gh of Newark was at Mr. Gladstone's disposal
if he should be ready to enter parliamentary life. This was the fruit of
his famous anti-reform speech at the Oxford Union. No wonder that such
an offer made him giddy. 'This stunning and overpowering proposal,' he
says to his father (July 8), 'naturally left me the whole of the evening
on which I received it, in a flutter of confusion. Since that evening
there has been time to reflect, and to see that it is not of so
intoxicating a character as it seemed at first. First, because the Duke
of Newcastle's offer must have been made at the instance of a single
person (Lincoln), that person young and sanguine, and I may say in such
a matter partial.... This much at least became clear to me by the time I
had recovered my breath: that decidedly more than mere permission from
my dear father would be necessary to authorise my entering on the
consideration of particulars at all.' And then he falls into a vein of
devout reflection, almost as if this sudden destination of his life were
some irrevocable priesthood or vow of monastic profession, and not the
mere stringent secularity of labour in a parliament. It would be thin
and narrow to count all this an overstrain. To a nature like his, of
such eager strength of equipment; conscious of life as a battle and not
a parade; apt for all external action yet with a burning glow of light
and fire in the internal spirit; resolute from the first in small things
and in great against aimless drift and eddy,--to such an one the moment
of fixing alike the goal and the track may well have been grave.

Then points of doubt arose. 'It is, I daresay, in your
recollection,'--this to his father,--'that at the time when Mr. Canning
came to power, the Duke of Newcastle, in the House of Lords, declared
him the most profligate minister the country had ever had. Now it struck
me to inquire of myself, does the duke know the feelings I happen to
entertain towards Mr. Canning? Does he know, or can he have had in his
mind, my father's connection with Mr. Canning?' The duke had in fact
been one of the busiest and bitterest of Canning's enemies, and had
afterwards in the same spirit striven with might and main to keep
Huskisson out of the Wellington cabinet. Another awkwardness appeared.
The duke had offered a handsome contribution towards expenses. Would not
this tend to abridge the member's independence? What was the footing on
which patron and member were to stand