I felt myself open to the charge of being opinionated, and wanting in deference to really great authorities; and I could not but know I should be regarded as fastidious and fanciful, fitter for a dreamer, or possibly a schoolman, than for the active purposes of public life in a busy and moving age. In effect so it was. In the month of January, 1845, if not sooner, the resolution of the Cabinet was taken; and I resigned. The public judgment, as might have been expected, did not favour the act. I remember that the 'Daily News,' then as now a journal greatly distinguished for an almost uniform impartiality, as well as for breadth of view and high discernment, remarked at the time or afterwards upon the case, as a rare one, in which a public man had injured himself with the public by an act which must in fairness be taken to be an act of self-denial. I hope that reference to this criticism will not be considered boastful. It can hardly be so; for an infirm judgment, exhibited in a practical indiscretion, is after all the theme of these pages. I do not claim acquittal upon any one of the counts of indictment which I have admitted may be brought against the conduct I pursued. One point only I plead, and plead with confidence. It proved that I was sensible of the gravity of any great change in political conduct or opinion, and desirous beyond all things of giving to the country such guarantees as I could give of my integrity, even at the expense of my judgment and fitness for affairs. If any man doubts this, I ask him to ask himself, what demand political honour could have made with which I failed to comply? In the ensuing debate on the Address (February 4, 1845), Lord John Russell, in terms of courtesy and kindness which I had little deserved from him, called for an explanation of the cause of my retirement. In a statement which I corrected for 'Hansard's Debates,' I replied that it had reference to the intentions of the Government with respect to Maynooth; that those intentions pointed to a measure "at variance with the system which I had maintained," "in a form the most detailed and deliberate," "in a published treatise:" that although I had never set forth any theory of political affairs as "under all circumstances inflexible and immutable," yet I thought those who had borne such solemn testimony to a particular view of a great constitutional question, "ought not to be parties responsible for proposals which involved a material departure from it." And the purpose of my retirement was to "place myself, so far as in me lay, in a position to form not only an honest, but likewise an independent and an unsuspected judgment," on the plan likely to be submitted by the Government. I also spoke as follows, in more forms than one: