right to
demand. If the affair had been less practically vexatious, we can
imagine the Socratic satisfaction with which Mr. Gladstone would have
revelled in pressing all these and many other distinctions on those who
boasted of being Socrates' fellow-countrymen.

From day to day anxiously did Mr. Gladstone watch what he called the
dodges of the assembly. Abundant reason as there was to complain of the
conduct of the Ionians in all these proceedings, it is well to record
the existence of a number of sincere patriots and enlightened men like
the two brothers Themistocles, Napoleon Zambelli, and Sir Peter Braila,
afterwards Greek minister in London. This small band of royal adherents
gave Mr. Gladstone all the help they could in preparing his scheme of
reform, and after the scheme was launched, they strained every nerve to
induce the assembly to assent to it in spite of the pressure from the
people. Their efforts were necessarily unavailing. The great majority,
composed as usual of the friends of England who trembled for their own
jobs, joining hands with the demagogues, was hostile to the changes
proposed, and only flinched from a peremptory vote from doubt as to its
reception among the people. Promptitude and force were not to be
expected in either way from men in such a frame of mind. 'On a
preliminary debate,' Mr. Gladstone wrote mournfully to Phillimore,
'without any motion whatever, one man has spoken for nearly the whole of
two days.' Strong language about the proposals as cheating and
fraudulent was freely used, but nothing that in Mr. Gladstone's view
justified one of those high-handed prorogations after the manner of the
Stuarts, that had been the usual expedient in quarrels between the high
commissioner and a recalcitrant assembly. These doings had brought
English rule over the islands to a level in the opinion of Southern
Europe with Austrian rule at Venice and the reign of the cardinals in
the pontifical states.

PROCEEDINGS IN ASSEMBLY

Sir Henry Storks arrived on the 16th of February, and the same day the
assembly which before had been working for delay, in a great hurry gave
a vote against the proposals, which, though in form preliminary, was in
substance decisive; there were only seven dissentients. Mr. Gladstone
sums up the case in a private letter to Sidney Herbert.

_Corfu, 17th Feb. 1859._--This decision is not convenient for me
personally, nor for the government a