touched with a live coal from that Irish altar.
Of course your reference to Burke indicates a tendency to compare our
position as regards Ireland to the position of George III. towards the
colonies. I deny that there is any parallelism or even analogy." (M104) It
was during these months that he renewed his friendly intercourse with
Cardinal Manning, which had been suspended since the controversy upon the
Vatican pamphlets. In November Mr. Gladstone sent Manning his article on
the "Dawn of Creation." The cardinal thanked him for the paper--"still more
for your words, which revive the memories of old days. Fifty-five years
are a long reach of life in which to remember each other. We have twice
been parted, but as the path declines, as you say, it narrows, and I am
glad that we are again nearing each other as we near our end.... If we
cannot unite in the realm where 'the morning stars sang together' we
should be indeed far off." Much correspondence followed on the articles
against Huxley. Then his birthday came:--

Postal deliveries and other arrivals were seven hundred.
Immeasurable kindness almost overwhelmed us. There was also the
heavy and incessant weight of the Irish question, which offers
daily phases more or less new. It was a day for intense
thankfulness, but, alas, not for recollection and detachment. When
will that day come? Until then, why string together the
commonplaces and generalities of great things, really unfelt?... I
am certain there is one keen and deep desire to be extricated from
the life of contention in which a chain of incidents has for the
last four years detained me against all my will. Then, indeed, I
should reach an eminence from which I could look before and after.
But I know truly that I am not worthy of this liberty with which
Christ makes free his elect. In his own good time, something, I
trust, will for me too be mercifully devised.

III

At the end of this long travail, which anybody else would have found all
the sorer for the isolation and quietude that it was ever Mr. Gladstone's
fashion in moments of emergency to seek, he reached London on January
11th; two days later he took the oath in the new parliament, whose life
was destined to be so short; and then he found himself on the edge of the
whirlpool. Three days before formalities were over, and the House
assembled for the despatch of business, he received a communicat