especially sent from Rome are said to have been busily engaged in the lobby in inducing the Irish Members to vote with the Opposition. Be that as it may, a majority of eighteen votes was a godsend so unexpected, that the Premier begged some young ladies, who had no notion of what had happened, to congratulate him. Lady Palmerston was delighted at the hand-shakings lavished on the Prime Minister by the crowd that thronged the lobby.” [Illustration: FREDERICKSBORG CASTLE, ELSINORE.] The result of the division was hailed with great delight by the country. To have turned out Palmerston would have brought Lord Derby back to office, whose followers, it was suspected, would have finally driven him into war with Germany. To retain Palmerston in power, but by a vote that humiliated him and destroyed his personal _prestige_, was felt to be in every way safer for the country than the transference of its Government to an Opposition which was at once weak and warlike. “However the dice may fall,” writes Count Vitzthum, “the Prime Minister is disarmed, and his secret schemes of anger and revenge are condemned. The victory of the Peace Party is a victory of the Queen. Maligned, insulted, and reproached for German sympathies, her Majesty has checked the dictatorship of her Prime Minister, and beaten him three times in his own Cabinet on the question of war and peace. The Queen has recognised the true interests, the true wishes of her people, and not allowed herself to be misled by the gossip of the drawing-rooms, or the declamations of the daily Press.”[211] As for Lord Palmerston, his biographer has published some letters which show how bitterly he resented his defeat. In one of these, addressed to the King of the Belgians, he rails at Austria and Prussia for taking advantage of the weakness of Denmark, at Denmark for obstinately putting herself in the wrong, and at France for not cooperating with England. “One consequence,” he says, “is clear and certain, that if our good friend and neighbour at Paris were to take it into his head to deprive Prussia of her Rhenish provinces, not a finger in England would be stirred, nor a voice raised, nor a man or a shilling voted, to resist such a retribution upon the Prussian monarch.” As the Power which seized the Rhine would have Belgium at its mercy, it would be difficult to imagine an English Minister addressing to a Belgian Sovereign a more maladroit expression of impotent discomfiture. Then, in autumn, Palmerston, replying to a letter from Lord Russell, writes, “You say that with less timidity around us we might probably have kept Austria quiet on the Danish affair. Perhaps we might; but then we had no equal pull upon Prussia, and she would have rallied all the German Powers round her, and we should equally have failed in saving Denmark.[212] As to Cabinets, if we had colleagues like those who sat in Pitt’s Cabinet, such as Westmoreland and others, or such men as those who were with Peel, like