Mr. Gladstone found time, amid his preoccupations, to write a long article for the _English Historical Review_ on the last portion of the ‘Greville Memoirs,’ chiefly justifying the action of the parties with which he was associated at the time of the ‘death and obsequies of Protection,’ in 1852, and during the Crimean War. Mr. Gladstone traverses Mr. Greville’s statement that in 1852 the Peelites were indisposed to join the Whigs, under the delusive belief that they could form a Government of their own. He can say positively that, with the single exception of the Duke of Newcastle, none of the party entertained this belief. ‘They knew that dichotomy, and not trichotomy, was for our times the law of the nation’s life.’ Their sympathies in regard to economy and peace lay rather with one of the Liberal wings than with the main body. In some cases they were divided between their Liberal opinions and their Conservative traditions and associations. For many a man to leave the party in which he was brought up is like the stroke of a sword dividing bone and marrow. But the intermediate position is essentially a false position, and nothing can long disguise its falseness. The right hon. gentleman confesses that he himself frankly stated to Lord Derby that the Peelites were a public nuisance, for while rapid migrations from camp to camp may be less creditable, slow ones not only are more painful, but are attended with protracted public inconvenience. The lessons of this political drama, he says—and the statement is significant at the present time—are of the present and the future. It entails a heavy responsibility to embark political parties in controversies certain to end in defeat where there is a silent sense of what is coming—a latent intention to accept defeat—and where the postponement of the final issue means only the enhancement of the price to be paid at the close. Mr. Gladstone deprecates the tone generally assumed in speaking of the Crimean War. He denies the assumptions that we drifted into that war; that the Cabinet of the day was in continual conflict with itself at the various stages of the negotiations; and that if it had adopted a bolder course at an earlier stage the Emperor Nicholas would have succumbed. The first of these assertions he characterizes as untrue, the second as ridiculous, and the third as speculative and highly improbable. Lord Clarendon did say that we drifted into war; but his meaning was simply that the time of war had not come, but the time of measures for averting it had expired; and Lord Clarendon, not less expressively than truly, said that, while the intermediate days were gliding by, we were drifting into war. ‘But the fable is brazen-fronted, and, like Pope Joan, still holds her place.’ As regards the Cabinet, Mr. Gladstone has witnessed much more sharp or warm argument in almost every other of the seven Cabinets to which he has had the honour to belong.