ment were numbered, and that Peel would succeed him, and he did his best to bring about a more cordial personal feeling between the Queen and Peel and the Tory party. The Queen tells us that to her his word constantly was, "Hold out the olive-branch to them a little;" with Peel, he tried to induce the shy, proud man to put on a little of the courtier and the man of the world. At a Court ball in 1840, "Melbourne went up to Peel and whispered to him with the greatest earnestness, 'For God's sake, go and speak to the Queen;' Peel did not go, but the entreaty and the refusal were both characteristic."
When the long-anticipated fall of the Melbourne Administration came, and the election of 1841 resulted in the return of the Tories to power with a majority of over 80, Melbourne, who had worked unceasingly to reconcile the Queen to the impending change, did not desist from his good offices with her new Ministers.[1] He could not approach them directly, but he took the opportunity after Peel's Government had been formed of giving them a few hints, through Greville. He met Greville at a dinner-party and took him on one side and said: "'Have you any means of speaking to these chaps?' I said, 'Yes, I can say anything to them.' 'Well,' he said, 'I think there are one or two things Peel ought to be told, and I wish you would tell him. Don't let him suffer any appointment he is going to make to be talked about, and don't let her hear it through anybody but himself; and whenever he does anything, or has anything
- ↑ This generosity was thoroughly in keeping with his character. After Melbourne's death, Greville tells how he occupied his room at Brocket, and, "poking about" to see what he could find, came upon several MS. books of the late Prime Minister. In one of these was recorded Melbourne's settled determination "always to stand by his friend," and his conviction that it was more necessary to do so "when they were in the wrong than when they were in the right."
