vent of his persevering. He
said that if I gave an affirmative reply he would persevere with
the commission, and I think intimated that except on this condition
he would not. I said that the working of the coalition since its
formation in December 1852 had been to me entirely satisfactory,
but that I was not prepared to co-operate in its continuation under
any other head than Lord Aberdeen. I think that though perfectly
satisfied to be in a Peelite government which had whigs or radicals
in it, I was not ready to be in a whig government which had
Peelites in it. It took a long time, with my slow-moving and
tenacious character, for the Ethiopian to change his skin.

In the paper that I have already mentioned, as recording what, when all
was near an end, he took to be some of the errors of his life, Mr.
Gladstone names as one of those errors this refusal in 1855 to join Lord
Lansdowne. 'I can hardly suppose,' he says, more than forty years after
that time, 'that the eventual failure of the Queen's overture to Lord
Lansdowne was due to my refusal; but that refusal undoubtedly
constituted one of his difficulties and helped to bring about the
result. I have always looked back upon it with pain as a serious and
even gross error of judgment. It was, I think, injurious to the public,
if it contributed to the substitution as prime minister of Lord
Palmerston for Lord Lansdowne,--a personage of greater dignity, and I
think a higher level of political principle. There was no defect in Lord
Lansdowne sufficient to warrant my refusal. He would not have been a
strong or very active prime minister; but the question of the day was
the conduct of the war, and I had no right to take exception to him as a
head in connection with this subject. His attitude in domestic policy
was the same as Palmerston's, but I think he had a more unprejudiced and
liberal mind, though less of motive force in certain directions.'

III

FRUITLESS NEGOTIATIONS

The next day Mr. Gladstone called on Lord Aberdeen, who for the first
time let drop a sort of opinion as to their duties in the crisis on one
point; hithertofore he had restrained himself. He said, 'Certainly the
most natural thing under the circumstances, if it could have been
brought about in a satisfactory form, would have been that you should
have joined Derby.' On returning home, Mr. Gl