'Your position is quite different. You are free to take any course
you please with perfect honour.' I told him of Lord Lyndhurst's
visit and the purport of his conversation, of the meaning of the
junction on the opposition bench in the Lords, and of what we had
said of the difficulties in the Commons. He said, 'My resentment is
not against the new government, but against the seventy-three
conservative members of parliament who displaced the late
government by a factious vote; nearly all of them believed the bill
to be necessary for Ireland; and they knew that our removal was not
desired by the crown, not desired by the country. I find no fault
with the new ministers, they are fairly in possession of power--but
with those gentlemen I can never unite.' Later, however, in the
evening he relented somewhat, and said he must admit that what they
did was done under great provocation; that it was no wonder they
regarded themselves as betrayed; and that unfortunately it had been
the fate of Sir R. Peel to perform a similar operation twice....

Graham dwelt with fondness and with pain on Lord Stanley; said he
had very great qualities--that his speech on the corn law,
consisting as it did simply of old fallacies though in new dress,
was a magnificent speech, one of his greatest and happiest
efforts--that all his conduct in the public eye had been perfectly
free from exception; that he feared, however, he had been much in
Lord Geo. Bentinck's counsels, and had concurred in much more than
he had himself done, and had aided in marking out the course taken
in the House of Commons. He had called on Lord Stanley several
times but had never been able to see him, he trusted through
accident, but seemed to doubt.

On the Cobden eulogy, though he did not defend it outright by any
means, he said, 'Do you think if Cobden had not existed the repeal
of the corn law would have been carried at this moment?' I said
very probably not, that he had added greatly to the force of the
movement and accelerated its issue, that I admitted the truth of
every word that Peel had uttered, but complained of its omissions,
of its spirit towards his own friends, of its false moral effect,
as well as and much more than of its mere impolicy.[179]

IV