principles. They were like his taste for music, his taste for china, his taste for bric-à-brac, feelings he would like to indulge, but was restrained from by a higher duty, that of securing a Parliamentary majority. This was his ultimate reason of all action, his true conscience, to which his nobler aspirations had constantly to be sacrificed. His long habit, too, of publicity, had bred in him, as it does in actors, a tendency to self-deception. From constantly acting parts not really his own, he had acquired the power of putting on a character at will, even, I believe, to his inmost thoughts. If he had a new distasteful policy to pursue, his first object was to persuade himself into a belief that it was really congenial to him, and at this he worked until he had made himself his own convert, by the invention of a phrase or an argument which might win his approbation. Thus he was always saved the too close consciousness of his insincerities, for like the tragedian in Dickens, when he had to act Othello, he began by painting himself black all over. I believe this is not an unfair estimate of Gladstone's public character. Certainly it is the light in which his actions showed him to me in his betrayal that year of the Egyptian cause.
As yet, however, I had no misgiving, and in the next few days wrote letters to my friends at Cairo detailing the good news. With Gladstone on our side, what more was there to fear? Only I prayed them to be patient till the Commission I had asked for should arrive. That some attempt was made by Lord Granville to carry out my suggestion is clear from the Blue Books. But Granville's heart was also as clearly not in it, or he was thwarted by Dilke or others in the Foreign Office. He wrote me a note on the 24th asking me to luncheon, when I should have an opportunity of discussing the question of the Commission, but