aw, for that shape was mainly due to Mr. Gladstone, but as the mind by
whose secret counsels the arduous and intricate manoeuvre was directed.
"The most wonderful thing," wrote Bishop Wilberforce at the end of the
session, "is the rise of Disraeli. It is not the mere assertion of talent.
He has been able to teach the House of Commons almost to ignore Gladstone,
and at present lords it over him, and, I am told, says that he will hold
him down for twenty years."(158) If Mr. Disraeli said this, he proved
almost as much mistaken as when Fox was confident of holding the young
Pitt down in 1783. Still he impressed his rival. "I met Gladstone at
breakfast," says Lord Houghton (May), "he seems quite awed by the
diabolical cleverness of Dizzy." Awe, by no means the right word, I fancy.

IV

(M68) On April 12 the first act of the Reform question of 1867 ended in an
awkward crisis for Mr. Gladstone. The details of the story are intricate
and not much to our purpose. Mr. Gladstone's version printed above
discovers its general features. Some particulars, properly biographic,
will fill up his sketch. "If you have to drive a man out of a wood," Mr.
Gladstone said, "you must yourself go into the wood to drive him." The
bystander of a later time, however, may be content to keep outside the
thicket until the driver and the driven both emerge. Mr. Disraeli began by
preparing a series of resolutions--platitudes with little relation to
realities. He told the House that reform should no longer be allowed to
determine the fate of cabinets, and the House laughed. Yet if Mr. Disraeli
had only at this time enjoyed the advantage of a better character--if he
had been Althorp, Russell, Peel--instead of laughing, his hearers would
perhaps have recognised good sense and statesmanship. As he said later,
whig prime ministers, coalition prime ministers, coalition chancellors of
the exchequer, had one after another had their innings, and with a
majority at their back; was it not well now to try something that might be
carried by consent? Under pressure from Mr. Gladstone the government
explained their plan, dropped the resolutions, and brought in a bill.(159)
Men were to have votes who had university degrees, or were members of
learned professions, or had thirty pounds in a savings bank, or fifty
pounds in the funds, or paid a pound in direct taxes; but the fighting
point was that every householder who paid rates should have a vote. A
scheme for se