Then the game of intrigue began. Lord Malmesbury was sent to Mr. Sidney Herbert to negotiate an alliance between the Tories and the Peelites, his proposal being, says Lord Malmesbury, “that we should not take a hostile part towards each other’s candidates.” By this arrangement it was supposed that no personal enmities would be made, and the difficulty of organising an actual coalition, if such should be deemed necessary, would therefore be minimised.[307] Mr. Herbert rejected these overtures, because the Peelites had become so much divided in opinion and so weak in influence, that his desire was to see them dispersed. Lord Malmesbury then sounded Mr. Gladstone at the Carlton Club. “He had,” writes his lordship, “seen Sidney Herbert, who told him of our interview, and Gladstone said he quite disagreed with his views, and had told him so.... His leanings are apparently towards us, but he was quite of my opinion that no sort of agreement should be made beyond the one I had proposed.”[308] In fact, Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Herbert had very nearly quarrelled over the matter. Writing to Sir George Lewis on the 16th of March, the late Mr. A. Hayward says, “Gladstone and S. Herbert have come to an explanation which has ended very like the lovers’ separation in Little’s poems:-- ‘You may down _that_ pathway rove, While I shall take my way through _this_.’ Sidney Herbert takes the Liberal and Gladstone the Derbyite turn. I know no one who will follow Gladstone’s lead in the matter, except, perhaps, Lord A. Harvey.”[309]