ond it.... I have not a grain of inclination to recede from the course
marked out, and if you had proposed to abandon the appointment, I should
have remonstrated."

What Mr. Gladstone called "a parliamentary peppering" followed in due
course. It was contended that the statute in spirit as in letter exacted
judicial experience, and that formal passing through a court was a breach
of faith with parliament. As usual, lawyers of equal eminence were found
to contend with equal confidence that a fraud had been put upon the law,
and that no fraud had been put upon it; that the law required judicial
status not experience, and on the other hand that what it required was
experience not status. Lord Hatherley and Roundell Palmer were all the
virtues, whether public or private, personified; they were at the top of
the legal ladder; and they agreed in Palmer's deliberate judgment
that--after other judges with special fitness had declined the terms
offered by parliament--in nominating the best man at the bar who was
willing to take a vacant puisne judgeship upon the understanding that he
should be at once transferred to the judicial committee, the government
were innocent of any offence against either the spirit or substance of the
law.(252)

Yet the escape was narrow. The government only missed censure in the Lords
by a majority of one. In the Commons the evening was anxious. "You will
see," says Mr. Bruce (Feb. 20, 1872), "that we got but a small majority
last night. The fact is that our victory in the Lords made men slack about
coming to town, and Glyn got very nervous in the course of the evening.
However, Palmer's and Gladstone's speeches, both of which were excellent,
improved the feeling, and many who had announced their intention to go
away without voting, remained to support us." At one moment it even looked
as if the Speaker might have to give a casting vote, and he had framed it
on these lines: "I have concluded that the House while it looks upon the
course taken by government as impolitic and injudicious, is not prepared
at the present juncture to visit their conduct with direct parliamentary
censure."(253) In the end, ministers had a majority of twenty-seven, and
reached their homes at three in the morning with reasonably light hearts.

III

(M127) The ecclesiastical case of complaint against Mr. Gladstone was of a
similar sort. By an act of parliament passed in 1871 the Queen was
entitled to present to the rect