The difficulty of difficulties for Mr. Gladstone will be to
satisfy the scruples which Mr. Disraeli hopes to stir up in weak-kneed Liberals when the details of disendowment come to be discussed, a difficulty much increased by the attitude of Sir Roundell Palmer. For such cases the new Lord Chancellor will be an invaluable doctor dubitantium, and we are surprised that the Times does not see that his immense influence in this way is worth, at the present juncture, any amount of mere expository power. Confessed on all hands to be a considerable judge, a man of singularly high cha- racter, and a devoted Churchman, he is in nothing more remark- able than in the unusually perfect union of an habitual and over- ruling considerateness, with an instinctive sternness which dis- tinguishes him, and we would not give much for an ordinary Liberal who felt called upon to make a parade of scruples which Sir William Page Wood held to be unfounded. He balances Sir Roundell Palmer, and outweighs all other men of scruples put together.
