for November, and the Liberal party, almost without exception,
prepared to follow Gladstone in his Irish policy. On the 29th of
October Bishop Wilberforce noted that Derby was "very keen," and had
asked: "What will the Whigs not swallow? Disraeli is very sanguine
still about the elections."

The question about the Whigs came comically from the man who had
just made the Tories swallow Household Suffrage; and Disraeli's
sanguineness was ill-founded. The election resulted in a majority
of one hundred for Irish Disestablishment; Disraeli resigned, and
Gladstone became for the first time Prime Minister.

The Session of 1869 was devoted to the Irish Bill, and Lord Derby,
though on the brink of the grave, opposed the Bill in what some
people thought the greatest of his speeches in the House of Lords.
He was pale, his voice was feeble, he looked, as he was, a broken
man; but he rose to the very height of an eloquence which had already
become traditional. His quotation of Meg Merrilies' address to the
Laird of Ellangowan, and his application of it to the plight of
the Irish Church, were as apt and as moving as anything in English
oratory. The speech concluded thus:

"My Lords, I am now an old man, and, like many of your Lordships,
I have already passed three score years and ten. My official life
is entirely closed; my political life is nearly so; and, in the
course of nature, my natural life cannot now be long. That natural
life commenced with the bloody suppression of a formidable rebellion
in Ireland, which immediately preceded the union between the two
countries. And may God grant that its close may not witness a renewal
of the one and a dissolution of the other."