Lord Shaftesbury, as became his character, took a sterner view.  “Disraeli Prime Minister!  He is a Hebrew; this is a good thing.  He is a man sprung from an inferior station; another good thing in these days, as showing the liberality of our institutions.  But he is a leper, without principle, without feeling, without regard to anything, human or Divine, beyond his own personal ambition.”

The situation in which the new Prime Minister found himself was, from the constitutional point of view, highly anomalous.  The settlement of the question of Reform, which he had effected in the previous year, had healed the schism in the Liberal party, and the Liberals could now defeat the Government whenever they chose to mass their forces.  Disraeli was officially the Leader of a House in which his opponents had a large majority.  In March, 1868, Gladstone began his attack on the Irish Church, and pursued it with all his vigour, and with the support of a united party.  He moved a series of Resolutions favouring Irish Disestablishment, and the first was carried by a majority of sixty-five against the Government.

This defeat involved explanation.  Disraeli, in a speech which Bright called “a mixture of pompousness and servility,” described his audiences of the Queen, and so handled the Royal name as to convey the impression that Her Majesty was on his side.  Divested of verbiage and mystification, his statement amounted to this—­that, in spite of adverse votes, he intended to hold on till the autumn, and then to appeal to the new electorate created by the Reform Act of the previous year.  As the one question to be submitted to the electors was that of the Irish Church, the campaign naturally assumed a theological character.  On the 20th of August Lord Shaftesbury wrote:  “Dizzy is seeking everywhere for support.  He is all things to all men, and nothing to anyone.  He cannot make up his mind to be Evangelical, Neologian, or Ritualistic; he is waiting for the highest bidder.”

Parliament was dissolved in November, and the General Election resulted in a majority of one hundred for Gladstone and Irish Disestablishment.  By a commendable innovation on previous practice, Disraeli resigned the Premiership without waiting for a hostile vote of the new Parliament.  He declined the Earldom to which, as an ex-Prime Minister, he was by usage entitled; but he asked the Queen to make his devoted wife Viscountess Beaconsfield.  As a youth, after hearing the great speakers of the House which he had not yet entered, he had said, “Between ourselves, I could floor them all”—­but now Gladstone had “floored” him, and it took him five years to recover his breath.

V

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE