[314] It was objectionable, he said, because it was a Bill of pains and penalties for mere words. Government had released the Fenians. Why, then, object to Irishmen honouring them? He also complained that the House was asked to act on the ipse dixit of “an Irish Attorney-General.” Mr. Beresford Hope promptly rebelled against his leader, and approved of the Bill as a “manly step.” Mr. Gathorne-Hardy also deserted his chief, and said he would stand by the Government.
[315] Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, Vol. II., p. 411. The best sketch of Lady Palmerston that has appeared was the obituary notice in the Times of the 15th of September, from the pen of Mr. Abraham Hayward, Q.C.—See Mr. Hayward’s Correspondence, Vol. II., p. 201, also Hayward’s Selected Essays, Vol. II. (Longmans, 1878.)
[316] Hayward’s Correspondence, Vol. II., p. 202.
[317] Hodder’s Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G., Vol. III., pp. 251-252. (Cassell and Co., 1886.)
[318] It may be interesting to record that the most brilliant Queen of Society in the Victorian period was a hard-working, thrifty house-manager. During her reign she managed personally not only the sumptuous hospitalities, but the accounts of Cambridge House, Brocket Hall, and Broadlands, and kept Palmerston’s private affairs in admirable order. Even her visiting cards were filled up by her own hand till within a very few years of her death. There was one other trace of old-fashionedness about her. She was the last lady of quality who pronounced the word oblige as if it were spelt “obleege.”
[319] Two-thirds of the electors abstained from voting. Jeremiah Donovan prefixed the aristocratic “O’” to his surname to give himself social importance. To distinguish him from other O’Donovans the place of his birth, Rossa, was now added to his name, thus: “Jeremiah O’Donovan (Rossa).” In England it soon came to be written as if “Rossa” were actually his surname.
[320] On the 7th of December Mr. W. Johnston, M.P., one of the Orange leaders, told an Orange Lodge at Derry that between Fenians and Papists he chose Fenians, and added, amidst enthusiastic cheers, that “it is no part of the duty of an Orangeman to fire a shot or draw a sword as between the English Government and the Fenians.”
[321] Mr. Disraeli did not object to compensation for disturbance when it meant compensation for unexhausted improvements, or for the “interruption of a course of good husbandry.”
[322] The Commons restored the original scale of compensation for eviction, the original duration of the lease exempting holdings from the Bill, and they restricted the permission to settle disputes between landlord and tenant to cases where they acted in concert, and not to those in which the offer came from one party alone.
[323] These were (1), in towns, the municipal boroughs; (2), in the Metropolis, workhouse school districts, or failing these, vestry areas; and (3), in counties, the civil parishes.