n a display of overstrained
moral delicacy. As it was, his anxiety to explore every nook and cranny
of his case, and to defend or discover in it every point that human
ingenuity could devise for attack, led him to speak for more than an
hour; at the end of which even friendly and sympathetic listeners were
left wholly at a loss for a clue to the labyrinth. 'What a marvellous
talent is this,' Cobden exclaimed to a friend sitting near him; 'here
have I been sitting listening with pleasure for an hour to his
explanation, and yet I know no more why he left the government than
before he began.' 'I could not but know,' Mr. Gladstone wrote on this
incident long years after, 'that I should inevitably be regarded as
fastidious and fanciful, fitter for a dreamer or possibly a schoolman,
than for the active purposes of public life in a busy and moving
age.'[169]

VIEWS OF HIS RESIGNATION

Sir Robert Inglis begged him to lead the opposition to the bill. In the
course of the conversation Inglis went back to the fatal character and
consequences of the Act of 1829; and wished that his advice had then
been taken, which was that the Duke of Cumberland should be sent as lord
lieutenant to Ireland with thirty thousand men. 'As that good and very
kind man spoke the words,' Mr. Gladstone says, 'my blood ran cold, and
he too had helped me onwards in the path before me.' William Palmer
wrote that the grant to Maynooth was the sin of 1829 over again, and
would bring with it the same destruction of the conservative party. Lord
Winchilsea, one of his patrons at Newark, protested against anything
that savoured of the national endowment of Romanism. Mr. Disraeli was
reported as saying that with his resignation on Maynooth Mr. Gladstone's
career was over.

The rough verdict pronounced his act a piece of political prudery. One
journalistic wag observed, 'A lady's footman jumped off the Great
Western train, going forty miles an hour, merely to pick up his hat.
Pretty much like this act, so disproportional to the occasion, is Mr.
Gladstone's leap out of the ministry to follow his book.' When the time
came he voted for the second reading of the Maynooth bill (April 11)
with remarkable emphasis. 'I am prepared, in opposition to what I
believe to be the prevailing opinion of the people of England and of
Scotland, in opposition to the judgment of my own constituents, from
whom I greatly regret to differ, and in opposition to my ow