frame, and brisk in movement. Whereas most statesmen were bald,
he had an immense crop of curly, and rather untidy, hair and the
abundant whiskers of the period. His features were exactly of the
type which novelists used to call aristocratic: an aquiline nose,
a wide but firmly compressed mouth, and a prominent chin. His dress
was, even then, old-fashioned, and his enormous black satin cravat,
arranged in I know not how many folds, seemed to be a survival
from the days of Count D'Orsay. His air and bearing were such as
one expects in a man whose position needs no advertizing; and I
have been told that, even in the breeziest moments of unguarded
merriment, his chaff was always the chaff of a gentleman.

Lord Beaconsfield, writing to a friend, once said that he had just
emerged from an attack of the gout, "of renovating ferocity," and
this phrase might have been applied to the long succession of gouty
illnesses which were always harassing Lord Derby. Unfortunately, as
we advance in life, the "renovating" effects of gout become less
conspicuous than its "ferocity;" and Lord Derby, who was born in
1799, was older than his years in 1867. In January and February, 1868,
his gout was so severe that it threatened his life. He recovered,
but he saw that his health was no longer equal to the strain of
office, and on the 24th of February he placed his resignation in
the Queen's hands.

But during the year and a half that remained to him he was by no
means idle. He had originally broken away from the Whigs on a point
which threatened the temporalities of the still-established Church
of Ireland; and in the summer of 1868 Gladstone's avowal of the
principle of Irish Disestablishment roused all his ire, and seemed
to quicken him into fresh life. The General Election was fixed