time had brought him
into a novel age, defended himself with the haughty truism, then just
ceasing to be true, that he had a right to do as he liked with his own.
This clear-cut enunciation of a vanishing principle became a sort of
landmark, and gave to his name an unpleasing immortality in our
political history. In the high tide of agitation for reform the whigs
gave the duke a beating, and brought their man to the top of the poll, a
tory being his colleague. Handley, the tory, on our present occasion
seemed safe, and the fight lay between Mr. Gladstone and Sergeant Wilde,
the sitting whig, a lawyer of merit and eminence, who eighteen years
later went to the woolsack as Lord Truro. Reform at Newark was already
on the ebb. Mr. Gladstone, though mocked as a mere schoolboy, and
fiercely assailed as a slavery man, exhibited from the first hour of the
fight tremendous gifts of speech and skill of fence. His Red club worked
valiantly; the sergeant did not play his cards skilfully; and pretty
early in the long struggle it was felt that the duke would this time
come into his own again. The young student soon showed that his double
first class, his love of books, his religious preoccupations, had not
unfitted him by a single jot for one of the most arduous of all forms of
the battle of life. He proved a diligent and prepossessing canvasser, an
untiring combatant, and of course the readiest and most fluent of
speakers. Wilde after hearing him said sententiously to one of his own
supporters, 'There is a great future before this young man.' The rather
rotten borough became suffused with the radiant atmosphere of Olympus.
The ladies presented their hero with a banner of red silk, and an
address expressive of their conviction that the good old Red cause was
the salvation of their ancient borough. The young candidate in reply
speedily put it in far more glowing colours. It was no trivial banner of
a party club, it was the red flag of England that he saw before him, the
symbol of national moderation and national power, under which, when
every throne on the continent had crumbled into dust beneath the
tyrannous strength of France, mankind had found sure refuge and
triumphant hope, and the blast that tore every other ensign to tatters
served only to unfold their own and display its beauty and its glory.
Amid these oratorical splendours the old hands of the club silently
supplemented eloquence and argument by darker agencies, of which
ha