Still, it is no new experience for me to be persuaded to do things I don't like. I'm swallowing hard pills in the Conservative interest now, but many a box I've cleared out in former days to make things pleasant for GL-DST-NE. You've seen me, I daresay, reluctantly brought up to the box on the table of the House, patted, pushed, placed in position, and made to support all kinds of things, which a few months or weeks earlier I honestly believe I loathed. As I write I see GL-DST-NE nodding encouragingly as I proceed. I hear the rapturous cheers of the Radicals, delighted to find me won over. I am conscious of the chilling silence on the benches immediately behind, and I am roused to more desperate declaration by the satirical cheers of my friends on the benches opposite. I recall, as it were but yesterday, the effect H-RC-RT'S cheer used to have upon me--the strong temptation to turn round, publicly chuck up the whole business, and go back to the expression of my opinion on the particular topic before GL-DST-NE took me in hand. That's all over now, at least in that particular development. But it's the same old thing over again in altered circumstances. After I had consented to support GL-DST-NE'S last Land Bill, he sent me a gushing letter, in which he said that, turning over the pages of T-RT-LL-N, he had come upon a passage which might well be engraved on my tombstone. I thought at the time it was, in chronological circumstances, rather cool his preparing a tombstone for me. But that by the way. Here is the epitaph:-- "Sic vita erat; facile omnes perferre ac pati; Cum quibus erat cunque una, his sese dedere; Eorum obsequi studiis; adversus nemini, Nunquam præponens se aliis.----" But that was, of course, before I bolted on the Home-Rule question. I fancy he has found another passage since. I know I'm not a person of any conspicuous ability. If I had not been born a C-V-ND-SH I would never have been even a CH-PL-N. But as things fell out, I am like the boy in the middle of the balanced plank, at the end of which two others sit. According as I move to the right or to the left, one end of the plank goes up, and the other down. So the friends on either side constantly shoulder me one way or the other; which is all very well for them, but rather a nuisance to me.