It is a singular thing that, among the twelve hundred men or so who constitute the two Houses of Parliament, there has never been any reluctance to take office. Probably the only instance of a public man who had a positive repugnance of office was Lord Althorp, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons in the Grey and Melbourne Administrations from November 1830 to December 1834. Office destroyed all his happiness, he declared, and so affected his mind that he had to remove his pistols from his bedroom lest he should be tempted to shoot himself. He remained in office because he felt that one in his rank and position—born, as it were, to the purple, a member of one of the great territorial families, who boast of long lines of ancestors in the public service—could no more set aside the responsibility of office than the earldom and broad acres of which he was also the heir. The one consolation he derived from the death of his brother, Earl Spencer, was that his own accession to the House of Lords compelled him to lay down the burden of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Sir George Cornewall Lewis seems to have been animated by somewhat the same uncommonly high sense of duty. When Palmerston, in the forming of his Administration in 1855, offered him the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer which Gladstone had vacated, he says he entertained the strongest disinclination to accept the office. “I felt, however,” he writes, “that in the peculiar position of the Government”—they were in difficulties over the Crimean War—“refusal was scarcely honourable, and would be attributable to cowardice, and I therefore, most reluctantly, made up my mind to accept it.”