ch pleased. I ended by
kissing her Majesty's hand.

IV

(M200) The usual embarrassments in building a government filled many days
with unintermittent labour of a kind that, like Peel, Mr. Gladstone found
intensely harassing, though interesting. The duty of leaving out old
colleagues can hardly have been other than painful, but Mr. Gladstone was
a man of business, and lie reckoned on a proper stoicism in the victims of
public necessity. To one of them he wrote, "While I am the oldest man of
my political generation, I have been brought by the seeming force of
exceptional circumstances to undertake a task requiring less of years and
more of vigour than my accumulating store of the one and waning residue of
the other, and I shall be a solecism in the government which I have
undertaken to form. I do not feel able to ask you to resume the toils of
office," etc., but would like to name him the recipient for a signal mark
of honour. "I have not the least right to be disappointed when you select
younger men for your colleagues," the cheerful man replied. Not all were
so easily satisfied. "It is cruel to make a disqualification for others
out of an infirmity of my own," Mr. Gladstone wrote to the oldest of his
comrades in the Peelite days, but--et cetera, et cetera, and he would be
glad to offer his old ally the red riband of the Bath when one should be
vacant. The peer to whom this letter with its dubious solatium was
addressed, showed his chagrin by a reply of a single sentence: that he did
not wish to leave the letter unanswered, lest it should seem to admit that
he was in a state of health which he did not feel to be the case; the red
riband was not even declined. One admirable man with intrepid _naivete_
proposed himself for the cabinet, but was not admitted; another no less
admirable was pressed to enter, but felt that he could be more useful as
an independent member, and declined--an honourable transaction repeated by
the same person on more than one occasion later. To one excellent member
of his former cabinet, the prime minister proposed the chairmanship of
committee, and it was with some tartness refused. Another equally
excellent member of the old administration he endeavoured to plant out in
the viceregal lodge at Dublin, without the cabinet, but in vain. To a
third he proposed the Indian vice-royalty, and received an answer that
left him "stunned and out of breath." As the hours passed and office after
o