Chamberlain has been often as indiscreet as the theory he expounded to F. Cavendish implies, but he can hardly have prompted the Standard.
I am glad to think of Dizzy dining at No. 18. I wonder whether it is because Lord Granville has heard he is Rowchester.[[75]] Your choice of topics shows how you were on your guard with Sir Bartle. The true thing about him is the strength, not the softness. I know that many have been taken in by that assumed quality, and much resented it. The right place for him would be in Asia Minor.
If you were to see those letters you would say that Burne-Jones is not the only hand at missing a likeness; but in politics you would recognise exactly what must have been your impression, that I had strung my expectations a little above practicable height, and came down with anguish to the baseness of prose—like the heroine of my dreams (I mean Dorothea, not the lady whose name is in your letter).
I fear there is a perceptible change for the worse in Cardwell.
La Madeleine Feb. 10, 1881
You have gone through an anxious time, and I need not say where my thoughts were fixed during the week of Revolution.[[76]] I trust you are well out of it, and found relief at Lubbock's. Wolverton is growing excited and goes back. I shall miss his good spirits, his keen pugnacity, his singularly practical and unphilosophical view of politics, and Godley's[[77]] letters. And I don't know whether the Government will gain an adviser prompt, if they make a mistake, to help them to find it out.
I have suggested to May[[78]] a precedent for the action of the Speaker in stopping the discussion. It was three days before the Little Gentleman in Black Velvet[[79]] at Hampton Court changed the dynasty. The House was in Committee; the Tories were getting the worst of it and wished to prevent a division. The Whigs would not hear of an adjournment, and were jubilant, when one of their number had a stroke of apoplexy. Harley, the Speaker, in concert with the Chairman, seized the opportunity, took the chair, and closed the debate. Although the majority was floored, nobody seems to have remonstrated. I presume it is not on the Journals, and does not count.
In the hundreds of reflections suggested by the day of the scene, and of the superb speech, there is one slightly laced with regret (laced is a metaphor taken from toddy and negus). Once in 1816, the extreme Royalists, taking offence, walked out of the Chamber of Deputies. The majority were about to vote when De Serre[[80]] said: "Personne ne croira que j'approuve, même indirectement, l'espèce de scission dont nos yeux sont frappés en ce moment. Mais je demande s'il ne serait pas de la sagesse, je dirai même de la générosité de la majorité ici constatée et qui pourrait delibérer très légalement, de remettre la séance à demain. Il importe qu'on ne puisse pas dire que vous avez refusé d'entendre ceux de vos membres qui pourraient avoir des observations à faire." And the debate was adjourned.
I like to quote De Serre, for though a Tory in those days, he would have developed if he had lived; and there is no statesman in French parliamentary history who has so much analogy with Mr. Gladstone.