at large, while you have
incurred the strong dislike of a considerable portion of Lord Derby's
followers.'

Things grew worse rather than better. Even friendly journalists in the
spring of 1858 wrote of him as 'the most signal example that the present
time affords of the man of speculation misplaced and lost in the
labyrinth of practical politics.' They call him the chief orator and the
weakest man in the House of Commons. He has exhibited at every stage
traces of an unhappy incoherence which is making him a mere bedouin of
parliament, a noble being full of spirit and power, but not to be tamed
into the ordinary ways of civil life. His sympathies hover in hopeless
inconsistency between love for righteous national action, good
government, freedom, social and commercial reform, and a hankering after
a strong, unassailable executive in the old obstructive tory sense. He
protests against unfair dealing with the popular voice in the
Principalities on the Danube, but when the popular voice on the Thames
demands higher honours for General Havelock he resists it with the
doctrine that the executive should be wholly free to distribute honours
as it pleases. He is loudly indignant against the supersession of
parliament by diplomacy, but when a motion is made directly pointing to
the rightful influence of the House over foreign affairs, he neither
speaks nor votes. Is it not clear beyond dispute that his cannot be the
will to direct, nor the wisdom to guide the party of progress out of
which the materials for the government of this country will have to be
chosen?[371]

In organs supposed to be inspired by Disraeli, Mr. Gladstone's fate is
pronounced in different terms, but with equal decision. In phrases that
must surely have fallen from the very lips of the oracle itself, the
public was told that 'cerebral natures, men of mere intellect without
moral passion, are quite unsuited for governing mankind.' The days of
the mere dialectician are over, and the rulers of Christendom are no
longer selected from the serfs of Aristotle. Without the emotions that
soar and thrill and enkindle, no man can attain 'a grand moral vision.'
When Mr. Gladstone aims at philosophy, he only reaches casuistry. He
reasons like one of the sons of Ignatius Loyola. What their Society is
to the Jesuit, his own individualism is to Mr. Gladstone. He supports
his own interests as much from intellectual zeal as from self-love. A
shrewd observer is quoted: 'look