It was “a revolution by due course of law,” nothing less; and to this day people dispute whether Disraeli induced Derby to accept it, or whether the process was reversed.  Derby called it “a leap in the dark.”  Disraeli vaulted that he had “educated his party” up to the point of accepting it.  Both alike took comfort in the fact that they had “dished the Whigs”—­which, indeed, they had done most effectually.  The disgusted Clarendon declared that Derby “had only agreed to the Reform Bill as he would of old have backed a horse at Newmarket.  He hates Disraeli, but believes in him as he would have done in an unprincipled trainer:  he wins—­that is all.”

On the 15th of August, 1867, the Tory Reform Bill received the Royal Assent, and Derby attained the summit of his career.  Inspired by whatever motives, influenced by whatever circumstances, the Tory chief had accomplished that which the most liberal-minded of his predecessors had never even dreamed of doing.  He had rebuilt the British Constitution on a democratic foundation.

At this point some account of Lord Derby’s personal appearance may be introduced.  My impression is that he was only of the middle height, but quite free from the disfigurement of obesity; light in 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 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.”