very earliest years, and not less since marriage than before it,
their breath so to speak in common, that the relation I bore to her
conveys little even of what I have lost; but that again is little
compared to my wife's bereavement; and far above all to that of
Lyttelton, who now stands lonely among his twelve children. But the
retrospect from first to last is singularly bright and pure. She
seemed to be one of those rare spirits who do not need affliction
to draw them to their Lord, and from first to last there was scarce
a shade of it in her life. When she was told she was to die, her
pulse did not change; the last communion appeared wholly to sever
her from the world, but she smiled upon her husband within a minute
of the time when the spirit fled.

FOOTNOTES:

[357] See above pp. 525-8.

[358] Phillimore's Diary.

[359] The reader will find a candid statement of the controversy in
Northcote, _Financial Policy_, pp. 306-329.

[360] _Ars Poetica_, 32-5.

[361] Malmesbury, _Memoirs_, ii. pp. 56-7. See above, p. 536.

[362] See above, p. 225.

[363] It is a striking indication of the tenacity of custom against
logic that in France, though civil marriage was made not merely
permissive, as with us, but compulsory in 1792, divorce was banished
from French law from 1816 down to 1884.

[364] July 1857. Reprinted in _Gleanings_, vi. p. 47.

[365] House of Commons, June 20, 1849.

[366] _Ibid._, July 20, 1869. See also _Gleanings_, vi. p. 50.

[367] It may be said that the exaction of damages comes to the same
thing.

[368] In republishing in 1878 his article from the _Quarterly_
(_Gleanings_, vi. p. 106), he says his arguments have been too sadly
illustrated by the mischievous effects of the measure. The judicial
statistics, however, hardly support this view, that petitions for
divorce were constantly increasing, and at an accelerating rate of
progression. In England the proportion of divorce petitions to marriages
and the proportion of divorce decrees to population are both of them
lower than they were a few years ago. Mr. Gladstone used to desire the
prohibition of publicity in these proceedings, until he learned the
strong view of the president of the Court that the hideous glare of this
publicity acts probably as no inconsiderable deterrent.

CHAPTER IX

THE SECOND DERBY GOVERNMENT