dderley, _Review of Earl Grey's
Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell's Administration_, p. 135.

[225] See Mr. Gladstone's speech on introducing the Government of
Ireland bill, April 8, 1886.

[226] Nov. 12, 1855. See also two speeches of extraordinary fervour and
exaltation, one at Mold (Sept. 29, 1856), and the other at Liverpool the
same evening, both in support of the claims of societies for foreign
missions.

CHAPTER IV

DEATH OF SIR ROBERT PEEL

(_1850_)

Famous men--whose merit it is to have joined their name to events
that were brought onwards by the course of things.--PAUL-LOUIS
COURIER.

LORD PALMERSTON

It was now that Lord Palmerston strode to a front place--one of the two
conspicuous statesmen with whom, at successive epochs in his career, Mr.
Gladstone found himself in different degrees of energetic antagonism.
This was all the stiffer and more deeply rooted, for being in both cases
as much a moral antagonism as it was political. After a long spell of
peace, earnestness, and political economy, the nation was for a time in
a mood for change, and Palmerston convinced it that he was the man for
its mood. He had his full share of shrewd common sense, yet was capable
of infinite recklessness. He was good-tempered and a man of bluff
cheerful humour. But to lose the game was intolerable, and it was
noticed that with him the next best thing to success was quick
retaliation on a victorious adversary--a trait of which he was before
long to give the world an example that amused it. Yet he had no capacity
for deep and long resentments. Like so many of his class, he united
passion for public business to sympathy with social gaiety and pleasure.
Diplomatists found him firm, prompt, clean-cut, but apt to be narrow,
teasing, obstinate, a prisoner to his own arguments, and wanting in the
statesman's first quality of seeing the whole and not merely the half.
Metternich described him as an audacious and passionate marksman, ready
to make arrows out of any wood. He was a sanguine man who always
believed what he desired; a confident man who was sure that he must be
right in whatever he chose to fear. On the economic or the moral side of
national life, in the things that make a nation rich and the things that
make it scrupulous and just, he had only limited perception and moderate
faith. Wh