‘His gentle disposition and good intentions,’ said Lord Randolph long afterwards, ‘would have saved anyone from attack except a leader of Opposition.’ The very qualities which endeared him to his friends and family and won him the compliments of his opponents, disheartened, irritated, and paralysed his followers in the House of Commons. The deference which he delighted to show to the Prime Minister, offended a party which had just struggled back, smarting and reduced, from a crushing electoral disaster. His lack of enterprising vigour was from the first session of the new Parliament painfully apparent even to his most faithful friends--and all of those who sat below the gangway were not his friends. His speeches were tame and ineffective. When party rancour festered to hate, when crisis at home followed hot on crisis abroad, the mild expostulations with which Sir Stafford was accustomed to conclude the debates, disappointed his followers. The Opposition, always hopelessly outmatched in their official spokesman, were never more plainly at a disadvantage than when their leader undertook to encounter Mr. Gladstone. Sir Stafford Northcote’s character was estimable, his talents were distinguished, his experience had been long; but scarcely any Parliamentary chief has been more unequal to the particular work he had to do. And yet though his strength failed year by year and extraordinary physical disabilities oppressed him with increasing severity, his fingers, nerveless for aught else, closed tenaciously upon the reins of power. Unfit for any serious exertion or important business even in private life, he was willing--not, indeed, from any selfish or sordid motive, but from a high sense of public duty--to fill the most arduous offices of State. In a condition when, as a doctor, lawyer, or business man, he would have been unable properly to discharge his duties, he was prepared to form Governments, to grapple with Mr. Gladstone at the head of a great majority, and to guide the Conservative party through the fiercest political tumult of a hundred years. Heedless of the warnings of Nature and blind to the plainest teaching of fact, he struggled gallantly forward until he died in harness beneath burdens he was utterly unable either to relinquish or sustain.