Iddesleigh has pointed out, he studied the Bible in the earliest hours. In church attendance he was what Mr. Gladstone used to call a “oncer.” He was a regular communicant. By success he was never inflated, by reversals never depressed, although by nature elastic.[27] It was not until 1874 that his power became wholly unfettered, and then foreign crisis claimed the attention that he longed to bestow on social improvements and Colonial Confederation. His three previous spans of office had been equally brief. For some twenty years he headed, at intervals, a despairing Opposition, whose mistrustful murmurs had to be stilled, whose doubts had to be dispelled, and the immense difficulties of whose management he has graphically portrayed in a notable passage from his _Life of Lord George Bentinck_. To the printed diatribes which assailed him he was indifferent. In parliamentary generalship, demanding an infinite insight and management, an instant recognition of movements in the mass, and “creation of opportunity,” he was unsurpassed even by Peel, who played on Parliament “as on an old fiddle.” To his urgent control even so early as 1854, and when out of office, the correspondence with Spencer Walpole affords a striking insight. “My dear Walpole,” he writes on November 29 of that year, “remember to write to the Queen if anything of interest happens to-night. Tell somebody, Harry Lennox or another, to send me a bulletin by this messenger of what is taking place, but not later than ten o’clock, as I shall retire early, that being my only chance. Be positive that the financial statement will be made on Friday.”[28] What he really valued in power was its faculty of influence. Otherwise it was bitter-sweet. He once told a high aspirant for high office, that as for its _pleasures_, they lay chiefly in contrasting the knowledge it afforded of what was really being done with the ridiculous chatter about affairs in the circles that one frequented.