"counter-worked the purpose of Lord Beaconsfield" from 1876 to
1880--and he attained his object. Lord Beaconsfield, like other
Premiers nearer our own time, imagined that he was indispensable
and invulnerable. Gladstone might harangue, but Beaconsfield would
still govern. He told the Queen that she might safely go abroad
in March, 1880, for, though there was a Dissolution impending,
he knew that the country would support him. So the Queen went off
in perfect ease of mind, and returned in three weeks' time to find
a Liberal majority of one hundred, excluding the Irish members,
with Gladstone on the crest of the wave. Lord Beaconsfield resigned
without waiting for the verdict of the new Parliament. Gladstone,
though the Queen had done all she could to persuade Hartington
to form a Government, was found to be inevitable, and his second
Administration was formed on the 28th of April, 1880. It lasted
till the 25th of June, 1885, and, its achievements, its failures,
and its disasters are too well remembered to need recapitulation
here.

When, after a defeat on the Budget of 1885, Gladstone determined
to resign, it was thought by some that Sir Stafford Northcote,
who had led the Opposition in the House of Commons with skill and
dignity, would be called to succeed him. But the Queen knew better;
and Lord Salisbury now became Prime Minister for the first time. To
all frequenters of the House of Commons he had long been a familiar,
if not a favourite, figure: first as Lord Robert Cecil and then as
Lord Cranborne. In the distant days of Palmerston's Premiership he
was a tall, slender, ungainly young man, stooping as short-sighted
people always stoop, and curiously untidy. His complexion was unusually
dark for an Englishman, and his thick beard and scanty hair were
intensely black. Sitting for a pocket-borough, he soon became famous