at 80 and 86 (coming next birthday)
respectively, both in the fullest possession of their faculties,
Brougham vehement, impulsive, full of gesticulation, and not a
little rambling, the other calm and clear as a deep pool upon rock.
Lord Lyndhurst is decidedly against the bill, Brougham somewhat
inclines to it; being, as Lord Lyndhurst says, half a Frenchman.
[Lord Lyndhurst expounded the matter in a most luminous way from
his point of view. Brougham went into raptures and used these
words: 'I tell you what, Lyndhurst, I wish I could make an exchange
with you. I would give you some of my walking power, and you should
give me some of your brains.' I have often told the story with this
brief commentary, that the compliment was the highest I have ever
known to be paid by one human being to another.][369]

The debate showed a curious inversion of the parts usually played by
eminent men. Palmerston vainly explained that he was doing no more than
international comity required, and doing no worse than placing the
foreign refugee on the same footing in respect of certain offences as
the British subject. Mr. Gladstone (Feb. 19), on the other hand, 'as one
who has perhaps too often made it his business to call attention to the
failings of his countrymen,' contended that if national honour was not
henceforth to be a shadow and a name, it was the paramount, absolute,
and imperative duty of Her Majesty's ministers to protest against the
imputation upon us of favour for assassination, 'a plant which is
congenial neither to our soil nor to the climate in which we live.'[370]
One of the truest things said in the debate was Disraeli's incidental
observation that 'the House should remember that in ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred, when there is a quarrel between two states, it is
generally occasioned by some blunder of a ministry.' Mr. Disraeli
perhaps consoled himself by the pithy saying of Baron Brunnow, that if
no one made any blunders, there would be no politics. The blood of the
_civis Romanus_, however, was up, and Palmerston, defeated by a majority
of nineteen, at once resigned.

CORRESPONDENCE WITH LORD DERBY

Lord Derby, whose heart had failed him three years earlier, now formed
his second administration, and made one more attempt to bring Mr.
Gladstone over to the conservative ranks. Lord Lansdowne had told the
Queen that no other government was