As usual with him, these grave political preoccupations were not engrossing, but only a part of the day's task. He carried on a pretty profuse correspondence, he worked hard on his favourite diversion of arranging books and papers, he gave much thought and time to estate matters with his eldest son, with him too he felled now a chestnut, now a sycamore; he corrected the proofs of his speeches and wrote an article for Mr. Knowles; he read books and articles about Eleusis, and the Hebrew migration from Egypt, and the Olympian system, and Newman on the Eirenicon, and Westcott on St. John, and somebody else upon St. Thomas Aquinas. For two or three days he was partially disabled by “a low face-ache: the reaction after heavy pressure, under which [pg 604] I received from the mercy of God such remarkable support.” In the middle of January alarming accounts came from his sister Helen, who lay dying at Cologne. Thither he sped with his eldest brother and his sister-in-law. They found life fast ebbing, and four days after their arrival the end came, in the midst of pious exercises and affectionate care. They were satisfied that she had been “freely restored to the unity of spirit and the bond of peace,” and had died not in the actual Roman communion. A few days after his return home he records: “Wrote a long memorandum of the evidence in regard to dear Helen's religious profession.” The remains they bore to Fasque, and by the end of the month he was again at Hawarden, once more at work with his eldest son upon the “accumulated disorder,” and the rest of the round of his familiar employments. Among other things he read Cowper's Task—“the fifth book very noble in its moral strain”; and another entry will interest many,—“Feb. 15.—Read the biography of noble Dora Pattison. How by reflex action it stings.... Yet even to her (like Bishop Butler), death was terrible.” “He was haunted,” he writes, “with recollections of Sister Dora.” Then after a Sunday passed in church exercises, and “skimming many theological books,” on February 23 he “left Hawarden with a heavy heart.”
He quickly found himself in the London whirlpool, attending conclaves of his political friends, dining out, seeing Irving in the Merchant of Venice (“his best, I think”), speaking once or twice in the House, and twice at London meetings in St. Pancras and Marylebone, where the popular enthusiasm made even his most hardened critics begin to suspect that the tide had really turned since the days when the Londoners mobbed him in the street and broke his windows.
Chapter VIII. The Fall Of Lord Beaconsfield. (1880)
In causa facili cuivis licet esse disertum,
Et minimae vires frangere quassa valent;
Subruere est arces et stantia moenia virtus.
—Ov. Trist., iii. xi. 21.
In an easy case any man can plead, and against shattered walls the puniest strength prevails; 'tis the overthrow of standing towers and frowning ramparts that tests manhood.