much searching of
heart beforehand, and was a masterpiece of grace and good feeling. Mr.
Gladstone stood alone, concentrating upon himself by his personal
ascendency and public history the bitter antagonism of his opponents, only
matched by the enthusiasm and devotion of his followers. The rage of
faction had seldom been more unbridled. The Irish and the young fourth
party were rivals in malicious vituperation; of the two, the Irish on the
whole observed the better manners. Once Mr. Gladstone was wounded to the
quick, as letters show, when a member of the fourth party denounced as "a
government of infamy" the ministry with whose head he had long been on
terms of more than friendship alike as host and guest. He could not fell
his trees, he could not read the lessons in Hawarden church, without
finding these innocent habits turned into material for platform mockery.
"In the eyes of the opposition, as indeed of the country," said a great
print that was never much his friend, "he is the government and he is the
liberal party," and the writer went on to scold Lord Salisbury for wasting
his time in the concoction of angry epigrams and pungent phrases that were
neither new nor instructive.(55) They pierced no joint in the mail of the
warrior at whom they were levelled. The nation at large knew nothing of
difficulties at Windsor, nothing of awkward passages in the cabinet,
nothing of the trying egotisms of gentlemen out of the cabinet who
insisted that they ought to be in. Nor would such things have made any
difference except in his favour, if the public had known all about them.
The Duke of Argyll and Lord Lansdowne had left him; his Irish policy had
cost him his Irish secretary, and his Egyptian policy had cost him Mr.
Bright. They had got into a war, they had been baffled in legislation,
they had to raise the most unpopular of taxes, there had been the
frightful tragedy in Ireland. Yet all seemed to have been completely
overcome in the public mind by the power of Mr. Gladstone in uniting his
friends and frustrating his foes, and the more bitterly he was hated by
society, the more warmly attached were the mass of the people. Anybody who
had foreseen all this would have concluded that the government must be in
extremity, but he went to the Guildhall on the 9th of November 1882, and
had the best possible reception on that famous stage. One tory newspaper
felt bound to admit that Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues had
rehabilitated