IAMENTARY SUCCESS

His parliamentary success had been extraordinary. From the first his
gifts of reasoning and eloquence had pleased the House; his union of
sincerity and force had attracted it as sincerity and force never fail
to do; and his industry and acuteness, his steady growth in political
stature, substance, and acquisition, had gained for him the confidence
of the austerest of leaders. He had reached a seat in the cabinet before
he was thirty-four, and after little more than ten years of
parliamentary life. Canning was thirty-seven before he won the same
eminence, and he had been thirteen years in the House; while Peel had
the cabinet within reach when he was four-and-thirty, and had been in
the House almost thirteen years, of which six had been passed in the
arduous post of Irish secretary. Mr. Gladstone had shown that he had in
him the qualities that make a minister and a speaker of the first class,
though he had shown also the perilous quality of a spirit of minute
scruple. He had not yet displayed those formidable powers of contention
and attack, that were before long to resemble some tremendous
projectile, describing a path the law of whose curves and deviations, as
they watched its journey through the air in wonder and anxiety for the
shattering impact, men found it impossible to calculate.

Mr. Gladstone's brief notes of his first and second cabinets are worth
transcribing: the judicious reader will have little difficulty in
guessing the topic for deliberation; it figured in the latest of his
cabinets as in the earliest, as well as in most of those that
intervened. '_May 15._--My first cabinet. On Irish repeal meetings. No
fear of breach of the peace, grounded on reasons. Therefore no case for
interference. (The duke, however, was for issuing a proclamation.) _May
20._--Second [cabinet] Repeal. Constabulary tainted.' It would be safe to
say of any half dozen consecutive meetings of the Queen's servants,
taken at random during the reign, that Ireland would be certain to crop
up. Still, protection was the burning question. From one cause or
another, said Mr. Gladstone looking back to these times, 'my reputation
among the conservatives on the question of protection oozed away with
rapidity. It died with the year 1842, and early in 1843 a duke, I think
the Duke of Richmond, speaking in the House of Lords, described some
renegade proceeding as a proceeding conducted under the banner of the
vice-president of