I cannot resist speaking of the admiration with which I read your answer to the addresses at Endsleigh. It is quite perfect.

The Bristol speech won equal approval from a more Conservative critic. Sir Herbert Taylor wrote, by the King's commands, on November 12

The King noticed with much satisfaction in the report of the proceedings the tone of the speech which you made in reply to the address of the inhabitants who presented you with a piece of plate, and the spirit of your remarks.

Lord John stayed at Bowood for the Bristol meeting. He returned thence to London, where the Cabinet was reassembling. Business of importance was awaiting the Ministers. They had to determine, in the first place, on the legislation of the ensuing session; and they had, in the next place, to decide what to do with the Chancellorship. Lord Melbourne, unwilling to confer office on Lord Brougham, had placed the great seal in commission. But the Administration lost no time in announcing that the arrangement was provisional, and that it was intended to separate the judicial and political functions of the Chancellor. Very early in the recess Lord John drew up a memorandum, which he sent to the Prime Minister, in which he advocated the appointment of a permanent judge in Equity. In the following month Lord Melbourne and Lord John, who were in almost daily communication with one another on the subject, agreed that legislation should be attempted in the ensuing session, and that in the meanwhile Sir C. Pepys, the Master of the Rolls, should be advanced to the Chancellorship and a peerage. But the promotion involved a new difficulty. Two men, Lord Brougham, and Sir J. Campbell, the Attorney-General, were certain to aspire to the office thus vacated; and, so far as Lord Brougham1 was con

1 In September 1835 Lord John decided on re-constituting an old commission to inquire into educational endowments, and on offering Lord Brougham, whose previous career marked him out for the post, the chairmanship of the commission. The King strongly objected to Lord Brougham's employment even in this capacity, and Lord John wrote to Lord Melbourne on September 30 begging him to overcome the King's objection. If Brougham is rejected after having consulted his friends, we shall have "war to the knife" from him, and,

cerned, it was very doubtful whether the King would assent to his promotion; while Sir John Campbell's training did not qualify him to preside in an Equity court. Lord John wrote from Woburn on December 12

With respect to the Mastership of the Rolls, I shall be content to see it given to Brougham, Bickersteth, or Campbell. I am doubtful about the two first.

And Lord Melbourne replied on the 14th

I have been thinking much about the great seal, and I feel great doubts whether I could conscientiously recommend the King to place Brougham at the Rolls. . . . If the King were to say to me, 'After the manner he has acted, can you advise me to place him in a high judicial office, from which, however he may act, or whatever extravagance he may commit, I cannot remove him?' I know not what I should be able to answer. My opinion is to make Pepys Chancellor, and Bickersteth Master of the Rolls, with or without a peerage; but I think the former. . . . To Campbell's complaints I should say that we were determined to try Equity lawyers in Equity courts. No common lawyer has recently given satisfaction.

I was not at all disposed [replied Lord John on the same day] to urge pertinaciously what I yet think a fair claim for Brougham. In your place, I could venture to recommend him to the King. But I cannot fairly ask you to be responsible for a man in whose soundness of mind and integrity of conduct you have so little confidence. The appointment of Bickersteth would have the advantage that the courts of Equity would be as well filled as the corruption of what is called Equity would permit.1

according to an old joke of Dudley's, Mr. Brougham's Monarchy Abolition Bill read a first time.' The King gave way very reluctantly, saying, 'he does not know what Lord Brougham may do in any situation;' and Lord Melbourne added the next day, October 1, 'I have reason to think that the letter to you with respect to the appointment to the head of the Charity Commission was written, not with a view of persisting in the objection, but to let you know what were the feelings entertained "with respect to this individual."'

1 Lord John had not a high opinion of Equity judges. In the memorandum referred to in the text as addressed to Lord Melbourne in October, he wrote, 'Two of the fittest men of our time to preside in an Equity court (Lord Eldon and Sir John Leach) had yet such faults that, according to the epigram, with one you never had the oyer, with the other never the terminer.'

Lord John did not cease to regret Lord Melbourne's refusal to appoint Lord Brougham. Nearly two years afterwards, on September 12, 1837, he wrote to

These arrangements were concluded in the first week of January 1836; and Lord John, who, since his return from Devonshire, had paid flying visits to Brighton, Holkham, and Woburn, settled in London to prepare for the coming session. Unfortunately for him, he was immediately afterwards laid up with fever; and, though the attack proved a very mild one, he was far from recovered when Parliament opened in the beginning of February. His father wrote to him imploring him not to do the honours of the dinner which the leader of the House of Commons always gives at the commencement of the session.

I trust you will consider it. You will be risking a relapse, et à quoi bon ? The Chancellor of the Exchequer can sit at the head of the table, and . . . read the King's speech, just as well as you can. Think how very important it is that you should keep yourself quite well, and in health and strength, to undertake all that will be required of you in the ensuing campaign.

If Lord John had cared much for anonymous abuse, a series of letters, which was just appearing in the Times, might have retarded his recovery. Mr. Disraeli wrote the first of the Runnymede Letters on January 16, 1836. The letter to Lord John Russell is dated January 30. Their author's subsequent career has given a permanent interest to these scurrilous productions; and though in the form, in which they are read to-day, they are a little less offensive than when they first appeared, the reader, accustomed to the careful manner in which the Times is now edited, is surprised that that paper should have stooped to insert them. In these letters Mr. Disraeli exhausted his powers of venom in attacking Lord John Russell. In the opening letter the seals of the principal office of the State are entrusted to an individual who, on the principle that good vinegar is the corruption of bad wine, has been metamorphosed from an incapable author into an eminent Lord Melbourne: 'I have a letter from the Chancellor, very full and satisfactory. He says truly enough that Langdale will not be of much use to him. I always regret that office was not given to Brougham. It would have been better for the suitors and for the public.'

politician. In the letter of February 2, the three Secretaries of State are described as 'one odious, another contemptible, the third [Lord John] both.' And in the letter of January 30 Lord John is thus addressed :

:

You were born with a strong ambition and a feeble intellect. Your ambition persuaded you that you were a great poet; your intellect in consequence produced the feeblest tragedy in our language. . . . Your ambition sought from prose fiction the fame which had been denied to your lyre; and your intellect in consequence produced the feeblest romance in our literature. Not deterred by the unhappy catastrophe of the fair maid of Arrouca your ambition sought consolation in the notoriety of political literature, and your intellect in due time produced the feeblest political essay on record. . . . Your ambition resolved on rivalling the fame of Hume and Gibbon. Your Memoirs of the Affairs of Europe,' published with pompous parade in successive quarto volumes, retailed in frigid sentences a feeble compilation from the gossip of those pocket tomes of small talk which abound in French literature. . . . This luckless production closed your literary career; you flung down your futile pen in incapable despair; and, your feeble intellect having failed in literature, your strong ambition took refuge in politics. Your friends, I speak of the circle in which you lived, always treated you with a species of contempt. . . . Lord Grey, only five years ago, would not even condescend to offer you a seat in the Cabinet, and affected to state that, in according you a respectable office, he had been as much influenced by the state of your finances as of your capacity. . . . A finer observer of human nature than that forlorn statesman might have recognised at this crisis in a noble with an historic name and no fortune, a vast ambition and a balked career, and soured, not to say malignant, from disappointment, some prime materials for the lead of a revolutionary faction. These materials have worked well. . . . A miniature Mokanna, you are now exhaling upon the constitution of your country which you once eulogised . . . all this long-hoarded venom and all those distempered humours that have for years accumulated in your petty heart and tainted the current of your mortified life. Your aim is to reduce everything to your own mean level-to degrade everything to your malignant standard. . . . I think it is Macrobius who tells a story of a young Greek, who, having heard much of the wealth and wisdom of Egypt, determined on visiting that celebrated land. When he

...

beheld the pyramids of Memphis and the gates of Thebes, he exclaimed, 'Oh, wonderful men, what must be your Gods!' But what was his mingled astonishment and disgust when he found a nation prostrate before the most contemptible and the most odious of created beings! The Gods of Egypt are the Ministers of England. . . . But, my Lord, how thunderstruck must be our visitor when he is told to recognise a Secretary of State in an infinitely small scarabeus; yes, my Lord, when he learns that you are the leader of the English House of Commons, our traveller may begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped-AN INSECT.

Mr. Disraeli's strictures were sooner or later certain to be answered by Mr. Disraeli himself; and accordingly eight years after the Runnymede Letters Mr. Disraeli wrote—

The interval that elapsed between 1835 and 1837 proved that there was all this time in the Whig array one entirely competent to the office of leading a great party. . . . Lord John Russell has that degree of imagination, which, though evinced rather in sentiment than expression, still enables him to generalise from the details of his reading and experience, and to take those comprehensive views which, however easily depreciated by ordinary men in an age of routine, are indispensable to a statesman in the conjunctures in which we live. He understands, therefore, his position; and he has the moral intrepidity which prompts him on to dare that which his intellect assures him is politic. He is consequently, at the same time, sagacious and bold in council. As an administrator, he is prompt and indefatigable. He is not a natural orator, and labours under physical difficulties which even a Demosthenic impulse could scarcely overcome. But he is experienced in debate, quick in reply, fertile in resource, takes large views, and frequently compensates for a dry and hesitating manner by the expression of those noble truths that flash across the fancy, and rise spontaneously to the lip, cf men of poetic temperament when addressing popular assemblies. If we add to this a private life of dignified repute, the accidents of his birth and rank, which never can be severed from the man-the scion of a great historic family, and born, as it were, to the hereditary service of the State-it is difficult to ascertain at what period, or under what circumstances, the Whig party have ever possessed,, cr could obtain, a more efficient leader.1

1 Coningsby, book v. ch. iv.