ersion of
arranging books and papers, he gave much thought and time to estate
matters with his eldest son, with him too he felled now a chestnut, now a
sycamore; he corrected the proofs of his speeches and wrote an article for
Mr. Knowles; he read books and articles about Eleusis, and the Hebrew
migration from Egypt, and the Olympian system, and Newman on the
Eirenicon, and Westcott on St. John, and somebody else upon St. Thomas
Aquinas. For two or three days he was partially disabled by "a low
face-ache: the reaction after heavy pressure, under which I received from
the mercy of God such remarkable support." In the middle of January
alarming accounts came from his sister Helen, who lay dying at Cologne.
Thither he sped with his eldest brother and his sister-in-law. They found
life fast ebbing, and four days after their arrival the end came, in the
midst of pious exercises and affectionate care. They were satisfied that
she had been "freely restored to the unity of spirit and the bond of
peace," and had died not in the actual Roman communion. A few days after
his return home he records: "Wrote a long memorandum of the evidence in
regard to dear Helen's religious profession." The remains they bore to
Fasque, and by the end of the month he was again at Hawarden, once more at
work with his eldest son upon the "accumulated disorder," and the rest of
the round of his familiar employments. Among other things he read Cowper's
_Task_--"the fifth book very noble in its moral strain"; and another entry
will interest many,--"_Feb. 15._--Read the biography of noble Dora Pattison.
How by reflex action it stings.... Yet even to her (like Bishop Butler),
death was terrible." "He was haunted," he writes, "with recollections of
Sister Dora." Then after a Sunday passed in church exercises, and
"skimming many theological books," on February 23 he "left Hawarden with a
heavy heart."

He quickly found himself in the London whirlpool, attending conclaves of
his political friends, dining out, seeing Irving in the _Merchant of
Venice_ ("his best, I think"), speaking once or twice in the House, and
twice at London meetings in St. Pancras and Marylebone, where the popular
enthusiasm made even his most hardened critics begin to suspect that the
tide had really turned since the days when the Londoners mobbed him in the
street and broke his windows.

Chapter VIII. The Fall Of Lord Beaconsfield. (1880)

In causa facili cuivis licet ess