missioner would still therefore be ineligible. Nobody
was ever by constitution more averse than Mr. Gladstone to turning
backward, and in this case he felt himself especially bound to go
forward not only by the logic of the Ionian situation at the moment, but
for the reason which was also characteristic of him, that the Queen in
approving his appointment (January 7) had described his conduct as both
patriotic and most opportune, and therefore he thought there would be
unspeakable shabbiness in turning round upon her by a hurried
withdrawal. The Oxford entanglement thus became almost desperate.
Resolved not to disturb the settled order of proceeding with his
assembly, Mr. Gladstone with a thoroughly characteristic union of
ingenuity and tenacity tried various ways of extrication. To complete
the mortifications of the position, the telegraph broke down.

QUESTION OF THE OXFORD SEAT

The scrape was nearly as harassing to his friends at home as to
himself. Politicians above all men can never safely count on the charity
that thinketh no evil. Lord John Russell told Lord Aberdeen that it was
clear that Gladstone was staying away to avoid a discussion on the
coming Reform bill. There was a violent attack upon him in the _Times_
(January 13) as having supplanted Young. The writers of leading articles
looked up Greek history from the days of the visit of Ulysses to
Alcinous downwards, and they mocked his respect for the countrymen of
Miltiades, and his reverence for the church of Chrysostom and
Athanasius. The satirists of the cleverest journal of the day admitted
his greatness, the brilliance and originality of his finance, the
incomparable splendour of his eloquence, and a courage equal to any
undertaking, that quailed before no opposition and suffered no abatement
in defeat, and they only marvelled the more that a statesman of the
first rank should accept at the hands of an insidious rival a fifth-rate
mission--insidious rival not named but easy to identify. The fact that
Mr. Gladstone had hired a house at Corfu was the foundation of a
transcendent story that Mr. Disraeli wished to make him the king of the
Ionian islands. 'I hardly think it needful to assure you,' Mr. Gladstone
told Lytton, 'that I have never attached the smallest weight to any of
the insinuations which it seems people have thought worth while to
launch at some member or members of your government with respect to my
mission.' Though Mr. Gl