and in 1837 was commended for
treating them liberally by Lord Russell. Then Sir R. Peel carried
me into trade, and before I had been six months in office, I wanted
to resign because I thought his corn law reform insufficient. In
ecclesiastical policy I had been a speculator; but if you choose to
refer to a speech of Sheil's in 1844 on the Dissenters' Chapels
bill,[129] you will find him describing me as predestined to be a
champion of religious equality. All this seems to show that I have
changed under the teaching of experience.

And much later he wrote of himself:--

The stock in trade of ideas with which I set out on the career of
parliamentary life was a small one. I do not think the general
tendencies of my mind were even in the time of my youth illiberal.
It was a great accident that threw me into the anti-liberal
attitude, but having taken it up I held to it with energy. It was
the accident of the Reform bill of 1831. For teachers or idols or
both in politics I had had Mr. Burke and Mr. Canning. I followed
them in their dread of reform, and probably caricatured them as a
raw and unskilled student caricatures his master. This one idea on
which they were anti-liberal became the master-key of the
situation, and absorbed into itself for the time the whole of
politics. This, however, was not my only disadvantage. I had been
educated in an extremely narrow churchmanship, that of the
evangelical party. This narrow churchmanship too readily embraced
the idea that the extension of representative principles, which was
then the essential work of liberalism, was associated with
irreligion; an idea quite foreign to my older sentiment on behalf
of Roman catholic emancipation. (_Autobiographic note, July 22,
1894_.)

VII

LIMITATIONS OF INTEREST

Notwithstanding his humility, his willingness within a certain range to
learn, his profound reverence for what he took for truth, he was no more
ready than many far inferior men to discern a certain important rule of
intellectual life that was expressed in a quaint figure by one of our
old English sages. 'He is a wonderful man,' said the sage, 'that can
thread a needle when he is at cudgels in a crowd; and yet this is as
easy as to find Truth in the hurry of disputation.'[130] The st