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 years and ten. My official life is entirely closed; my political life is nearly so; and, in the course of nature, my natural life cannot now be long. That natural life commenced with the bloody suppression of a formidable rebellion in Ireland, which immediately preceded the union between the two countries. And may God grant that its close may not witness a renewal of the one and a dissolution of the other." This speech was delivered on the 17th of June, 1869, and the speaker died on the 23rd of the following October. IV _BENJAMIN DISRAEI_