A Fresh Rebuff.

Yet he did not despair of recovering the favour of the Colonial Office. When troubles were brewing in South Africa in the late seventies, he sat sullen in his island, waiting for a summons. Just so had Lord Melbourne, who had sworn himself out of office, as out of men's respect, sat "waiting to be sent for." The summons did not arrive, and Mahomet went to the mountain that refused to come to him. He applied to be sent to South Africa. The application was refused. Ten or twelve years afterwards Froude was sympathetic. "South Africa is moving again," he wrote to him in 1889; "you might set all straight, but the Office, I suppose, would as soon invite the help of the King of Darkness." Lord page 168Carnarvon was then ruler at "the Office," and he was neither a Satan nor his ally, but he was implacably convinced that Grey "was a dangerous man," who would wreck any colonial government to which he might be appointed.

Spurned by the Colonial Office and by the governing powers, he was for the first time in nearly thirty years a free man. He no longer owed loyalty to any department of State, and both political parties having employed and promoted him, he owed none to either of the great parties in particular. He was still in his prime, with thirty years of life and twenty years of administrative and legislative activity ahead of him. The world lay all before him. What path of activity should he choose?