bainters,’ hated literature; and, as Milnes’s father told him, ‘every book he wrote was a nail in his political coffin.’ Again, Milnes was in favour of the endowment of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, and had written a pamphlet called _The Real Union of England and Ireland_, on which, we may note, in passing, Mr Gladstone’s remark, that he had ‘some opinions on Irish matters that are not fit for practice.’ With these views he supported Peel’s grant to Maynooth, a step which brought him into such disgrace at Pontefract that he thought seriously of giving up parliamentary life altogether. In fact he applied for a diplomatic post, but without success. Before long we find him again running counter to his chief’s policy, supporting Lord Ashley against the Government, and seconding a motion of Charles Buller’s against Lord Stanley. After this it cannot excite surprise that Peel passed him over when he rearranged his Administration in 1845. With his second disappointment Milnes’s career as a professional politician came to an end. Ten years later Palmerston offered him a lordship of the Treasury, but he declined it. As he said himself in a letter written shortly afterwards: ‘_Via media_ never answers in politics, and somehow or other I never can get out of it. My Laodicean spirit is the ruin of me. From having lived with all sorts of people, and seen good in all, the broad black lines of judgment that people usually draw seem to me false and foolish, and I think my own finer ones just as distinct, though no one can see them but myself’ (vol. i. p. 360).