thoughts, has he any fixed law to guide them?' On Roscoe's _Leo X._ he
remarks how interesting and highly agreeable it is in style, and while
disclaiming any right to judge its fidelity and research, makes the odd
observation that it has in some degree subdued the leaven of its
author's unitarianism. He writes occasional verses, including the
completion of 'some stanzas of December 1832 on "The Human Heart," but I
am not impudent enough to call them by that name.'

In the midst of days well filled by warm home feeling, reasonable
pleasure, and vigorous animation of intellect came the summons to
action. On November 18, a guest arrived with the astonishing news that
ministers were out. The king had dismissed the Melbourne government,
partly because he did not believe that Lord John Russell could take the
place of Althorp as leader of the Commons, partly because like many
cleverer judges he was sick of them, and partly because, as is perhaps
the case with more cabinets than the world supposes, the ministers were
sick of one another, and King William knew it. Mr. Gladstone in 1875[63]
described the dismissal of the whigs in 1834 as the indiscreet
proceeding of an honest and well-meaning man, which gave the
conservatives a momentary tenure of office without power, but provoked a
strong reaction in favour of the liberals, and greatly prolonged the
predominance which they were on the point of losing through the play of
natural causes.[64] Sir Robert Peel was summoned in hot haste from Rome,
and after a journey of twelve days over alpine snows, eight nights out
of the twelve in a carriage, on December 9 he reached London, saw the
king and kissed hands as first lord of the treasury. Less than two years
before, he had said, 'I feel that between me and office there is a wider
gulf than there is perhaps between it and any other man in the House.'

PROPOSAL OF OFFICE

Mr. Gladstone meanwhile at Fasque worked off some of his natural
excitement which he notes as invading even Sundays, by the composition
of a political tract. The tract has disappeared down the gulf of time.
December 11 was his father's seventieth birthday, 'his strength and
energy wonderful and giving promise of many more.' Within the week the
fated message from the new prime minister arrived; the case is apt to
quicken the pulse of even the most serene of politicians, and we may be
sure that Mr. Gladstone with the keen vigour of five-and-twe