onfident of a majority of ten. Still all was
admittedly uncertain. The prime perplexity was whether if a new
administration could be formed, Lord Palmerston or Lord John should be
at its head. Everybody agreed that it would be both impossible and wrong
to depose the tories until it was certain that the liberals were united
enough to mount into their seat, and no government could last unless it
comprehended both the old prime ministers. Could not one of them carry
the prize of the premiership into the Lords, and leave to the other the
consolation stake of leadership in the Commons? Lord Palmerston, who
took the crisis with a veteran's good-humoured coolness, told his
intimates that he at any rate would not go up to the Lords, for he could
not trust John Russell in the other House. With a view, however, to
ministerial efficiency, he was anxious to keep Russell in the Commons,
as with him and Gladstone they would make a strong treasury bench. But
was it certain that Gladstone would join? On this there was endless
gossip. One story ran that Mrs. Gladstone had told somebody that her
husband wished bygones to be bygones, was all for a strong government,
and was ready to join in forming one. Then the personage to whom this
was said upset the inference by declaring there was nothing in the
conversation incompatible with a Derby junction. Sir Charles Wood says
in his journal:--

_May 22._--Saw Mrs. Gladstone, who did not seem to contemplate a
junction with Palmerston but rather that he should join Derby. I
stated the impossibility of that, and that the strongest government
possible under present circumstances would be by such a union as
took place under Aberdeen. To effect this, all people must pull the
same and not different ways as of late years. I said that I blamed
her husband for quitting, and ever since he quitted, Palmerston's
government in 1855, as well as Lord John; that in the quarrel
between Lord John and Gladstone the former had behaved ill, and the
latter well.

_May 27._--Gladstone dined here.... He would vote a condemnation of
the dissolution, and is afraid of the foreign affairs at so
critical a moment being left in the hands of Malmesbury; says that
we, the opposition, are not only justified but called upon by the
challenge in the Queen's speech on the dissolution, to test the
strength of parties; but that he is himself in a differe