in the breeziest moments of unguarded
merriment, his chaff was always the chaff of a gentleman.

Lord Beaconsfield, writing to a friend, once said that he had just
emerged from an attack of the gout, "of renovating ferocity," and
this phrase might have been applied to the long succession of gouty
illnesses which were always harassing Lord Derby. Unfortunately, as
we advance in life, the "renovating" effects of gout become less
conspicuous than its "ferocity;" and Lord Derby, who was born in
1799, was older than his years in 1867. In January and February, 1868,
his gout was so severe that it threatened his life. He recovered,
but he saw that his health was no longer equal to the strain of
office, and on the 24th of February he placed his resignation in
the Queen's hands.

But during the year and a half that remained to him he was by no
means idle. He had originally broken away from the Whigs on a point
which threatened the temporalities of the still-established Church
of Ireland; and in the summer of 1868 Gladstone's avowal of the
principle of Irish Disestablishment roused all his ire, and seemed
to quicken him into fresh life. The General Election was fixed
for November, and the Liberal party, almost without exception,
prepared to follow Gladstone in his Irish policy. On the 29th of
October Bishop Wilberforce noted that Derby was "very keen," and had
asked: "What will the Whigs not swallow? Disraeli is very sanguine
still about the elections."

The question about the Whigs came comically from the man who had
just made the Tories swallow Household Suffrage; and Disraeli's
sanguineness was ill-founded. The election resulted in a majority
of one hundred for Irish Disestablishment; Disraeli resigned, and
Gladstone became for the first time Prime Minister.

The Session of 1869 was devoted to the Irish Bill, and Lord Derby,
though on the brink of the grave, opposed the Bill in what some
people thought the greatest of his speeches in the House of Lords.
He was pale, his voice was feeble, he looked, as he was, a broken
man; but he rose to the very height of an eloquence which had already
become traditional. His quotation of Meg Merrilies' address to the
Laird of Ellangowan, and his application of it to the plight of
the Irish Church, were as apt and as moving as anything in English
oratory. The speech concluded thus:

"My Lords, I am now an old man, and, like many of your Lordships,
I have already passed three score year