Between the two Indian Bills, the Directors, it is thought, will escape for the present, and survive a little longer. I myself was not so absolutely unfavourable to the Ellenborough Bill as the English world in general. I desire much to see a franchise given to those who have served. That offered to the five towns is perhaps impracticable. My notion is to make a great Council of all who have served in certain offices, and give them the appointment of half the Executive Council. But our people hate all refinements of this sort.
Politics are almost at a dead lock with us. Palmerston cannot come back with his own party alone to back him. Lord John Russell has joined Milner Gibson, and has formed a sufficient body of opponents in the Liberal part of the House to make it impossible for Palmerston to get sufficient support there. So that for the present the Derby people stay, and are almost ashamed and indignant to stay, by the help of Lord John and his Manchester allies.
To the same.
London: May 17, 1858.
Things here are in sad confusion. Lord Ellenborough, who is really competent, has thrown himself overboard, and cannot be by his best friends acquitted of a great indiscretion. In India the enemy all abroad again, and a hot weather campaign before us. Not, however, it seems by Sir Colin’s fault; for he was bid to clear all the other districts first, and not till then to attack Lucknow, but was overruled by Lord Canning. John Mill, it is said, does not consider Lord Canning’s proclamation wrong; but is very sorry, on general grounds, to lose Lord Ellenborough.
Pray read Hogg’s ‘Life of Shelley.’ It is a great pleasure to see Shelley really alive, and treading the vulgar earth—Hogg’s transparent absurdity being the only intervening impediment.
I am reading, too, Gladstone’s ‘Homer’: it is very direct and plain-sailing, and in that respect is an agreeable contrast to German annotation. The working out of his theory about Danaans, Achæans, Argives, and Hellenes was to me satisfactory; but at the end he goes off all at once out of his depth into general ethnology. Gladstone’s uncompromising belief in Homer and the heroes, as real people, gives the book a solidity and substance which is acceptable. Carlyle said he read carefully Homer and the controversy some years ago, and was quite convinced that ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ were written at different ages—the ‘Odyssey’ by one man, the ‘Iliad’ not; and he likes the ‘Odyssey’ best. He thinks anyone mad who holds the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ to be written by one man.
While I wrote came a rumour, not from a private secretary, that news had come from India that the proclamation had been stopped at the last moment, at the entreaty of Sir C. Campbell, Sir John Lawrence, Outram, and Mansfield, who went on their knees to Lord Canning, and besought him, in the name of England’s honour, no less than for the sake of present security. So that, if this be true, Lord Ellenborough is right after all.
To the same.
Cowley House, Oxford: May 21, 1858.