Mr. Gladstone introduced the Bill himself, and though it was singularly intricate, he within the space of three hours not only made it clear from preamble to schedule, but had talked over a predeterminedly hostile House into believing it would do well to accept it. Mr. Horsman, not an emotional person, went home after listening to the speech, and wrote a glowing letter to the Times, in which he hailed Mr. Gladstone and the Irish University Bill as the most notable of the recent dispensations of a beneficent Providence. Later, when the Tea-room teemed with cabal, and revolt rapidly spread through the Liberal host, presaging the defeat of the Government, Mr. Horsman, in his most solemn manner, explained away this letter to a crowded and hilarious House. The only difference between him and seven-eighths of Mr. Gladstone's audience was that he had committed the indiscretion of putting pen to paper whilst he was yet under the spell of the orator, the others going home to bed to think it over.
Mr. Gladstone.
On the eve of a new departure, once more Premier, idol of the populace, and captain of a majority in the House of Commons, Mr. Gladstone's thoughts may peradventure turn to those weary days twenty years dead. He would not forget one Wednesday afternoon when the University Education Bill was in Committee, and Mr. Charles Miall was speaking from the middle of the third bench below the gangway. The Nonconformist conscience then, as now, was a ticklish thing. It had been pricked by too generous provision made for an alien Church, and Mr. Miall was solemnly, and with indubitable honest regret, explaining how it would be impossible for him to support the Government. Mr. Gladstone listened with lowering brow and face growing ashy pale with anger. When plain, commonplace Mr. Miall resumed his seat, Mr. Gladstone leaped to his feet with torpedoic action and energy. With voice stinging with angry scorn, and with magnificent gesture of the hand, designed for the cluster of malcontents below the gangway, he besought the honourable gentleman "in Heaven's name" to take his support elsewhere. The injunction was obeyed. The Bill was thrown out by a majority of three, and though, Mr. Disraeli wisely declining to take office, Mr. Gladstone remained on the Treasury Bench, his power was shattered, and he and the Liberal party went out into the wilderness to tarry there for six long years.
To this catastrophe gentlemen at that time respectively known as Mr. Vernon Harcourt and Mr. Henry James appreciably contributed. They worried Mr. Gladstone into dividing between them the law offices of the Crown. But this turn of affairs came too late to be of advantage to the nation. The only reminders of that episode in their political career are the title of knighthood and a six months' salary earned in the recess preceding the general election of 1874.
Mr. Disraeli's keen sight recognised the game being played on the Front Bench below the gangway, where the two then inseparable friends sat shoulder to shoulder. "I do not know," he slyly said, one night when the Ministerial crisis was impending, "whether the House is yet to regard the observations of the hon. member for Oxford (Vernon Harcourt) as carrying the authority of a Solicitor-General!"
"Member for Dungarvan."
Of members holding official or ex-official positions who will gather in the House of Commons this month, and who were in Parliament in 1873, are Mr. Goschen, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and Liberal member for the City of London; Lord George Hamilton, member for Middlesex, and not yet a Minister; Mr. Shaw-Lefevre, member for Reading, and Secretary to the Admiralty; Mr. J. Lowther, not yet advanced beyond the Secretaryship of the Poor Law Board, and that held only for a few months pending the Tory rout in 1868; Mr. Henry Matthews,
