in 1869 this number had fallen to
fourteen (in 1880 it was about the same). Lord Palmerston in his second
government appears to have recommended sixteen peerages, and Lord Derby in
little more than a quarter of the time recommended fourteen. Mr. Gladstone
himself, during his first administration, excluding royal, non-political
and _ex-officio_ peerages, added thirty members to the House of Lords,
besides making five promotions. In the same period twelve peerages became
extinct. Lord Beaconsfield (counting the same exclusions) created between
1874 and 1880 twenty-six new peers, and made nine promotions.(281)

In two directions Mr. Gladstone made an honourable innovation. He
recommended a member of the Jewish faith for a peerage, and in the first
list of his submissions to the Queen two Roman catholics were included. No
catholic peer had been created within living memory. One of these two was
Lord Acton, afterwards so intimate a friend, whose character, he told the
Queen, "is of the first order, and he is one of the most learned and
accomplished, though one of the most modest and unassuming, men of the
day." If religious profession was not in his eyes relevant in making
peers, neither was the negation of profession, for at the same time he
proposed a peerage to Grote. "I deeply and gratefully appreciate," he
wrote to Mr. Gladstone, "the sentiments you are pleased to express
respecting my character and services. These I shall treasure up never to
be forgotten, coming as they do from a minister who has entered on the
work of reform with a sincerity and energy never hitherto paralleled. Such
recognition is the true and sufficient recompense for all useful labours
of mine."(282)

At the same time the prime minister thought that some honour ought to be
tendered to Mr. Mill, but Lord Granville, whom he consulted, thought
otherwise, "merely on the ground that honours should go as much as
possible with general acceptance." Lord Granville was a man of thoroughly
liberal and even generous mind; still not particularly qualified to be a
good judge either of the merits of a man like Mill, or of his "acceptance"
in circles well worth considering.

IV

It was to be expected that preferments in the church should get a special
share of Mr. Gladstone's laborious attention, and so they did. As member
for Oxford he had been so much importuned in Lord Palmerston's time, that
he wrote in a moment of unusual impatience (1863), "I thin