The extraordinary violence of the present hostility to the Prime
Minister was remarkably shown by an attempt of Lord C. Hamilton's on Monday night to fasten on him the discredit of having called Lord Grey " an old woman," during the campaign in Midlothian. Mr. Gladstone denied the accusation, and on Tuesday Lord C. Hamilton asked leave to make a personal explanation, in order to establish it. In this personal explanation he made the matter still worse, by assert- ing for the first time that Mr. Gladstone did so characterise Lord Grey, and that the Times so reported him, but that Mr. Gladstone had carefully left out the passage containing this bit of acrimony in the collected speeches which he republished in a volume. Mr. Gladstone proved that the statement was quite -false ; that even by the Times' report,—which was the report of a private Committee meeting, at which no reporters were, to his knowledge, present,—he had most carefully distinguished between the assertion made by Lord Grey and the other asser- tion which he had characterised as the apprehension of an old woman ; and that, not content with this, he had gone out of his way, lest he should be misunderstood, to say expressly that he had a great respect for Lord Grey's abilities and character, and was not in any way referring to him, when he spoke of the apprehension which he regarded as the apprehension of an old woman. But Lord C. Hamilton neither apologised nor re- tracted. And Mr. James Lowther virtually reiterated the .charge on Thursday night. In all probability, these young men cannot trust Mr. Gladstone to speak the truth, even when all the evidence is on his side. There is no more curious sign of the violence of political feeling of the day, than the utter incapacity of certain Tories to accept ordinary evidence, if it tells in favour of the Prime Minister.
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