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 confidence -a resolution declaring that ministers did not possess confidence 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 Reformation. 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