"There is no hope but in violence; no chance of escaping a revolution," writes William Napier. In May, 1832, Lord Grey resigned because the King would not create new peers. Wellington was sent for by the King; for a fortnight he endeavoured to frame an anti-reform ministry, and then it was that popular indignation broke through all bounds and carried everything before it. The King had to come from Windsor to London, and from Hounslow to Buckingham Palace one long shout of discontent greeted the royal carriage. "No taxes until Reform"; "Go for gold and stop the Duke," were the cries that met Wellington when he drove to meet His Majesty at the Palace. A few days later he was mobbed and pelted with all kinds of missiles as he rode through the city. To make the insult more ominous it was the anniversary of Waterloo. Then the King gave way. Brougham and Grey came back to office, the Lords surrendered, and the Reform Bill became law. It was into this seething state of politics that Charles Napier came back from the Ionian Isles. During the three years following his retirement from active employment, the pressure from straitened means, and the sense of injustice under which he laboured, kept him much to himself. The terrible epidemic of cholera which swept England in 1832 very nearly made him one of its victims. Scarcely had he recovered from this fell disease than he was struck down by a terrible blow. In the summer of 1833 his wife died. Then at last the great heart of the man seemed to break. A leaf from his written thoughts at this time attests the agony he endured. "O God, merciful, inscrutable Being," he writes, "give me power to bear this Thy behest! Hitherto I had life and light, but now all is a dream, and I am in darkness, the darkness of death, the loneliness of the desert. I see life and movement and affection around me, but I am as marble. O God, defend me, for the spirit of evil has struck a terrible blow. I too, can die; but thus my own deed may give the dreadful spirit power over me, and I may in my haste to join my adored Elizabeth divide myself for ever from her. My head seems to burst. Oh, mercy, mercy! for this seems past endurance." What depths of agony these heroic natures know, as profound as the heights they climb to are immense! He arose from this sorrow chastened, but at the same time steeled to greater suffering. He hears that his enemies in London and Corfu are about to attack him in the Reviews. "I will assail in turn," he writes. "I am so cool, so out of the power of being ruffled by danger, that my fighting will be hard. The fear of being taken from my wife to a gaol made me somewhat fearful, when I wrote before, now I defy prosecution and every other kind of contest." In the end of 1833 he settled at Caen in Normandy. His life now was very dreary, and his letters show how small are the sorrows of disappointed ambition compared with the blows which death deals to all. "Formerly," he writes,