The question about the Whigs came comically from the man who had just made the Tories swallow Household Suffrage; and Disraeli’s sanguineness was ill-founded.  The election resulted in a majority of one hundred for Irish Disestablishment; Disraeli resigned, and Gladstone became for the first time Prime Minister.

The Session of 1869 was devoted to the Irish Bill, and Lord Derby, though on the brink of the grave, opposed the Bill in what some people thought the greatest of his speeches in the House of Lords.  He was pale, his voice was feeble, he looked, as he was, a broken man; but he rose to the very height of an eloquence which had already become traditional.  His quotation of Meg Merrilies’ address to the Laird of Ellangowan, and his application of it to the plight of the Irish Church, were as apt and as moving as anything in English oratory.  The speech concluded thus: 

“My Lords, I am now an old man, and, like many of your Lordships, I have already passed three score years and ten.  My official life is entirely closed; my political life is nearly so; and, in the course of nature, my natural life cannot now be long.  That natural life commenced with the bloody suppression of a formidable rebellion in Ireland, which immediately preceded the union between the two countries.  And may God grant that its close may not witness a renewal of the one and a dissolution of the other.”

This speech was delivered on the 17th of June, 1869, and the speaker died on the 23rd of the following October.

IV

BENJAMIN DISRAEI

I always count it among the happy accidents of my life that I happened to be in London during the summer of 1867.  I was going to Harrow in the following September, and for the next five years my chance of hearing Parliamentary debates was small.  In the summer of 1866, when the Russell-Gladstone Reform Bill was thrown out, I was in the country, and therefore I had missed the excitement caused by the demolition of the Hyde Park railings, the tears of the terrified Home Secretary, and the litanies chanted by the Reform League under Gladstone’s window in Carlton House Terrace.  But in 1867 I was in the thick of the fun.  My father was the Sergeant-at-Arms attending the House of Commons, and could always admit me to the privileged seats “under the Gallery,” then more numerous than now.  So it came about that I heard all the most famous debates in Committee on the Tory Reform Bill, and thereby learned for the first time the fascination of Disraeli’s genius.  The Whigs, among whom I was reared, did not dislike “Dizzy” as they disliked Lord Derby, or as Dizzy himself was disliked by the older school of Tories.  But they absolutely miscalculated and misconceived him, treating him as merely an amusing charlatan, whose rococo oratory and fantastic tricks afforded a welcome relief from the dulness of ordinary politics.