Recollections of Carlisle, 37 



On the Carlisle hustings in '52 he said that he might 

 " now claim to close the book," but he was bound to 

 take his place by the Earl of Aberdeen that winter 

 now that Sir Robert was gone. He had begun to 

 fail very much after his grand climacteric in 1855, and 

 went down gradually until his death. Still the well- 

 known words, " Sir James is up" which, to the last, 

 never failed to empty the library and the smoking- 

 room, were heard in the May before his death, when 

 he spoke upon the question of a tack to a Bill of 

 Supply. We happened to be in the Speaker's Gallery, 

 and painfully noted the ravages which a few years had 

 made, since he and his colleague for Ripon, the Hon. 

 Edwin Lascelles, two of the handsomest men in Eng- 

 land, were listening to a protection debate in the 

 House of Lords. Earl Derby then adjusted his eye- 

 glass and glanced up at his old colleague, as he sat 

 with a look of half-indifference, half-scorn on his face, 

 and his finely-moulded hands folded on the top of his 

 stick. When he made that last great speech in the 

 Commons the political poet might still have written of 

 him, 



" So cute and cunning he of fence, 

 We count him worth a host ;" 



but he said when he rose from the last bench behind 

 the ministers, that his days of conflict were gone by, 

 and that he claimed an old man's privilege to lift the 

 question out of a mere party arena, and deal with it 

 strictly as a constitutional one. He spoke leaning on 

 his stick, and though his measured accents lacked the 

 fire of the days when he bade the House at least to 

 " get out of Nisi Prius" or made " he knows the 

 reason why" the key-note of a speech which recounted 

 the blessings of Free Trade, there was the same beau- 

 tiful precision and flow of language which so distin- 

 guished him in his prime. The house sat in rapt 

 silence so as not to lose one word, and all seemed 

 to feel that his voice would be heard again no 



