amended or modified or made worse in its details. Mr. Gladstone applied himself to an unceasing effort for the elimination from the bill of what seemed to him its worst and most offensive purposes. He pointed out, for instance, that there was a fundamental injustice in that part of the bill which would entitle the husband to obtain a divorce from an unfaithful wife because of a single act of infidelity, but which did not give the same right to the wife against the husband, and did not entitle her to obtain a divorce unless the husband had been physically cruel as well as morally unfaithful. The debates in committee were conducted on the part of the Government by the Attorney-General, Sir Richard Bethell, afterwards Lord Westbury, one of the keenest and ablest lawyers ever known in the House of Commons. Sir Richard Bethell was master of every statute and every clause which could have any bearing on the subject, and he had an unfailing resource of acrid and even vitriolic sarcasm. It might well have been thought by many people that even Mr. Gladstone, with all his eloquence, would be no match for such an antagonist on that antagonist's own ground. But Mr. Gladstone never in his whole life showed a more marvelous fighting power than he put forward in this long controversy. To every reply he had his rejoinder; to every citation of authority he had another citation at the tip of his tongue. His marvelous gift of memory came into surprising play. He could repeat whole passages from a statute without a scrap of a note to assist him. One might have thought, to hear him, that he had given up his entire life to the study of the marriage laws of various ages and nations, and had never allowed his attention to be distracted from the subject by finance or politics or the reading of Homer. He did succeed in obtaining some slight improvements in the measure, but the bill in its main provisions was passed in spite of all his resistance. Old members of the House of Commons will tell you unto this day of the effect produced by those splendid passages of arms. Bethell, they all say, was great, but Gladstone was greater, and it was Bethell's own ground and not Gladstone's. The bill was passed into law, and Mr. Gladstone has never ceased to condemn it. Something, of course, has to be said for the bill if we consent to come down from that lofty religious principle which Mr. Gladstone maintained, and which some of the great churches of the world have always maintained. It has to be said that divorce existed in England long before the passing of the Act Mr. Gladstone opposed, but it was divorce obtained after a very different fashion. A divorce could be obtained, first of all, by proving the offense in a court of law, and then by passing a bill through both Houses of Parliament to give effect to the judgment of the court of law by the dissolution of the marriage. This was an immensely costly process, and it made divorce the luxury of the very rich. Mr. Gladstone did not find his conscience or his mind attracted by the prospect of facility or cheapness. CHAPTER XVII. THE IONIAN ISLANDS I venture to think that Mr. Gladstone never undertook a more congenial task than that which was offered to him by the Tory Government, which had turned out Lord Palmerston, when the Homeric scholar was invited to go out to the Ionian Islands for the purpose of conducting an inquiry on the spot as to the complaints and grievances of the island HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT. DINING-ROOM OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT. INTERIOR OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS Immediately facing the spectator is the Speaker's chair. To his right are the seats of the party in power, the Ministers of the Cabinet occupying the first bench; to the Speaker's left are the seats of the Opposition, the leaders occupying the first bench. The Clerk's table is in front of the Speaker. The mace lies on this table. Behind and above the Speaker is the Reporters' Gallery; opposite this is the Strangers' Gallery. ers. The proposal was made under the inspiration of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, the novelist and dramatist, who had become Secretary for the Colonies in the Tory Government. Bulwer Lytton's career in Parliament had up to this time been little better than an absolute failure. had been He the House of Commons from 1831 to 1841, and his attempts at Parliamentary debate had ended in almost absolute breakdown. But he was a man of indomitable perseverance, and he seems to have said to himself that he would not die until he had made a name as a Parliamentary orator. A debater he never could have been, because he was so deaf that he had to read a speech in the newspapers before he could attempt to reply to it. His articulation was, from actual physical causes, so defective that almost any other man would have considered himself utterly debarred from any attempt of his novels, but it is impossible to deny that the novels had an immense popuby the critics that he had no dramatic larity. He wrote a play, and was told gift. He accepted the fact that the play was a failure, but he said that he could do better, and he wrote the "Lady of Lyons," which, with all its preposterous faults, had for more than a generation a vast success, and even still holds the stage. Inspired by these successes, he seems to have made up his mind that he also. would conquer the House of Commons He did in the end conquer the much as he had conquered the literary House of Commons, after a fashion, very full popularity of Dickens and Thackeray and the dramatic public. Even in the he held his own with the literary public; and Disraeli he accomplished a marveleven in the days of Gladstone and Bright ous success in the House of Commons. at eloquence. But Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton had a boundless confidence in phrase-making, elaborate no doubt, but himself-I should have called it a bound- very splendid. Whenever it was known less self-conceit, if he had not made good that he was about to speak in a debate, his pretensions so far as popularity was concerned. One may smile at the exthe House was crowded. I am really travagance of the style displayed in several cess, but the success itself was at the unable to explain the secret of his suc He was a master of the art of gorgeous 38 time a fact which it would be impossible to doubt. His speeches are well-nigh forgotten now in the House of Commons, and nobody any longer believes that he Some of us did not was a great orator. believe it even then; and even while we were under the influence of the spell we felt pretty clear that it was but a glamour and a magic destined to lose its effect. Still, we could not deny that Bulwer Lytton had conquered the House of Commons and held it for the time enthralled. Then he turned on to prove himself a practical statesman. He founded, for example, the Colony of British Columbia. But the mission of Mr. Gladstone to the Ionian Islands was something more in keeping with Bulwer Lytton's general tastes and tendencies. The seven Ionian Islands were united as a kind of commonwealth by the Treaty of Vienna, and they were placed under the protection of England, which had the right of main WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE taining garrisons in them. England was represented by a Lord High Commissioner, who was usually a soldier, and who was Commander-in-Chief as well as civil Governor. The Republic of the Seven Islands had a Senate and a Legislative Assembly. For many years there had been growing complaints in the islands against English administration. The complaints admitted, in fact, of no real compromise. What the islanders wanted above all things was to be Greeks and to be united with the Kingdom of Greece. It was futile to point out to them that their material affairs were much better administered under the English Government than they were likely to be under the Government of King Otho, the dull, incapable ruler of the Greek Kingdom. It was of no use to tell the islanders that they had much better roads and harbors and lines of steamers than were possessed by the inhabitants of the Greek Kingdom. 1859. Fifty years old. Wearing his robes of office as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Palmerston's second Administration. From an old illustration. Their whole ideas of life were not limited to roads and piers and bridges and harbors. They had an impassioned, romantic, indomitable desire to be united with their brothers of the Kingdom. Futile, unreasonable critics in this country tried to convince them that the islanders, after all, were not of kin with the Greeks of the mainland. It was argued that the inhabitants of the mainland had got so intermixed with other races that they could hardly be considered genuine Greeks at all. The islanders could not be reasoned out of their national sentiments by any inquiries into the pedigree or the family tree of the Grecian Kingdom. So there was always some trouble in the Ionian Islands, and the Lord High Commissioner every now and then dismissed some more or less mutinous Parliament and convened another by a general election, and the new Parliament was in spirit just the same as the old, and things went on exactly as they had been going before. Bulwer Lytton was, it would seem, the first statesman in office to whom it occurred to ask himself whether, after all, there might not be something worth considering in the claims made by the people of the Seven Islands. "Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton," says a modern writer, "had not been long enough in office to become soaked in the ideas of routine. He did not regard the unanimous opinions of the insular legislature, municipalities, and press as evidence merely of the unutterable stupidity or the incurable ingratitude and wickedness of the Ionian populations." Therefore it occurred to him that it might be as well to send out some impartial statesman who could examine the controversy on the spot; and he could think of no one so well fitted for such a task as Mr. Gladstone. Every one knew that Mr. Gladstone was in strong sympathy with the general movement of Greece to accomplish a high destiny in Europe, and the mere fact that such a man was sent out would be enough in itself to prove to the islanders that no predetermined spirit of hostility was dictating the mission. The news of the offer was at first received in English society with incredulity, and The hill called the Akropolis was the earliest seat of the Athenian Kings, and later was devoted solely to the worship of the gods. It attained its greatest splendor under Perikles. Crowning all is the Parthenon, the work of Iktinos and Kallikrates. The sculpturai adornment was the work of Pheidias, the counselor of Perikles. To the left is the Propylæa, rivaling the Parthenon itself in the admiration of the ancients. Underneath and resting against the hill is the Odeion of Herodes Atticus, a Roman ruin. Further to the right are the remains of the Theater of Dionysos, where the dramas of Eschylus, Sophocles. Euripides, and Aristophanes were first produced The city is mostly hidden by the Akropolis, but is seen extending on either side. Back of all rise the Lykabettos (commanding a splendid view) and the hills to the north. Mr. Gladstone visited Greece in 1858-9. then with a good deal of ridicule. Is it possible, wise and solemn people asked, that Mr. Gladstone could be induced to accept so crazy a mission? Mr. Gladstone, however, did not think the mission altogether crazy, and he at once accepted it. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton had made in his dispatch an eloquent allusion to Mr. Gladstone's Homeric studies, and dry officials insisted that this was nothing short of an unwarrantable outrage on all the precedents of conventional diplomacy. "What are we coming to?" they asked. "We have a Prime Minister, Lord Derby, who goes in for Greek studies; we have a novelist as leader of the Government in the House of Commons; we have a novelist as Colonial Secretary; and these three propose to send out a man on a mission to the disturbed Ionian Islands for no other reason than because he is fond of reading Homer!" Mr. Gladstone, however, was in hope that he could do some good by accepting the mission, and he went out to the Ionian Islands, arriving at Corfu in November, 1858. Up to that time I believe he never had been in Greece. It must have been to him like the actual realization of youth's best dream when he stood on the soil of Greece, when he went from island to island of that enchanting Greece for which nature and poetry and history and tradition have done so much, when he saw the home of Ulysses and the fabled rock of Sappho, and, above all, when he climbed the Acropolis of Athens and gazed upon the Parthenon, and, turning his eyes one way, looked on Mount Hymettus, and turning another way saw Salamis, and then, on a clear day, the outlines of the steep of Acro-Corinth. Even the most commonplace among us who have in our early days been at all in love with Greek poe'ry and Greek history, were it through the blurring medium of translations and cribs," have felt as we reached that enchanted soil rather as if we were coming home to some familiar scenes of our boyhood than as if we were entering for the first time into a foreign country. If that is so with the commonplace among us, how must it have been with a man like Mr. Gladstone, steeped to the lips in all the poetry, the history, and the traditions of Greece, and with now an opportunity given to him of visiting Greece, not merely as a tourist, however loving and devoted, but as a man intrusted with a mission to listen to the complaints of the Greek islanders and to endeavor to find some remedy for any genuine grievances of which they complained. Mr. Gladstone, it is needless to say, behaved with the most genuine and exact loyalty to the task he had undertaken for the British Government. December the third, 1858, he called to On |