lies almost an
engagement to take it up on some early occasion, and this I take it we are
not prepared for." In the summer of 1865 he wrote to the warden of
Glenalmond that the question was "remote and apparently out of all bearing
on the practical politics of the day." So far as his own judgment went, he
had told Sir Roundell Palmer in 1863, that he had made up his mind on the
subject, and should not be able to keep himself from giving expression to
his feelings. Why did he say that he did not then believe that the
question would come on in his time? "A man," he replied, "who in 1865
completed his thirty-third year of a laborious career, who had already
followed to the grave the remains of almost all the friends abreast of
whom he had started from the university in the career of public life; and
who had observed that, excepting two recent cases [I suppose Palmerston
and Russell], it was hard to find in our whole history a single man who
had been permitted to reach the fortieth year of a course of labour
similar to his own within the walls of the House of Commons; such a man
might be excused ... if he formed a less sanguine estimate of the fraction
of space yet remaining to him, than seems to have been the case with his
critics."(163)

It was Maynooth that originally cut from under his feet the principle of
establishment in Ireland as an obligation of the state. When that went,
more general reflections arose in his mind. In 1872 he wrote to Guizot:--

It is very unlikely that you should remember a visit I paid you, I
think at Passy in the autumn of 1845, with a message from Lord
Aberdeen about international copyright. The Maynooth Act had just
been, passed. Its author, I think, meant it to be final. I had
myself regarded it as _seminal_. And you in congratulating me upon
it, as I well remember, said we should have the sympathies of
Europe in the work of giving Ireland justice--a remark which
evidently included more than the measure just passed, and which I
ever after saved and pondered. It helped me on towards what has
been since done.

"I must own," he wrote to Lord Granville (April 11, 1868), "that for years
past I have been watching the sky with a strong sense of the obligation to
act with the first streak of dawn." He now believed the full sun was up,
and he was right. In an autobiographic note, undated but written near to
the end of his days, he says:--

I am by