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mure. 288 THE WINTER TROUBLES. CHAP. The whole Cabinet of course was responsible for any determination affecting the command of our army ; but the actual framer of the despatch in which they agreed to assail Lord Kaglan was more pointedly answerable for its language than his merely assenting colleagues. (^^) Lord Pan Lord Panmurc — long known as Fox Maule — had been peculiarly circumstanced in early life. When about seventeen years old, a headstrong, tyrannical father had driven him to make a choice which — like the one famed in old Greece — was to be between pleasure and virtue. Upon condition of submitting to absolute estrangement from his mother, the lad was to have before him a world of ease, luxury, and enjoyment, with a prospect of a seat for the county. If rejecting the condition, he was to take a commission in a line regiment, with a pittance so cruelly gauged that, instead of enabling him to ' live,' it would only serve to keep him alive. The Scotch Her- cules made his choice bravely, and was held with threat rigour to the threatened conditions, but it seems that the effect of the ' virtue ' combined with privation was to make him beyond measure savage ; and the improving society of his young brother officers did not save him from growing up to be a churl. However, he had the vigour to do what he could towards supplying his re- cognised deficiencies by a course of diligent study. His state of thraldom having ceased, he in 1835 entered Parliament, and disclosing a great capajity for work, became a subordinate member of the Government, and in time ' Secretary at War. In