[374] 'I wish,' said Mr. Disraeli to Bishop Wilberforce in 1862, 'you could have induced Gladstone to join Lord Derby's government when Lord Ellenborough resigned in 1858. It was not my fault that he did not: I almost went on my knees to him.'—Life, iii. p. 70.

Vitzthum reports a conversation with Mr. Disraeli in January 1858, of a different tenor: 'We are at all times ready,' he said, 'to take back this deserter, but only if he surrenders unconditionally.'—Vitzthum, i. p. 269.

CHAPTER X

[ToC]

THE IONIAN ISLANDS

(1858-1859)

The world is now taking an immense interest in Greek affairs, and does not seem to know why. But there are very good reasons for it. Greece is a centre of life, and the only possible centre for the Archipelago, and its immediate neighbourhood. But it is vain to think of it as a centre from which light and warmth can proceed, until it has attained to a tolerable organisation, political and economical. I believe in the capacity of the people to receive the boon.—Gladstone (1862).

PROPOSAL FROM BULWER

At the beginning of October, while on a visit to Lord Aberdeen at Haddo, Mr. Gladstone was amazed by a letter from the secretary of state for the colonies—one of the two famous writers of romance then in Lord Derby's cabinet—which opened to him the question of undertaking a special mission to the Ionian islands. This, said Bulwer Lytton, would be to render to the crown a service that no other could do so well, and that might not inharmoniously blend with his general fame as scholar and statesman. 'To reconcile a race that speaks the Greek language to the science of practical liberty seemed to me a task that might be a noble episode in your career.' The origin of an invitation so singular is explained by Phillimore:—