“ ... Quod optanti Divûm promittere nemo Auderet, volvenda dies en attulit ultro.”
It was thus he signified his final triumph to his brother,--or intended so to signify it, but quoted the passage wrongly.
There is in this a boyish feeling of the happiness of success. And yet he was seventy years old. We cannot fancy such an expression coming from Lord John or Lord Aberdeen. Though either had felt it, he could not have so written to his brother. Here I am at last,--Prime Minister of England, in spite of all accidents. My old friend, Lord John, turned me out of the Foreign Office the other day. And I was obliged to go at his bidding. And I had a bad quarter of an hour in the House of Commons when, for reasons which are always paramount with an Englishman, I was unable to take my own part. They said I was crushed. “There was a Palmerston.” But when these times of war had come, I was wanted, And now my Lord John is my lieutenant. All that was not loudly expressed in the “volvenda dies en attulit ultro;” but it was understood both by the writer and by his brother. And he goes on: “Here am I, writing to you from Downing Street as First Lord of the Treasury. The fact was, that Aberdeen and Newcastle had become discredited in public estimation as Statesmen equal to the emergency; Derby felt conscious of the incapacity of the greater portion of his party, and their unfitness to govern the country; and John Russell, by the way in which he suddenly abandoned the Government, had so lost caste for the moment that I was the only one of his political friends who was willing to serve under him.” “I think our Government will do very well. I am backed by the general opinion of the whole country, and I have no reason to complain of the least want of cordiality or confidence on the part of the Court.” Lord Aberdeen had himself done his best to make the matter easy for Lord Palmerston. I quote the following words from the “Life of the Prince Consort” (vol. iii. p. 209);--“Lord Palmerston had good reason to appreciate the generosity with which his old chief had interposed to remove this formidable impediment to his success.” Nor was Her Majesty less grateful; and in her letter, 6th of February, announcing to Lord Aberdeen that Lord Palmerston had just kissed hands upon his appointment as Premier, she told him that she was now relieved from great anxiety and difficulty, and felt that she owed much to Lord Aberdeen’s kind and disinterested assistance. Then he states the terms which he intends to propose to the enemy, and in doing so prophesies the future almost exactly. “We must also _ask_ for the destruction of the works at Sebastopol, although we should not make that a _sine quâ non_ unless we had taken the place and had destroyed the works ourselves.”