s, and for facilitating the
discharge of your Majesty's high functions, that your Majesty's
government should possess the confidence of this House and of the
country; and we deem it our duty respectfully to submit to your Majesty
that such confidence is not reposed in the present advisers of your
Majesty.'

[389] _Life of Cobden_, ii. pp. 229-233.

[390] There is a strange story in the _Halifax Papers_ of Bright at this
time visiting Lord Aberdeen, and displaying much ill humour. 'He cannot
reconcile himself to not being considered capable of taking office. Lord
John broached a scheme for sending him as governor-general to Canada. I
rather doubted the expediency of this, but Mr. Gladstone seemed to think
it not a bad scheme' (June 15, 1859). Many curious things sprang up in
men's minds at that moment.

[391] Reproduced in Mr. Russell's book on Mr. Gladstone, pp. 144-5.

[392] It is worth noticing that he sat on the ministerial side of the
House without breach of continuity from 1853 to 1866. During the first
Derby government, as we have already seen (p. 423), he sat below the
gangway on the opposition side; during the Palmerston administration of
1855 he sat below the gangway on the government side; and he remained
there after the second Derby accession to office in 1858.

[393] The Address is in _Gleanings_, vii.

APPENDIX

CHOICE OF PROFESSION

_Page 82_

_Mr. Gladstone to his Father_

_Cuddesdon, Aug. 4, 1830._--MY BELOVED FATHER,--I have a good while
refrained from addressing you on a subject of importance and much
affecting my own future destiny, from a supposition that your time and
thoughts have been much occupied for several months past by other
matters of great interest in succession. Now, however, believing you to
be more at leisure, I venture to bring it before you. It is, as you will
have anticipated, the decision of the profession to which I am to look
forward for life. Above eighteen months have now passed since you spoke
to me of it at Seaforth, and most kindly desired me, if unable then to
make up my mind to go into the law, to take some time to consider calmly
of the whole question.

It would have been undutiful to trouble you with a recurrence of it,
until such a period had been suffered to elapse, as would suffice to
afford, by the effects it should itself produce, s