Napier, the hot-headed, self-conceited commodore, was enthusiastically extolled, and his feats of successful audacity were glorified as though they had shown the genius of a Nelson or the clever resource of a Cochrane. Not many of Napier's admirers cared a rush about the merits of the quarrel between the Porte and the Pasha. Most of them would have been just as well pleased if Napier had been fighting for the Pasha and against the Porte; not a few were utterly ignorant as to whether he was fighting for Porte or for Pasha. Those who claimed to be more enlightened had a sort of general idea that it was in some way essential to the safety and glory of England that whenever Turkey was in trouble we should at once become her champions, tame her rebels, and conquer her enemies. Unfounded as were the suspicions of Frenchmen about our designs upon Egypt, they can hardly be called very unreasonable. Even a very cool and impartial Frenchman might be led to the conclusion that free England would not without some direct purpose of her own have pledged herself to the cause of a base and a decaying despotism.

Steadily, meanwhile, did the ministry go from bad to worse. They had greatly damaged their character by the manner in which they had again and again put up with defeat, and consented to resume or retain office on any excuse or pretext. They were remarkably bad administrators; their finances were wretchedly managed. In later times we have come to regard the Tories as especially weak in the matter of finance. A well-managed revenue and a comfortable surplus are generally looked upon as in some way or other the monopoly of a Liberal administration; while lavish expenditure, deficit, and increased taxation are counted among the necessary accompaniments of a Tory Government. So nearly does public opinion on both sides go to accepting these conditions, that there are many Tories who take it rather as a matter of pride that their leaders are not mean economists, and who regard a free-handed expenditure of the national revenue as something peculiarly gentlemanlike, and in keeping with the honorable traditions of a great country party. But this was not the idea which prevailed in the days of the Melbourne Ministry. Then the universal conviction was that the Whigs were incapable of managing

the finances. The budget of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Baring, showed a deficiency of nearly two millions. This deficiency he proposed to meet in part by alteration in the sugar duties; but the House of Commons, after a long debate, rejected his proposals by a majority of thirty-six. It was then expected, of course, that ministers would resign; but they were not yet willing to accept the consequences of defeat. They thought they had another stone in their sling. Lord John Russell had previously given notice of his intention to move for a committee of the whole House to consider the state of legislation with regard to the trade in corn; and he now brought forward an announcement of his plan, which was to propose a fixed duty of eight shillings per quarter on wheat, and proportionately diminished. rates on rye, barley, and oats. Except for its effect on the fortunes of the Melbourne Ministry there is not the slightest importance to be attached to this proposal. It was an experiment in the direction of the Free-traders, who were just beginning to be powerful, although they were not nearly strong enough yet to dictate the policy of a government. We shall have to tell the story of Free-trade hereafter; this present incident is no part of the history of a great movement; it is merely a small party dodge. It deceived no one. Lord Melbourne had always spoken with the uttermost contempt of the Free-trade agitation. With characteristic oaths, he had declared that of all the mad things he had ever heard suggested, Free-trade was the maddest. Lord John Russell himself, although far more enlightened than the Prime-minister, had often condemned and sneered at the demand for Free-trade. The conversion of the ministers into the official advocates of a moderate fixed duty was all too sudden for the conscience, for the very stomach of the nation. Public opinion would not endure it. Nothing but harm came to the Whigs from the attempt. Instead of any new adherents or fresh sympathy being won for them by their proposal, people only asked, “Will nothing, then, turn them out of office? Will they never have done with trying new tricks to keep in place ?"

Sir Robert Peel took, in homely phrase, the bull by the horns. He proposed a direct vote of want of confidencea resolution declaring that ministers did not possess con

fidence of the House sufficiently to enable them to carry through the measures which they deemed of essential importance to the public welfare, and that their continuance in office under such circumstances was at variance with the spirit of the Constitution. On June 4th, 1841, the division was taken; and the vote of no-confidence was carried by a majority of one. Even the Whigs could not stand this. Lord Melbourne at last began to think that things were looking serious. Parliament was dissolved, and the result of the general election was that the Tories were found to have a majority even greater than they themselves had anticipated. The moment the new Parliament was assembled amendments to the address were carried in both Houses in a sense hostile to the Government. Lord Melbourne and his colleagues had to resign, and Sir Robert Peel was intrusted with the task of forming an administration.

We have not much more to do with Lord Melbourne in this history. He merely drops out of it. Between his expulsion from office and his death, which took place in 1848, he did little or nothing to call for the notice of any one. It was said at one time that his closing years were lonesome and melancholy; but this has lately been denied, and indeed it is not likely that one who had such a genial temper and so many friends could have been left to the dreariness of a not self-sufficing solitude and to the bitterness of neglect. He was a generous and kindly man; his personal character, although often assailed, was free of any serious reproach; he was a failure in office, not so much from want of ability, as because he was a politician without convictions.

The Peel Ministry came into power with great hopes. It had Lord Lyndhurst for Lord Chancellor; Sir James Graham for Home Secretary; Lord Aberdeen at the Foreign Office; Lord Stanley was Colonial Secretary. The most remarkable man not in the cabinet, soon to be one of the foremost statesmen in the country, was Mr. W. E. Gladstone. It is a fact of some significance in the history of the Peel administration, that the elections which brought the new ministry into power brought Mr. Cobden for the first time into the House of Commons.

CHAPTER X.

MOVEMENTS IN THE CHURCHES.

WHILE Lord Melbourne and his Whig colleagues, still in office, were fribbling away their popularity on the pleasant assumption that nobody was particularly in earnest about anything, the Vice-chancellor and heads of houses held a meeting at Oxford, and passed a censure on the celebrated "No. 90," of "Tracts for the Times." The movement, of which some important tendencies were formally censured in the condemnation of this tract, was one of the most momentous that had stirred the Church of England since the Ref ormation. The author of the tract was Dr. John Henry Newman, and the principal ground for its censure, by voices claiming authority, was the principle it seemed to put forward-that a man might honestly subscribe all the articles and formularies of the English Church, while yet holding many of the doctrines of the Church of Rome, against which those articles were regarded as a necessary protest. The great movement which was thus brought into sudden question and publicity was in itself an offspring of the immense stirring of thought which the French Revolution called up, and which had its softened echo in the English Reform Bill. The centre of the religious movement was to be found in the University of Oxford. When it is in the right, and when it is in the wrong, Oxford has always had more of the sentimental and of the poetic in its cast of thought than its rival or colleague of Cambridge. There were two influences then in operation over England, both of which alike aroused the alarm and the hostility of certain gifted and enthusiastic young Oxford men. One was the tendency to Rationalism drawn from the German theologians; the other was the manner in which the connection of the Church with the State in England was beginning to operate to the disadvantage of the Church as a sacred institution and teacher. The Reform party everywhere were assailing the rights and

property of the Church. In Ireland, especially, experiments were made which every practical man will now regard with approval, whether he be Churchman or not, but which seemed to the devoted ecclesiast of Oxford to be fraught with danger to the freedom and influence of the Church. Out of the contemplation of these dangers sprang the desire to revive the authority of the Church; to quicken her with a new vitality; to give her once again that place as guide and inspirer of the national life which her ardent votaries believed to be hers by right, and to have been forfeited only by the carelessness of her authorities, and their failure to fulfil the duties of her Heaven-assigned mission.

No movement could well have had a purer source. None could have had more disinterested and high-minded promoters. It was borne in upon some earnest, unresting souls, like that of the sweet and saintly Keble-souls "without haste and without rest," like Goethe's star-that the Church of England had higher duties and nobler claims than the business of preaching harmless sermons and the power of enriching bishops. Keble could not bear to think of the Church taking pleasure since all is well. He urged on some of the more vigorous and thoughtful minds around him, or rather he suggested it by his influence and his example, that they should reclaim for the Church the place which ought to be hers, as the true successor of the Apostles. He claimed for her that she, and she alone, was the real Catholic Church, and that Rome had wandered away from the right path, and foregone the glorious mission which she might have maintained. Among those who shared the spirit and purpose of Keble were Richard Hurrell Froude, the historian's elder brother, who gave rich promise of a splendid career, but who died while still in comparative youth; Dr. Pusey, afterward leader of the school of ecclesiasticism which bears his name; and, most eminent of all, Dr. Newman. Keble had taken part in the publication of a series of treatises called "Tracts for the Times," the object of which was to vindicate the real mission, as the writers believed, of the Church of England. This was the Tractarian movement, which had such various and memorable results. Newman first started the project of the Tracts, and wrote the most remarkable of them. He had, up to this time, been distinguished as one of the most