He succeeded, and went to war with Russia. Went is hardly the ...

He succeeded, and went to war with Russia. Went is hardly the word.

But the mismanagement of the opening campaign in '54 broke up the Cabinet, and with universal applause, superb assurance, and the recovered confidence of his Sovereign, Palmerston bounded into the vacant place.

A brief eclipse in 1865 hardly impaired his ascendancy, and till his death at eighty-one, with a half-finished dispatch on his table, in the eyes of the world and his country Palmerston was England and England was Palmerston. The political comedy has never been more brilliantly staged, and at every turn the Crown was in its proper place, selecting, reconciling, and listening, its dignity unimpaired by

party conflicts and its

impartiality surmounting individual distastes.

'I object to Lord

Palmerston on personal grounds,' the Queen said.

'The Queen means,' Prince Albert explained, 'that she does not object to Lord Palmerston on account of his person.' In place of a definite but brittle prerogative it had acquired an indefinable but potent influence.

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