This defeat involved explanation. Disraeli, in a speech which Bright called "a mixture of pompousness and servility," described his audiences of the Queen, and so handled the Royal name as to convey the impression that Her Majesty was on his side. Divested of verbiage and mystification, his statement amounted to this--that, in spite of adverse votes, he intended to hold on till the autumn, and then to appeal to the new electorate created by the Reform Act of the previous year. As the one question to be submitted to the electors was that of the Irish Church, the campaign naturally assumed a theological character. On the 20th of August Lord Shaftesbury wrote: "Dizzy is seeking everywhere for support. He is all things to all men, and nothing to anyone. He cannot make up his mind to be Evangelical, Neologian, or Ritualistic; he is waiting for the highest bidder." Parliament was dissolved in November, and the General Election resulted in a majority of one hundred for Gladstone and Irish Disestablishment. By a commendable innovation on previous practice, Disraeli resigned the Premiership without waiting for a hostile vote of the new Parliament. He declined the Earldom to which, as an ex-Prime Minister, he was by usage entitled; but he asked the Queen to make his devoted wife Viscountess Beaconsfield. As a youth, after hearing the great speakers of the House which he had not yet entered, he had said, "Between ourselves, I could floor them all"--but now Gladstone had "floored" him, and it took him five years to recover his breath. V _WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE_ Most people remember Gladstone as an old man. He reached the summit of his career when he had just struck seventy. After Easter, 1880, when he dethroned Lord Beaconsfield and formed his second Administration, the eighteen years of life that remained to him added nothing to his fame, and even in some respects detracted from it. Gradually he passed into the stage which was indicated by Labouchere's nickname of "The Grand Old Man"; and he enjoyed the homage which rightly attends the closing period of an exemplary life, wonderfully prolonged, and spent in the service of the nation. He had become historical before he died. But my recollections of him go back to the earlier sixties, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Palmerston's Government, and they become vivid at the point of time when he became Prime Minister--December, 1868.