In short, he was as much a dictator as the then existing forms of the Constitution allowed, and he gloried in his power.  If only he had risked a Dissolution on his triumphal return from Berlin in July, 1878, he would certainly have retained his dictatorship for life; but his health had failed, and his nerve failed with it.  “I am very unwell,” he said to Lord George Hamilton, “but I manage to crawl to the Treasury Bench, and when I get there I look as fierce as I can.”

Meanwhile Gladstone was not only “looking fierce,” but agitating fiercely.  After his great disappointment in 1874 he had abruptly retired from the leadership of the Liberal party, and had divided his cast-off mantle between Lord Granville and Lord Hartington.  But the Eastern Question of 1876-1879 brought him back into the thick of the fight.  Granville and Hartington found themselves practically dispossessed of their respective leaderships, and Gladstonianism dominated the active and fighting section of the Liberal party.

It is impossible to conceive a more passionate or a more skilful opposition than that with which Gladstone, to use his own phrase, “counter-worked the purpose of Lord Beaconsfield” from 1876 to 1880—­and he attained his object.  Lord Beaconsfield, like other Premiers nearer our own time, imagined that he was indispensable and invulnerable.  Gladstone might harangue, but Beaconsfield would still govern.  He told the Queen that she might safely go abroad in March, 1880, for, though there was a Dissolution impending, he knew that the country would support him.  So the Queen went off in perfect ease of mind, and returned in three weeks’ time to find a Liberal majority of one hundred, excluding the Irish members, with Gladstone on the crest of the wave.  Lord Beaconsfield resigned without waiting for the verdict of the new Parliament.  Gladstone, though the Queen had done all she could to persuade Hartington to form a Government, was found to be inevitable, and his second Administration was formed on the 28th of April, 1880.  It lasted till the 25th of June, 1885, and, its achievements, its failures, and its disasters are too well remembered to need recapitulation here.

When, after a defeat on the Budget of 1885, Gladstone determined to resign, it was thought by some that Sir Stafford Northcote, who had led the Opposition in the House of Commons with skill and dignity, would be called to succeed him.  But the Queen knew better; and Lord Salisbury now became Prime Minister for the first time.  To all frequenters of the House of Commons he had long been a familiar, if not a favourite, figure:  first as Lord Robert Cecil and then as Lord Cranborne.  In the distant days of Palmerston’s Premiership he was a tall, slender, ungainly young man, stooping as short-sighted people always stoop, and curiously untidy.  His complexion was unusually dark for an Englishman, and his thick beard and scanty hair were intensely black.  Sitting for a pocket-borough,