Parliament died of old age. It had exhausted its allotted septennial span, and was prorogued and dissolved on the 6th of July. The General Election created little stir or excitement in the country, because no appeal was made by either party to the constituencies on any vital question. The election of Mr. John Stuart Mill for Westminster roused some popular interest. The defeat of Mr. Gladstone at Oxford University was due to the votes of the non-resident graduates among the country clergy; and there was a stroke of unconscious irony in the success of the Opposition at Tiverton, where they managed to give Lord Palmerston a Tory as a colleague. The Liberals claimed to have carried 367 seats, and the Tories 290. But all speculation as to what course the new Parliament might adopt was cut short by the death of Lord Palmerston on the 18th of October. He was within two days of completing his eighty-first year, and, as his biographer says, “the half-opened cabinet-box on his table, and the unfinished letter on his desk, testified that he was at his post to the last.”[236] He had sat in sixteen Parliaments, and had been chosen to sit in a seventeenth. He had been a member of every Administration that had ruled England since 1807, save those of Sir Robert Peel and Lord Derby, and the voice of the nation rightly decreed for him the funeral honours of Westminster Abbey. It will always be a mystery why Palmerston succeeded in establishing, towards the end of his life, a personal dictatorship over the England which was governed by the £10 householder. In home politics he took hardly any interest. One day, for example, at Balmoral, when the Queen asked him for some information about a serious strike in the North of England, he replied that he had none; but “Madam,” said he, “I hear that the Russians have crossed the Pruth.” He was an aristocrat to the core, and his ideas of England’s mission in the world, and of her interests in the political forces and conflicts that shaped the destinies of nations, were those, not of a man of business or of affairs, but of a happy-hearted, reckless, pugnacious public-school-boy. To coolness, courage, and tenacity of purpose, he, however, added a dexterity in action that rendered him a successful as well as “A daring pilot in extremity.”