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POLITICS AND LETTERS. 
 
POLITICS AND LETTERS. 
 
 BY 
 
 T. H. S. ESCOTT. 
 
 LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL, 
 
 Limited. 
 1886. 
 
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 cha.bi.es dickens and bvans, 
 ceystal palace pkess. 
 
 JJA 
 
 5^' 
 5 
 
 t-^ 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I. 
 
 PASB 
 
 A PERSONAL EETROSPECT 1 
 
 II. 
 
 MR. GLADSTONE. . . . . . . .41 
 
 III. 
 MEN OF LETTERS ON THEMSELVES ... 64 
 
 IV. 
 
 LORD HOUGHTON .90 
 
 V. 
 
 TWO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS— ROME AND 
 
 LONDON, A.D. 408 and 1875 109 
 
 V ( Reprinted /7'oni yLACUihT.Kv' n 'MxGxziyr..) 
 
 -^52860 
 
vi CONTENTS. 
 
 VI. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 JOH^ BRIGHT 141 
 
 {Reprinted from The Centubt.) 
 VII. 
 
 A CHILD'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY . . . . .173 
 
 VIII. 
 
 MR. HAYWARD 189 
 
 IX. 
 
 SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN . . . . 213 
 
 X. 
 
 BERNAL OSBORNE ... . . ., . .252 
 
POLITICS AND LETTERS. 
 
 I. 
 
 A PERSONAL RETROSPECT. 
 
 After two decades of unremitting exertion, the 
 worker in the arduous passes of London journalism 
 is perhaps entitled to feel that he has reached a 
 table-land on which he may pause to take breath, 
 and whence he may, for a few minutes, survey the 
 retrospect. If no commanding eminence has been 
 gained, the up-bill track of an opposed career has 
 been steadily trodden, experience has been acquired, 
 and at every step the ground has been made fairly 
 sure. Journalism affords to those who have been 
 moderately successful in it the satisfaction of 
 knowing that the results secured have been honestly 
 won, that they are the reward of industry and merit 
 alone, and that the sphere of labour in which they 
 have been reaped is one where nothing but his own 
 capacity and deserts can be of any assistance to the 
 labourer. No such thing as a spurious reputation 
 
2 POLITICS AND LETTBBS. [i. 
 
 exists in journalism. Books may occasionally be 
 puffed into notoriety by friendly critics, and in that 
 case the laurels of literary triumph wither as quickly 
 as they are gathered. But no friends, however 
 powerful or loyal ; no backers, however energetic or 
 unscrupulous ; no letters of commendation, however 
 uncj^ualified ; no conversational advertisements, how- 
 ever loud and systematic, can establish the writer 
 for the periodical press in a position that is worth 
 five minutes' purchase. An impostor in journalism 
 is a contradiction in terms. His whole existence is 
 an ordeal of search — a series of competitive examina- 
 tions, or, to vary the metaphor, of addresses delivered 
 to a jury of his countrymen, who, though they may 
 not always be quick to discriminate between niceties 
 of thought and nuances of style, have the eye of 
 a hawk for blunders or fallacies, and are stoutly 
 intolerant of anything approaching to nonsense. 
 
 For these reasons, twenty years of London 
 journalism means twenty years of tried and genuine 
 work. To him who has lived through them, and 
 who looks to live through more, it must necessarily 
 be an eventful period. For other reasons of a less 
 selfish and personal character, the interval of time 
 which, in the press of London, separates 1865 from 
 1885 must be regarded as eventful also in no 
 common degree. The contrast between the two 
 epochs, if even superficially examined, will prove 
 sufficiently striking. 
 
 When, twenty years since, I adopted — very rashly 
 
I.] A PERSONAL BBTR08PECT. 3 
 
 as I was informed by many older and wiser heads, 
 on the strength, I suppose, of the failure which had 
 attended one or two chance ventures — ^journalism 
 as a profession, only two of the London newspapers 
 now in existence were published at a penny — Tlie 
 Daily Telegraph and The Standard. The former 
 of these was already an assured triumph ; the latter 
 was growing in favour and prosperity from day to 
 day, though its proprietors and conductors were 
 not able to divest themselves of all misgivings. 
 The Morning Post and The Daily News cost each 
 of them threepence; so did The Morning Herald, 
 published from The Standard office, and, with 
 the exception of the leading articles and the quality 
 of the paper, identically the same journal as The 
 Standard; so, of course, as it continues to be, did 
 The Times. The Morning Star, the reputed organ 
 of Mr. John Bright and the advanced Eadicals who 
 followed him, dragged on a precarious existence at 
 the same price as The Daily Telegraph. It was 
 discontinued some dozen years ago, while just 
 seventeen years ago The Herald, which proved a 
 dead loss, was merged in The Standard^ already a 
 fine property. In the higher class weekly press, 
 there were The Saturday Review, The Spectator, 
 The Examiner, and The Economist. Of these, The 
 Examiner, one of whose latest proprietors was 
 Lord Eosebery, has alone passed away. Of what 
 are known as " Society papers," not one had sprung 
 into being. Tlie Saturday Review, then under the 
 
 B 2 
 
4 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [i. 
 
 guidance of Mr. Douglas Cook, formerly editor of 
 The Morning Chronicle, published every week two 
 or three articles of the same kind that now regularly 
 appear in The World, and that the rejuvenated 
 Saturday would now reprobate as intolerably flippant 
 or personal. The chief writers for The Saturday 
 Review at its commencement were Sir William 
 Harcourt, Sir Henry Maine, the learned author of 
 "Ancient Law" and of the series of articles that 
 have recently been reprinted from Tlie Quarterly 
 Revieiv entitled ''Popular Government," and the 
 Eev. W. Scott, a clergyman in the City and 
 editor of The Christian Rememhrancer, In the 
 course of the ten years which in 1865 had 
 elapsed since the Saturday's first appearance, the 
 dimensions of the journal had grown greatly, and 
 a host of writers, most of them very occasional 
 ones, had gathered round it. It was then, as it 
 may, for all I know, be now, the practice of the 
 proprietors of The Saturday Review, Mr. Beresford 
 Hope and Mr. Douglas Cook, to entertain their 
 contributors — the word, as I have always under- 
 stood, including any one who had written for the 
 periodical during the past year — at the *' Trafalgar" 
 or the "Ship Tavern," at Greenwich. The only 
 one of these banquets I ever attended — I certainly 
 did not write more than two or three articles for 
 TJie Saturday Revieiv — was in 1866, when more 
 than one hundred gentlemen of all sorts and 
 conditions, college dons, country parsons, barristers, 
 
I.] A PERSONAL BETBOSPEOT. 5 
 
 professors, soldiers and doctors sat down under 
 the presidency of the sociable, yet choleric, Douglas 
 Cook — surely the oddest, most irascible as well 
 as shrewdest and canniest of Aberdonians who 
 ever filled an editorial chair. He had chambers in 
 the Albany, where on every Tuesday he saw his 
 more favoured and regular contributors. He had 
 also a little house, which he subsequently much 
 enlarged, at Tintagel in Cornwall. He was a great 
 gourmet, and was supplied with the most succulent 
 treasures of the deep by the staff of fishermen 
 whom he maintained in the far west. He had a 
 real love for his Cornish home, and his hospitalities 
 were exercised in it on a princely scale. In a 
 slope of Tintagel Churchyard, facing the Atlantic, 
 his body lies buried. The contents of his cellar, 
 which was remarkably well stocked, he left to his 
 scholarly friend, the clergyman of Tintagel, the Kev. 
 W. Vinsman, and his house itself to Lady Hayter, 
 the daughter of the late Adrian Hope, and now 
 kaown as one of the chief hostesses in London of 
 the Liberal party. 
 
 Journalism in 1865, and for some years after- 
 ward, differed in toto from the journalism of to-day. 
 Telegraphic enterprise was almost in its infancy. 
 The machines which now throw oft' tens of 
 thousands of copies an hour, and which enable 
 the London papers to go to press at four 
 or five o'clock in the morning, with the 
 certainty that they will appear on the breakfast 
 
6 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [i. 
 
 tables, or at the latest the luncheon tables of 
 the provinces, were unknown. As a consequence, 
 the despatches of special correspondents in the 
 European capitals, instead of being hurriedly wired 
 at the eleventh hour, were communicated in the 
 shape of written letters, and if they did not 
 record, as they record now, the impressions of the 
 instant, were more trustworthy, since they were com- 
 posed with greater deliberation, and, perhaps, even 
 more instructive, than can be the case under a 
 regime of universal electricity. In the same way, 
 the leadiDg articles, written under different circum- 
 stances, were written also upon different principles. 
 To-day, during the parliamentary session, the edi- 
 torials of the London journals are often little more 
 than resumes of Parliamentary discussions, of official 
 papers, or of despatches flashed by the electric wire 
 from *' our own " or *' our special correspondent " 
 in some remote corner of the earth. The great 
 thing is to present articles " newsy " and fresh to the 
 public; to supply the readers, it may be, with argu- 
 ments, but to supply them with facts as well, and 
 make it clear that they have been written at the 
 very latest moment, and with all the advantages of 
 the freshest intelligence. 
 
 The first journalist of distinction with whom, 
 after Douglas Cook — and Cook I knew better as a 
 friend than an editor — I had anything to do, was 
 Thornton Hunt, a son of Leigh Hunt, and the 
 assistant editor at The Daily Telegraph office, a 
 
I.] A PERSONAL UBTROSFEGT. 7 
 
 bright, courteous gentleman somewhat past middle 
 age, and reminding me very forcibly of the portraits 
 of Edgar Allan Poe. Tom Hood, now long since 
 dead and gone, had given me an introduction to 
 Mr. Edward Lawson, the editor as well as part 
 proprietor of The Daily Telegraphy and Mr. Lawson 
 had referred me to Mr. Hunt. At this time, 
 Thornton Hunt, on whose domestic complications 
 with George Henry Lewes I need not dwell, was 
 living in Euston Square. It was there that I met 
 at dinner a young Scotchman, as he was in those 
 days, now dead also, whom The Daily Telegraph 
 had attracted to London from the office of The 
 Scotsman in Edinburgh, edited by Mr. Alexander 
 Russel, a name that is never likely to be forgotten 
 on the other side of the Tweed, so long as Scotch 
 journalism and Scotch salmon-fishing, of which he 
 was an ardent devotee, endure. London journalism 
 has boasted very few, if any, more brilliant ornaments 
 or more capable writers than James Macdonald. He 
 had received a thorough training in his profession 
 not only at Edinburgh, but at Newcastle-on-Tyne, 
 before he came about 1865 to London. Like 
 most Scotchmen, he had a marvellous head for 
 philosophy and theology, but, unlike most Scotchmen, 
 and as a happy consequence of an innate literary 
 faculty nourished and formed by careful study of 
 the great masters of French publicism, especially 
 Paul and Jean Courier, he had a singular aptitude 
 for and appreciation of literary style. He was em- 
 
8 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [i. 
 
 ployed in the office of The Daily Telegraph first, 
 I believe, rather as an assistant editor and as a 
 coadjutor of Mr. Thornton Hunt. Afterward, when 
 for several years I was in the habit of meeting him 
 and my old friend, Mr. Justin McCarthy, then 
 a leader writer for The Daily News, at the back of 
 the reporters' gallery in the House of Commons, he 
 had given up all editorial work and was simply a 
 writer of leading articles for the paper. It must 
 have been, I think, in the year 1876 that he severed 
 his connection with The Daily Telegraph and went 
 over to TJie Times. He was, indeed, supposed to 
 have written articles for The Times while he was 
 still connected with The Telegraph. Ten years 
 ago a recrudescence of the war between France and 
 Germany was generally apprehended. The English 
 public was taken by storm one morning by a leader 
 in The Times appealing to Prince Bismarck to avert 
 the struggle. This was attributed, and I have since 
 been told, correctly, to James Macdonald. He died 
 some three or four years later. He was never a 
 strong man. There were times when he looked 
 appallingly ill. Nor can there be any doubt that 
 he was one of the many whom the terrific struggle 
 of daily journalism, pitiless and incessant, brought 
 to an early grave. 
 
 At the time of which I now speak. The Daily 
 Telegraph, with the possible exception of The Times, 
 of the writers for which the outside world, even of 
 journalism, knew little or nothing, possessed the most 
 
I.] A PERSONAL RETROSPECT. 9 
 
 remarkably gifted staff of writers. The destinies of 
 The Tim.es were directed then, as they continued 
 to be during many years subsequently, by Delane, 
 and secrecy was one of the traditions of the office. 
 Certain men, such as Mr. Leonard Courtney, now 
 a Member of Parliament ; Mr. Gr. C. Brodrick, now 
 Warden of Merton College, Oxford ; Mr. Wace, now 
 Principal of King's College, London, from whose pen 
 came, it is understood, all the more important 
 leaders which appeared in The Times during the 
 civil war in America ; Mr. L. J. Jennings, subse- 
 quently editor of The New, York Times, whose 
 extraordinary ability and energy have since enabled 
 him to make a name for himself in English literature; 
 Mr. Charles Austin and several more, were all known 
 in a vague kind of way as connected with The Times, 
 but they made it a point of never discussing their 
 connection of their particular work even in the 
 society of intimates. It was different in the case 
 of The Daily Teleg7'aph, and, doubtless, the other 
 daily London papers. The Times went later to press 
 than any of its contemporaries, and the men who 
 wrote for it were mostly free till 9.30 o'clock at 
 night, when they were expected to be in Printing 
 House Square, or, if they were not free, they associated 
 but little with other journalists. Even the writers 
 on Parliamentary subjects, whose business it naturally 
 was to attend debates, shunned the reporters' gallery 
 and were accommodated with a seat in that quarter 
 of the House reserved for private secretaries, 
 
10 POLITICS AND LBTTBBS. [i. 
 
 officials, and sometimes strangers, in the gallery under 
 the clock. With Mr. Delane I had only a social 
 acquaintance, and that a slight one. Introduced to 
 him in '68 by Bishop Wilberforce, I was invited to 
 lunch with him in the company of that amiable, 
 witty, and entertaining prelate, at^ what he used to 
 call his dingy little house in Serjeants' Inn, Fleet 
 Street. The general elections were then in progress, 
 and the Archbishop of Canterbury was seriously ill. 
 I shall never forget the twinkle in his eye, and the 
 quiet chuckle in his voice with which, when the 
 Bishop (who had been unusually outspoken in his 
 remarks and severe in his political criticisms) left the 
 room to keep an appointment, Delane said : " I think 
 our right reverend friend has his eyes keenly fixed 
 just now on Lambeth" — Lambeth is the London 
 house of the Primate, and a vacancy in the primacy 
 naturally seemed just then possible. I sat chatting 
 with the great man for an hour after this. I had 
 a vague sort of expectation that he might ask me to 
 join the staff of The Times. But when I told him 
 that I was pretty well occupied as a writer of leading 
 articles for The Standard, he congratulated me on 
 my success, and never held out to me any prospect 
 of promotion to Printing House Square. In those 
 days I was very full of Oxford interests. Probably 
 I talked too much about them, and being then only 
 twenty-four years of age, I believe I looked even 
 younger than I w^as. It always occurred to me that 
 any notion which Delane may have had — assuming 
 
I.] A PERSONAL BETHOSPEGT. H 
 
 that he had any at all — of inviting me for a trial on 
 The Times was dispelled by the juvenility of my 
 appearance, and, perhaps, the academic artlessness of 
 my prattle. In late years I met him frequently. 
 The last time I ever saw him was in his house at 
 Ascot, not many weeks before his death. His brain 
 was then softening rapidly, and he looked melancholy 
 in the extreme. He had ceased for about two years 
 previously to be editor of The Times, and if his 
 friend, Abraham Hayward, was to be trusted, he 
 never got over the curtness with which his retire- 
 ment was forced upon him by Mr. Walter. The 
 letter containing the intimation that his services 
 were no longer required in Printing House Square 
 was shown by Delane to Hayward immediately 
 after he received it. I never saw it myself, but I 
 can trust Hay ward's memory, and my own, and 
 it was almost verbally to this effect : " My dear 
 Delane, — The time has come when it is no longer 
 to your advantage or to that of The Times that 
 you should remain its editor. Your successor will 
 be Mr. Thomas Ghenery, whose talent and capacity 
 for the post we all recognise, and your pension 
 will be £2,000 a year." I have been informed 
 that The Times was worth to Delane during, at 
 any rate, the latter portion of his editorship^ 
 between £4,000 and £5,000 a year. This may seem 
 a^ large income even for a publicist in the incom- 
 parably commanding position of the great Jove of the 
 Thunderer. But it must be remembered that while 
 
12 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [i. 
 
 Delane (who was of a far higher calibre than that 
 of an ordinary Cabinet Minister, and the greatest 
 expert in the interpretation, and sometimes, by 
 four-and-twenty hours, the anticipation of public 
 opinion, a man whom it would not have been 
 flattery to compare to his friend Palmerston) 
 devoted his existence to the journal, he consolidated 
 and created its reputation as the first newspaper 
 in the world, and sacrificed his life for it, dying, 
 ere yet he had touched the threshold of old age, 
 of a disease incurred by his unremitting attention 
 to his work. 
 
 When I first penetrated into the interior of 
 The Standard office, its proprietor, Mr. Johnston, 
 was in the prime of a vigorous middle age, and 
 its editor was a Mr., or as he was sometimes called. 
 Captain Hamber, the son of an old friend of Mr. 
 Johnston. The City editor and manager was 
 Mr. David Morier Evans, and it was the habit 
 of these two gentlemen to see their contributors 
 successively between certain, or perhaps uncertain, 
 hours in the afternoon. Mr. Hamber, who is 
 now the editor of The Morning Advertiser, and 
 whom I regard as one of the best and kindest 
 friends I have ever encountered in journalism, 
 was and is one of the hardiest, pluckiest, 
 toughest, and quickest men who ever trod the 
 pavement of Fleet Street or Shoe Lane. Whether 
 he was intended by nature for a journalist, whether 
 instead of being a captain of the pen he should 
 
I.] A PERSONAL RETR08FECT. 13 
 
 not have been a captain of horse, is possibly doubt- 
 ful, or, as it may be said, not doubtful at all. 
 As journalist, however, he possessed remarkable 
 swiftness of insight, and, when he wrote himself, 
 great power of vigorous and sometimes epigrammatic 
 expression. Educated at Oxford, he had mixed much 
 with politicians, with some of whom he was well ac- 
 quainted. Lord Salisbury, certainly in the year 1866, 
 and I believe a little later, when he was Lord Eobert 
 Cecil, with no thought that he would ever inherit the 
 marquisate of his house, wrote leading articles for the 
 paper. Among the editorial staff were Mr. Alfred 
 Austin, whose connection with the paper has lasted 
 without interruption to this day, who wields a pen 
 unsurpassed for felicity and velocity in the ranks of 
 London journalism, and whose genius has displayed 
 itself in much exquisite and effective poetry as well 
 as in reams on reams of admirable political writing ; 
 Mr. Percy Grey, son of W. Eathbone Grey ; Mr. H. 
 E. Watts ; Mr. Horace St. John, and a certain Mr. 
 George Painter, who first attracted the notice of the 
 Shoe Lane authorities by some anonymous paragraphs 
 in w^hich the high fainting of The Daily Telegraph, 
 called by the parodist the Gaily Beligraph, were 
 parodied, and who, when he became attached to the 
 paper, was told off to deliver himself on the dullest 
 of topics, which he did in the most ponderous of 
 styles ; Mr. Burton Blythe, renowned for his know- 
 ledge of German politics, and Mr. Sydney L. Blanchard, 
 son of Lam an Blanchard. Blanchard, whose great 
 
14 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [i. 
 
 enemy was his almost idiotic vanity, subsisting as it 
 did upon a diet of dismally feeble jokes, is dead. 
 So, I fancy, is St. John ; and Painter, though I trust 
 he is now restored to health, broke down completely 
 some years ago. The Standard went through 
 many mutations before it settled into its present 
 splendidly triumphant stride. Mr. Hamber's services 
 were abruptly dispensed with about 1872, Mr. 
 Johnston appointing his own son, who, from the 
 accident of his father's proprietorship in Shoe Lane, 
 was imagined, I suppose, to have contracted some 
 soupgon of journalistic knowledge, as editor, his 
 technical address being Mr. Blythe, who subsequently 
 assumed the full or a qualified editorial responsibility. 
 The arrangement did not work, and when he could 
 no longer disguise from himself the fact that it 
 was a failure, astute Mr. Johnston took the boldest, 
 the most perspicacious, and the cleverest step he 
 ever took in his life. He ofi'ered the editorship 
 of his newspaper to a gentleman who was then 
 its manager (charged, that is, with making all the 
 arrangements for the report of speeches and incidents 
 of all descriptions), and who had previously served 
 the paper as a reporter in the gallery of the House 
 of Commons. His name was Mudford, and Mr. 
 Mudford has since raised The Standard to the 
 rank of the first newspaper in England, and one 
 of the best newspaper properties, while he has 
 placed himself at the head of the newspaper editors of 
 the United Kingdom. Practically Mr. Mudford's 
 
I.] A PERSONAL BBTB08PEGT. 15 
 
 position is at the present nearest that of the occupant 
 of a journalistic freehold. Mr. Johnston by his will 
 appointed him editor and manager for life at a 
 handsome salary, while the Court of Chancery 
 subsequently allowed him a share of the profits. 
 For some half-dozen years I served under Mr. 
 Mudford. Indebted to him as I am, and as I am 
 also to every editor and nearly every colleague 
 with whom I have been brought into contact, for 
 much personal kindness and consideration, I speak 
 entirely without bias when I describe in the language 
 I have, his own peculiar and eminent powers and 
 qualifications. The Standard has during its ever 
 increasingly prosperous career confronted occasional 
 opposition. The Day, which lasted for a few weeks 
 or months, was started by the Conservative Adulla- 
 mites, as they were called, who opposed Lord 
 Beaconsfield's Eeform Bill of 1867, and in 1873 
 or thereabouts there was founded The Hour, by 
 Mr. Hamber and Mr. Morier Evans, who had, like 
 his friends, seceded from The Standard. I w\as 
 asked myself to join, on very handsome terms, the 
 new Conservative print, and, feeling that my posi- 
 tion at The Standard office during the provisional 
 period, which I saw clearly was setting in, could not 
 but be precarious and disagreeable, I accepted the offer. 
 The Hour continued with chequered fortunes for 
 sopae three or four years, when it fell a victim to 
 pecuniary embarrassments. These, however, never 
 affected me, and I owe it to my good friends, Hamber 
 
16 POLITICS AND LETTUE8. [i. 
 
 and Evans, to say that from the first week to the last 
 my salary was paid to me with the regularity of 
 clockwork. When The Hour expired, I took ad- 
 vantaofe of the leisure which a short cessation from 
 the grinding labours of daily journalism seemed to 
 oflfer me to complete a project that had long been in 
 my mind. This was a work which should be as 
 nearly as possible exhaustive and accurate on the 
 contemporary condition of my native country. 
 *' England : its People, Polity, and Pursuits " — the 
 alliterative sub-title of which I believe has occasioned 
 some of my irreverent friends matter for parody — was 
 first published a little more than seven years ago. It 
 was the result of much work and observation, and of 
 frequent peregrinations over all parts of the country. 
 I was not satisfied with obtaining from books or in any 
 way second hand, information on the subjects of my 
 inquiry when first-hand knowledge was possible. 
 The book, I hope, has interested and instructed 
 others. To me the writing of it was a kind of 
 education. It gave me a touch of the opinion of 
 whole classes of my countrymen of whom I had 
 previously been in ignorance. It also made me many 
 acquaintances, and, I hope, friends, especially among 
 the industrial orders of the population. Altogether, 
 had the commercial success of the work been much 
 less than has actually proved the case, I should still 
 have had good reason not to regret that for six 
 months or a little longer I held entirely aloof from 
 daily newspaper work. 
 
I.] A PERSONAL RETROSPECT. 17 
 
 It has, I suppose, fallen to the lot of few men 
 being so little acquainted with London at the be- 
 ginning of their metropolitan career as I was in 
 1865 to have seen so much of it since, to have 
 formed from practical experience so full an idea 
 of most, or of very many, of its aspects, and to 
 have stayed in it so continuously and with such 
 little change. From 1868 to 1878 I was only 
 absent from London — not, of course, counting an 
 occasional " Sunday out " — twice for ten days and 
 once for three weeks. I attribute entirely any 
 success which, in journalism or in current literature, 
 I have achieved mainly to the tenacity with whicli 
 throughout this strenuous decade I stuck to my 
 work, the amount of work I was able to do 
 passably well, and the uniformly good health with 
 which I was blessed. I had, moreover, other occu- 
 pations than those which were not purely literary. 
 For some years I was Professor of Logic at King's 
 College, London, and during the greater portion of one 
 year acted as the deputy of my friend, Mr. Lonsdale, 
 then invalided, Vice-Professor of Greek and Latin. 
 It was not till 1878 — not, that is to say, before 
 thirteen years of sustained industry had come to a 
 close — that I felt at all sure of my position, or that I 
 was conscious of the conviction that I had been 
 justified at a period considerably anterior to this in 
 flinging aside all academic or educational props and 
 trusting entirely to my pen. 
 ^ When, in 1865, I settled in a London lodging, 
 
 
 
18 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [i. 
 
 my only personal acquaintance among literary men 
 was the late Tom Hood. To Mr. Masson, to Mr. 
 Macmillan, and to an eminent educationalist, a Dr. 
 W. B. Hodgson, living at that time in a pretty house 
 in St. John's Wood, I had received letters of intro- 
 duction from my friend and private tutor at Oxford, 
 Professor John Nichol. 
 
 Tom Hood I had known, as schoolboys say, " at 
 home." He had been my senior at Oxford by rather 
 less than a decade, and had left behind him a 
 brilliant reputation. To me he was the first 
 friend in literature whom I possessed, and 
 though toward the close of his life I saw little 
 of him, and I fancied, I know not for what 
 reason, his cordiality had worn off, I shall 
 always cherish his memory with gratitude and 
 affection. Hood's house in South Street, Brompton, 
 was, at the time of which I write, a pleasant little 
 centre of literary and dramatic Bohemianism. He 
 was editor of Fim, and he had gathered round himself 
 a remarkably bright band of personal friends and con- 
 tributors, the two terms being in almost every instance 
 identical. 
 
 Chief among these were Arthur Sketchley, whose 
 real name was George Rose, then giving his delinea- 
 tions of Mrs. Brown, who, I understand, never quite 
 took the fancy of the Americans, at the Egyptian 
 Hall ; Tom Robertson, the dramatist, author of 
 '' Society,'' '' Ours," " Caste," " School," " Play," and 
 many other performed and unperformed comedies ; 
 
I.] A PERSONAL BETB08PEGT. 10 
 
 W. J. Prowse, H. S. Leigh, Paul Gray, Tom Morten, 
 William Brunton, W. S. Gilbert, and Clement Scott. 
 Most of these have long since followed poor Tom 
 Hood and his wife into the land of shadows, 
 Sketchley, educated at Oxford, and a contemporary 
 of Delane and Dasent, was originally a clergyman 
 of the English Church. When he went over to 
 Eome he was supposed to have allied himself with 
 the Jesuits, and, be this as it may, he was a zealous 
 proselytiser. Inordinately stout in body, he had a 
 remarkably fine and handsome face, and was ac- 
 counted, I believe, an excellent impersonator of 
 Falstaff on the amateur stage. His two chief 
 friends at that era, and the most indefatigable of 
 Tom Hood's guests at his Friday evenings — evenings 
 of unconstrained fun and unaffected sociality, free 
 from all pretence, the only repast served at which 
 was a joint of cold beef, flanked by hot roast 
 potatoes — were Clement Scott and Paul Gray, both of 
 them, like Sketchley, Catholics, and the former well 
 known to-day as a journalist, dramatic critic, play- 
 wright, essayist, and poet of unprecedented fecundity 
 and grace. 
 
 Tom Eobertson, dead — as, too, are Brunton, 
 Morten, Sketchley, Prowse, Leigh, the three 
 Broughs, Eobert, John, and William, only the two 
 latter of whom were personally known to me from 
 meeting them at the Savage Club, Eobert Brough 
 having passed away before my time — was just about 
 to make, his first hit on any stage with " Society." 
 
 c 2 " 
 
20 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [i. 
 
 I was present, and so, I suppose, were all his personal 
 friends, at its inaugural performance. The curtain 
 had not been up ^yq minutes when it was plain 
 that the piquant and most artistic acting of Marie 
 Wilton, Mr. Hare, and the rest of the company 
 had ensured its triumph. There were some solecisms 
 in the piece, such, for instance, as the meeting 
 between the young patrician maiden and her lover 
 after dark in the garden of a London square. 
 There was also a great deal of genial and laughter- 
 moving satire. If the children of fashion were lashed 
 in some parts, so was Bohemianism also ; and the 
 scene in the Sly- by-Nights Club, in which one 
 gentleman of the society, asking another for a loan 
 of five shillings, received the answer : *' I have not got 
 it myself, my dear boy, but I will get it for you " — 
 the same request and the same reply being passed on 
 to every one in the room — was recognised by those 
 who knew the original as true to the life. A greater 
 air of actuality was further imparted to the incident 
 by a resemblance which two or three of the stage club 
 men bore to actual and living prototypes, notably to 
 Mr. Buckingham, the dramatic critic of The Morning 
 Star and son of Silk Buckingham, and to Mr. Horace 
 Green, each of them an habitue of a literary and 
 theatrical club facing the Thames at the bottom of 
 Salisbury Street, Strand, the Arundel. Tom Eobertson 
 really shone in conversation. He was full of sardonic 
 humour, of biting satire, of ironic badinage, and of 
 paradox which not unfrequently bordered on pro- 
 
I.] A PEB80NAL BETROSPECT. 21 
 
 fanity. Although he was then, as the result proved, 
 in a fair way to make his mark, he had passed through 
 a terrible probationary ordeal of failure. He in- 
 demnified himself for all that he had suffered by 
 making fun of the most mordant sort upon all 
 persons, upon all institutions, human and divine 
 His manner was bright and breezy, although a little 
 boisterous, and he delighted in running a tilt at the 
 conventionalities of the respectable as flimsy hypo- 
 crisies. In doing this he did but reflect, if in an 
 accentuated shape, the temper of those about him. 
 
 To-day the Prince of Wales, accompanied by an 
 equerry, dines with and is an honorary member or 
 president of the Savage Club. Twenty years ago, 
 when that society used to hold its Saturday dinners 
 in a long low room in Radley's Hotel, Henrietta 
 Street, Covent Garden, looking out on Maiden Lane, 
 the Savages would have been not more incredulous 
 or cynically contemptuous if they had been told that 
 the Heir Apparent would shortly be of their company, 
 than if the Archbishop of Canterbury had taken it 
 into his head to stroll in, supported by Mr. Paul 
 Bedford and Mr. J. L. Toole. Mr. Prowse (Jeff 
 Prowse, as he was known among his friends) wrote 
 the most charming articles on all matters non- 
 political for The Daily Telegraph, He was a humorist 
 of a very fine order, and his conception of Nicholas, 
 who was quite as real a personage to all readers of 
 iF'un, was equal in its way to the Jeames De la Plush 
 or the Mr. Snob of Thackeray. Had he lived, he 
 
22 POLITICS AND LETTEBS. [i. 
 
 might, and doubtless would, have touched the very 
 highest level of excellence in the lighter department 
 of English literature. To an uncommon gift of pathos 
 and taste, he added a fastidious appreciation of style. 
 His imagination was nimble and his metaphors apt. 
 But the life of London told upon his health. His 
 lungs gave way, and he was compelled to betake 
 himself to Nice, where eventually they laid him to 
 rest, at the age of thirty-three, under the orange and 
 palm trees of the Kiviera. He himself had shrewdly 
 prognosticated his coming end in some touching and 
 exquisite lines, which he had written four years 
 earlier, entitled, ''My Lost Old Age :" 
 
 I'm only nine-antl-twenty yet, 
 
 Though young experience makes me sage, ,^ 
 So how on earth can I forget 
 
 The memory of my lost old age 1 
 
 Of manhood's prime let others boast, 
 It comes too quick or goes too soon ; 
 
 At times the life I envy most 
 Is that of slippered pantaloon. 
 
 H. L. Leigh, who wrote not a few ballads equal 
 in merit to any of Frederick Locker, survived his 
 friend Prowse some ten years, and with him there 
 may be said to have departed the last of the 
 highly-gifted Bohemians of London. 
 
 Leigh's muse was really exquisite. His existence 
 slipped away between his chambers in Furnival's Inn, 
 the Savage Club, and a few chosen taverns and 
 restaurants. There is, I imagine, very little of the 
 
1.] A PERSONAL BETBOSPEGT. 23 
 
 Bohemianism of which Leigh was the representative 
 in London to-day. Had Tom Robertson been alive 
 he would have been not only famous but wealthy, 
 and might be living in the same splendour as Mr. 
 W. S. Gilbert enjoys to-day in South Kensington. 
 Gilbert, when I first knew him, was writing his 
 ^*Bab Ballads," and was essaying to take his first 
 flight as a dramatist. He was a man of reserved 
 and rather rugged manner, of biting and saturnine 
 wit, saying the oddest things, and making the most 
 bizarre of comparisons, in a rasping tone of voice. 
 His first piece, I believe, was played upon a London 
 stage as a burlesque, entitled " Dr. Dulcamara." It 
 was produced at the St. James's Theatre, and it 
 followed "Hunted Down," in which Henry Irving 
 was making his dSbut in the ;iietropolis, playing 
 admirably the part of the villain, with Miss Herbert 
 as his wife. It must have been in the year 1866 
 that I was introduced to Irving, who, I recollect, was 
 seated, as I entered the room, together with Gilbert, 
 on a couch in the Arundel Club — then one of the 
 favourite haunts of journalists, essayists, playwrights, 
 and playactors. It is a fascinating theme, that of 
 the literary Bohemianism of London twenty years 
 ago. Artemus Ward, who had no sooner taken up 
 his dwelling in the metropolis than he was made a 
 member of the Savage Club, saw it, enjoyed it, and 
 was highly popular in it. Sala had passed through 
 it, and he was not at the time I speak of a prominent 
 member of it. He was too busy, and above all 
 
2t POLITICS AND lETTEnS. [i. 
 
 things too constantly absent from London as the 
 Special Correspondent of The Daily Telegraph in 
 foreign parts. He used to turn up unexpectedly 
 sometimes at the Savage Club, more frequently in 
 the cafe portion of the old supper room at Evans's, 
 now transformed into the New Club. His conver- 
 sation was always full of brilliancy and knowledge, 
 and what must have struck every one most in 
 listening to him was the extraordinary flush of 
 animal spirits which he possessed. This he had in 
 common with Dickens and the great majority of 
 those who belonged to the school of Dickens. Of 
 the author of "David Copperfield " I can say little 
 more than vidi tantum. 1 was introduced to him 
 by my friend of now nearly twenty years' standing, 
 Edmund Yates, about the time that Dickens had 
 met Lord Beaconsfield, then Mr. Disraeli, at Lord 
 Stanhope's at dinner. Dickens was much attracted 
 by the Conservative statesman. "Had," he remarked 
 regretfully — not in my presence, the story is Mr. 
 Yates' — "Disraeli devoted himself to literature, he 
 might have done something. What on earth can 
 have made him throw himself away on politics ? " 
 Andrew Halliday was another prominent figure of 
 the group of which I now speak, a canny Aber- 
 donian who was occupied with the writing of essays 
 for Dickens's All the Year Round, and with the 
 adaptation of Sir Walter Scott's plays for the stage, 
 which he found exceedingly profitable. He had com- 
 menced his career in commerce, and had acquired in 
 
I.] A PERSONAL BETBOSPECT. 25 
 
 it habits of business which stood him in excellent 
 stead in after life. 
 
 Occasionally these convivial gatherings were 
 visited by James Hannay and his henchmen. Han- 
 nay was an extraordinary talker, with a good deal 
 of literary, antiquarian, and classical knowledge, very 
 loose and inaccurate in his statements, sometimes ex- 
 ceedingly epigrammatic, and always, when his humour 
 was exuberantly social, audacious in his criticisms on 
 the company to the point of impudence and even 
 insolence. It was the great object in Hannay's life 
 to revive in London the patrician and the feudal 
 ideas which he had derived from Sir Walter Scott 
 and the bibulous traditions of the "Noctes Ambro- 
 sianse." In the intellect of very few men can it be 
 said that the associations of conviviality played 
 so large a part. One of his first books was entitled 
 "Biscuits and Grog," and the best copy of light 
 verses which he ever wrote was called '^ Nothing Like 
 Hock." I have omitted two names, without some 
 mention of which the most hurried glance at the 
 literary life of London a couple of decades, or even 
 a decade ago, would be grievously incomplete. These 
 were John Oxen ford and J. W. Davidson, the dramatic 
 and musical critics of The Times respectively. Both 
 men were exceedingly well informed on all subjects, 
 acute reasoners, powerful conversational controver- 
 sialists. When the labours of play-going or opera- 
 going were past they would meet over a friendly 
 supper and not stinted potations at the ''Albion 
 
26 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [i. 
 
 Tavern." Fate, freewill, foreknowledge, the origin 
 of evil, the existence of a Deity — these were 
 the topics which they were never weary of debating. 
 I remember as if it were yesterday the air of triumph 
 with which Davidson rose after one of these polemical 
 encounters, and remarked to his friend, ** And now, 
 Oxenford, having brought your cosmic God to his 
 last ethical fence, I shall go to bed." 
 
 It has also been my lot to mix with what are 
 called literary circles of a very diflferent character, 
 and upon quite another social level. I first made 
 my bow to George Eliot at one of the Sunday recep- 
 tions she was in the habit of giving at her house in 
 North Bank, now inhabited by Mr. Wilson Barrett, 
 the actor. She was then Mrs. Lewes, and the late 
 G. H. Lewes was alive. The function was more like 
 a religious ceremonial than a social reunion, and Mr. 
 Lewes played to perfection the part of Hierophant. 
 The gifted lady, whose autobiography we have all 
 recently devoured, sat in the centre of a little 
 crowd of worshippers, of whom some were per- 
 mitted to hold personal converse with her. But 
 the majority gazed at her reverently and mutely 
 from afar, as if they were looking upon the beatific 
 vision. If any one spoke in too loud a tone, 
 or spoke at all, when George Eliot happened to be 
 speaking herself, he was at once met with a " hush " 
 of reprehension by Mr. Lewes, and made to feel 
 that he had perpetrated a sort of iniquity. George 
 Eliot had unquestionably immeasurable charm of 
 
I.] A PERSONAL RETROSPECT. 27 
 
 mind, manner, and conversation for those who knew 
 her well. But as in these desultory reminiscences I 
 record nothing of which I had not personal cognisance 
 myself, I must say that I never advanced beyond the 
 outer circle of worshippers, and that I always felt 
 myself one of the Levites at the gate. The poet, 
 Browning, assisted frequently at the intellectual mys- 
 teries of North Bank, and it was in that august 
 atmosphere that I first set my eyes upon one of the 
 finest heads I have ever seen, and the handsome 
 presence, incorporating, perhaps, the most penetrat- 
 ing, powerful, and sympathetic intellect, of our day. 
 Browning remained on terms of the most intimate 
 friendship with Mrs. Lewes, to the last — after, that 
 is, she became Mrs. Cross. There were several other 
 houses where, at this time, the literati of the period 
 of both sexes were in the habit of congregating. At 
 Mr. Grant Dufi'^s country house, whether in Bucking- 
 hamshire or subsequently at Twickenham, at Lord 
 Houghton's breakfasts and dinners, at Thomas and 
 William Longman's, to name only a very few out of a 
 multitude. Grant Dufi''s Saturday to Monday parties 
 were always exceedingly agreeable. Among those 
 whom one most frequently met there were FitzJames 
 Stephen, with his leonine presence and his home-like 
 manner ; George Selwyn, full of literature and poli- 
 tics, enthusiastic, humorous, and capital company; 
 Sir Thomas Erskine May, socially and politically 
 omniscient, and a good talker also ; Sir John Lubbock, 
 who was, as indeed he is, himself the most hospitable 
 
28 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [i. 
 
 of men both in London and at his country house near 
 Hayes, in Kent, High Elms, where for years Darwin 
 was his neighbour and Herbert Spencer and Alfred 
 Kussell Wallace his most frequent visitors. 
 
 Charles Eeade once did me the honour of dining 
 with me (now nearly fifteen years ago) at a club in 
 St. James's Street. He talked incessantly, without 
 quitting the dinner table, till nearly two o'clock in 
 the morning, and very interesting as well as aggres- 
 sively original much of his talk was. I do not 
 suppose I could have met him upon half a dozen 
 other occasions, and one of these, the only one, 
 indeed, I can now remember, was at a garden party 
 given by Mrs. Maxwell — Miss Braddon. Like Wilkie 
 Collins, he went into general society exceedingly 
 little. I have the honour of calling Mr. Collins my 
 friend, but I have only been seated twice at the same 
 dinner table with him, once upon the occasion already 
 mentioned, when I first met Dickens at Edmund 
 Yates's ; next at a little dinner at which I and a few 
 others entertained Edmund Yates some five or six 
 years ago. The late Lord Lytton, being well ac- 
 quainted with many members of my family, took 
 some trouble to be polite to me, and one of my most 
 interesting recollections is a Sunday I passed with 
 him many years ago at Knebworth. 
 
 I cannot help thinking that when I was with him 
 he must have been engaged in writing one of the most 
 perfect of the essays contained in the volume entitled 
 *' Caxtoniana " — ** The Increased Attention to Out- 
 
I.] A PERSONAL liETBOSPEGT. 29 
 
 ward Nature in the Decline of Life.'* In the first 
 place, his manner was that of one rehearsing "Adio- 
 comes/' which he' had either prefaced or was preparing. 
 In the second place, many of the sentiments which 
 this charming composition contains were identical 
 with his remarks to me. His manner impressed me 
 as that of the most abstracted and artificial person, 
 at once the most self-conscious and the most dreamy 
 I have ever seen. As was the man, so were his house 
 and his surroundings, a perfect epitome of picturesque 
 sincerity. Of George Lawrence, the author of " Guy 
 Livingston," and the founder of a school of English 
 novelists, I caught occasional glimpses in the course 
 of his troubled and tempestuous career. Lever I met, 
 and I can remember his conversation, but I did not 
 know him. Whyte-Melville had been good enough 
 to notice me when I was a boy at Oxford, giving me 
 then a piece of advice which I have never forgotten. 
 '^ Ride straight to hounds, say nothing, and all men 
 will speak well of you," and I believe he took a kind 
 interest in my modest career. With Captain Mayne 
 Reid, who was becoming old and even dilapidated 
 when I first settled in London, I have passed many 
 an afternoon and smoked many cigars in a little 
 tavern in Air Street, Regent Street, which, I 
 believe, ceased to exist many years ago. Tavern 
 life was a recognised thing in London, and 
 especially Stone's bar and parlour in Posterham 
 Street, Hay market, were the haunts of men con- 
 nected with literature, art, or law. 
 
30 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [i. 
 
 The great centre of the literary and intellectual 
 life of London in its social aspects then, as now, was, 
 as it is, the Athenaeum Club. Of this institution I 
 have never been, am not, and probably never shall be 
 a member ; but I have been favoured with the friend- 
 ship of some of its greatest ornaments, and at this 
 moment there lies before me a letter in which 
 Abraham Hay ward, who was a kind of despot of the 
 establishment, dominating it with his will and his 
 presence, is good enough to express his regret that I 
 had not the entree to the place, ^' because," he adds, 
 " I have organised a dinner-party for to-night there 
 which you would enjoy.'' Hay ward, on whom I 
 have written at some length elsewhere, was not, as 
 he has been represented, a wit or humorist at all. 
 He was far too earnest to be anything of the kind, 
 and one of his greatest objections to his friend, Bernal 
 Osborne, was that his lively sallies of humour rendered 
 serious conversation impossible. Even of Lord 
 Houghton he once said to me : *^ It is a pity so fine 
 an intellect is so spoiled by whim and paradox." 
 Hay ward liked political argument of the most prac- 
 tical kind. Fond of discussing politics, he never 
 talked about them in the speculative tone of a philo- 
 sopher, but always with something of the responsi- 
 bility of the statesman, and as one who would be 
 prepared, if he were in power, to translate into action 
 the opinions he expressed. One of Hayward's great 
 arts was that of telling a story with entire lucidity, 
 yet in the fewest possible words. No man had a 
 
L] A PERSONAL BETROSPECT. 31 
 
 greater horror of boredom or so successfully avoided 
 inflicting it on his fellow creatures. 
 
 Bernal Osborne, on the other hand, was a wit, a 
 humorist, an anecdotist and a farceur. All he required 
 was a butt, some one who was present for preference, 
 some one who was absent, or some incident in which 
 those of the company might be interested, of necessity. 
 The first time I ever met Osborne was some three-and- 
 twenty years ago in a country house. The post had 
 brought him a letter from, a young lady to whom he 
 was closely related, and this letter proved to be, in the 
 main, a eulogy upon the young gentleman on whom 
 she had set her affections. This Bernal Osborne took 
 as the text for a running commentary of infinite mirth 
 and merriment, which lasted throughout the whole of 
 breakfast, and kept the table in a roar. The man 
 who knew and appreciated and liked Bernal Osborne 
 better than any one else, is my much-respected old 
 friend, A. W. Kinglake, the historian of the Crimean 
 War, who, by his " Eothen," an epoch-making book, 
 if ever there was one, has done more than any man 
 living to exercise a permanent influence on English 
 literature. It was with the help of Mr. Kinglake — 
 though at his express desire I abstained from mention- 
 ing his name — that I wrote in The Fortnightly 
 Revieiv an article on Bernal Osborne, which, I 
 believe, on the whole, gave a fair idea of the man. 
 Kinglake and Froude are probably the two greatest 
 writers of the English language now alive. Certainly, 
 if one adds to these names those of Cardinal New- 
 
32 POLITICS AND LBTTEUS. [i. 
 
 man, John Morley, and Matthew Arnold they are 
 conspicuous amoDg the greatest. Nothing better, or 
 even half so good of its kind, was ever done as 
 ** Eothen." It unconsciously gave Mr. Oliphant a 
 model for imitation in his " Piccadilly," and its 
 lightness of touch and power of graphic illumina- 
 tion in the smallest number of words possible, have 
 powerfully affected all writers of the lighter kind 
 of English since. Mr. Kinglake, I am happy to say, 
 though he must be now within five or six years of 
 fourscore, is hale and well, and, as he ever was, the 
 very ideal of an English gentleman of the most 
 perfect possible breeding. Nothing could be more 
 chivalrous or touching than the attention with which 
 he nursed Abraham Hayward during his last illness. 
 There is one story which Mr. Kinglake is fond of 
 telling, and which he will, I believe, forgive me if I 
 repeat here. In the year '46, Hayward, though a 
 Peelite, remained a member of the Carlton Club. The 
 present Lord Eanelagh, seeing him there one day at 
 luncheon, offered, in a tone intended to be audible, 
 some observations as to the impropriety of Hay ward's 
 continuing in an institution from the political 
 principles of which he had apostatized. Hayward 
 immediately sent him a challenge through Kinglake, 
 and Kinglake informed Lord Eanelagh that he should 
 be dining that evening at the Travellers' Club, and 
 would gladly see any friend of his lordship's between 
 9 and 11. About 10 o'clock Sir William Bagge, 
 a Norfolk squire, was [>,nnounced, and Kinglake 
 
I.] A PERSONAL BETBOSPECT. 33 
 
 received him in a separate room. Sir William may 
 have been dining wisely, but he had been dining 
 well, and his honest face was flushed with the juice of 
 the grape. His manner was jovial, and he began 
 with expressions of hope that the matter might be 
 arranged amicably. He then proceeded to say in the 
 rich voice of vinous good fellowship : " You know, 
 Mr. Kinglake, I am one of those who contend that 
 Eanelagh is a gentleman." At this sentiment Mr. 
 Kinglake bowed stiffly, and remarked in his iciest 
 tones : " That I assume. In fact, the business in 
 hand rather implies it." In a moment the colour 
 fled from the rubicund cheeks of the jolly country 
 baronet, and he became white as a sheet. " I had," 
 says Mr. Kinglake, ^^ frozen him sober, and this is the 
 only little piece of acting in my life I ever attempted." 
 I have alluded to the literary influence of such a 
 book as " Eothen," and I think, as I have said, this 
 influence is reflected more or less in the lighter 
 periodical writing of our time. This was conspicu- 
 ously the case in what was, I suppose, the parent, or 
 at least the herald, of the so-called Society journals of 
 these latter days. The Oivl was started some five- 
 and-twenty years ago, mainly by Mr. Lawrence 
 Oliphant and Sir Algernon Borth wick, now the editor- 
 in-chief as well as proprietor of The Morning Post, 
 and the doyen of London journalism. Many other 
 writers, not the least among them Mr. T. Gibson 
 Bowles, there were. The journal appeared fitfully 
 during the parliamentary session, and, in addition to 
 
34 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [i. 
 
 much early and exclusive information about politics 
 and diplomacy, published some capitally written 
 little essays, admirable verses, and first-rate jetix 
 d'esprit. The enterprise was profitable, though it 
 was not started for purposes of profit, and it 
 was arranged that anything which stood to the 
 credit of the contributors to The Oivl, after all busi- 
 ness expenses had been paid, should be devoted to the 
 ends of pleasure. As a consequence, many amusing 
 Oivl dinners and symposia were held. The paper 
 continued till absence, other occupations, and the 
 disintegrating influences of life generally practically 
 broke up the staff". The next paper of the same sort 
 which appeared was the IbmaAat/;^, under the editor- 
 ship of Mr. Arthur A'Beckett. It was something 
 between Punch and The Owl, but dealt with certain 
 events of the day in a caustic and severe way peculiar 
 to itself. Its great feature was an exceedingly sen- 
 sational cartoon drawn by Mat Morgan. The writers 
 for this little print, in addition to Mr. A'Beckett, 
 were Mr. Gilbert A'Beckett, Mark Marshall, Mr. 
 T. G. Bowles, Mr. Alfred Thomson, and one or two 
 more. Gradually The Tomahawk went the way of all 
 such ephemeral prints, and then Mr. Bowles floated 
 Vanity Fair. Strange as it may seem, Vanity Fair 
 had been in existence five or six years before another 
 journal, organised upon anything like the same lines, 
 was started. The World, the first number of which 
 appeared in July, 1873, may be described as, in a 
 measure, of Transatlantic origin. That is to say, as 
 
I.] A PERSONAL RETHOSPECT. 35 
 
 my friend Mr. Yates has himself explained in his 
 "Recollections," it was the circumstance, beginning 
 with his jimerican trip, that he had acquired leisure 
 for reflection, which caused him to map out the whole 
 scheme of the *' journal for men and women." Long 
 before this Mr. Yates had written a w^eekly article, 
 summing up the social events of the past seven days, 
 full of shrewdness and remarkable for its antithetical 
 felicity of expression, in The Morning Star, entitled 
 " The Gleaner." The World w^as really in its incep- 
 tion, as it has been in its continuation, a blend 
 between the brightest features of The Saturday 
 Revieio in its old days and the series of brilliant, 
 social, and more or less personal jottings which 
 appeared from the pen of Mr. Edmund Yates, I know^ 
 not for how long, in The Morning Star. When he 
 projected the paper he was good enough to invite my 
 collaboration, chiefly or exclusively as a political 
 writer. It was gratifying to me to discover that he 
 had been so favourably impressed with a few com- 
 positions of mine which had appeared under his 
 editorship in Temple Bar. I gratefully accepted his 
 proposal, and I hope I have never given him reason 
 to regret that it was made. So far as I am aware. 
 The World is solely indebted for the large success it 
 has achieved to the brightness, the originality, and 
 the organising and administrative skill of its editor 
 and proprietor. 
 
 Since this journal first shot above the literary 
 horizon of London it has provoked many imitations. 
 
 D 2 
 
36 POLITICS AND LETTERS. ' [i. 
 
 It inaugurated, if the word be not too pretentious, an 
 era. Of many of these imitations I am ignorant even 
 of the name. The most prosperous of The World's 
 rivals is Mr. Labouchere's TrutL Only a man of Mr. 
 Labouchere's brilliance, versatility, and power could 
 have done what his opportunities have enabled him 
 to accomplish. One of the results brought about by 
 The World and Truth is the depression of the 
 influence and the popularity of The Saturday 
 Review. The Spectator has probably not felt 
 the competition at all, but that is because The 
 Spectator, unlike The Saturday Review, has been 
 able to command and retain a special public of its 
 own, as over and above, of course, a considerable 
 section of the general public. 
 
 It is not an easy thing for a person in my posi- 
 tion to say much of the distinguished public men who 
 have honoured him with their acquaintance. I well 
 recollect some years ago being a guest at a house 
 where Lord Beacon sfield and Lord Granville were of 
 the company. The latter, who was then leader of 
 the Opposition in the House of Lords, asked the 
 former, who was Prime Minister, what he thought of 
 Delane. ^' I think," replied Lord Beaconsfield, affect- 
 ing to hesitate for a moment, ''I would sooner 
 answer that question when Delane is dead." A mere 
 publicist has no title to pronounce an estimate of 
 public men into whose company he may chance to 
 have been thrown, whether they are alive or dead, 
 for the simple reason that it is, in the nature of 
 
i] A PERSONAL BETBOSPEOT. 37 
 
 things, impossible he should ever have acquired 
 much real insight into their character, while, if he 
 is bold enough to think that he possesses such 
 insight, he will be very rash or very foolish if he 
 does not keep it to himself. Circumstances have 
 caused me to be more or less, though always super- 
 ficially, acquainted with some of the chief person- 
 ages who have manufactured the history of this 
 generation. 
 
 Almost, I believe quite, my earliest recollection 
 is that of seeing the great Duke of Wellington, Sir 
 Kobert Peel, and Lord Lyndhurst walking on the 
 bowling-green of my uncle's house in West Somerset- 
 shire on a Sunday afternoon. I was not more than 
 five years old at the time, but I can remember that 
 the Duke suggested a game of bowds. Sir Eobert 
 Peel said : '' But it is Sunday ; think of the servants." 
 Lord Lyndhurst laughed, and my uncle told the ser- 
 vant to bring the bowls. The game, notwithstanding 
 that it was the Sabbath, was played. A little after 
 this I was taken by the same relative to the House of 
 Commons, and heard Sir Robert Peel make either his 
 last speech or his last speech but one. When my uncle 
 drove me back to his house in John Street, Mayfair, 
 I can recollect his asking the servant, who opened 
 the door, whether any one was waiting for him. The 
 reply was : '' Only the Prince," and the prince to 
 whom I was presently presented w^as Louis Napoleon, 
 shortly to be Napoleon IIL, Emperor of the French. 
 It must have been in the year '62, when the Second 
 
38 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [i. 
 
 Empire was at the height of its glory, that, being then 
 an undergraduate at Oxford, I paid my first visit to 
 Paris. With the boundless assurance of extreme 
 youth, I sent a note to his Imperial Majesty at the 
 Tuileries, intimating that I was in the capital of his 
 empire. When I returned that afternoon to my 
 hotel, I found that one of the Imperial carriages 
 was waiting to convey me and my luggage to the 
 palace. 
 
 Having during the last twenty years been com- 
 paratively little abroad, I have known or seen very 
 few European statesmen of eminence. With Gam- 
 betta, thanks to the introduction of Sir Charles Dilke, 
 I was acquainted for three or four years, and was in 
 the habit of seeing him once or twice a year. He 
 was so good as to authorise me to publish in the first 
 number of The Fortnightly Review for which I was 
 responsible (November, 1882), an account of his 
 views on French and European affairs. The article 
 w^as not actually written by him, but was dictated by 
 him to one of his secretaries. It was untouched by 
 any further hand, and, such as it is, possesses, I 
 believe, even at this day a historical value. Of Lord 
 Beaconsfield I had next to no personal knowledge ; 
 but he was so kind as to ask me once to see him at 
 Hughenden, and he showed me, with much thoughtful 
 attention, round its exceedingly picturesque gardens. 
 He was particularly proud of some beautiful speci- 
 mens of the birds sacred to Juno, and, on my 
 venturing to remark to him that these w^ere calculated 
 
I.] A PERSONAL RETB08PEGT. 39 
 
 to interfere with his flowers, he said : *' It may be 
 so; but I prefer the peacock to a flower." This 
 saying of his is an interesting commentary on the 
 culture of the primrose which has been recently 
 established in Lord Beaconsfield's honour. 
 
 Though I could add much to these disjointed 
 reminiscences of interesting and illustrious persons, 1 
 will for the present bring them to a conclusion. The 
 retrospect I have taken covers not perhaps a long, 
 but certainly an eventful period. Within its limits 
 there has been witnessed an entire revolution in the 
 status and opportunities of journalism. On the one 
 hand, journalism has, as a profession in England, become 
 more organised than at any previous period. On the 
 other hand, the enormous number of those who write — > 
 and write, if not excellently, yet passably well — in 
 newspapers has so increased that journalism is to-day, 
 to an extent it never was before, the occupation or the 
 pastime of the educated classes generally. There is 
 probably no calling in the world which is at once so 
 tempting to a man of mediocre abilities, and yet in 
 which mediocrity will so surely fail to make any 
 mark. There is none either in which the general 
 average of mind is so high. Yet anything above this 
 standard is unusual, and it thus follows that jour- 
 nalism is and will continue to be more of a career to 
 those possessing exceptional capacities than any other* 
 Thus much is certain. The really good political 
 writer of knowledge and power, if he devotes him- 
 self heart and soul to newspapers, if he does not form 
 
40 POLlTWS AND LETTERS. [i. 
 
 too high an estimate of the rewards that await him, 
 may have no reason to regret his selection of jour- 
 nalism as a pursuit. If, however, he does not possess 
 these attributes, he will do well to reflect seriously 
 before he essays to make a living by contributing to 
 the periodical press of Great Britain. What is true 
 of Great Britain and London is true, for all I know 
 to the contrary, of every other capital and country 
 in the world. 
 
II. 
 MR. GLADSTONE.-'^ 
 
 The place which will ultimately be assigned to Mr. 
 Gladstone in the ranks of English statesmen can only 
 be fixed by one who is prophet as well as critic. At 
 the present moment he is seen by opponents, and even 
 by friends, through so disturbing a medium of pre- 
 judice and partiality; he is presented to the public 
 by those who pass judgment upon him, in so grotesque 
 and inconsistent a variety of aspects and disguises ; he 
 is to such an extent the victim of contradictory and 
 antagonistic superlatives ; above all, the exact quah't}^ 
 of his influence upon the course of events, and the 
 members of his party, is so difficult to define ; the 
 results, in some cases even the tendencies, of his states- 
 manship are so incalculable — that only the very rash, 
 foolish and ignorant would presume to anticipate the 
 verdict of posterity on the Liberal leader. 
 
 It is a task, at once less perilous and more profit- 
 able, to measure and classify the attributes by which 
 he has acquired the position he now holds ; to sum- 
 marise a few of the idiosyncrasies of a man who is 
 * Reprinted from The Fortnightly Review for I^oveiiiber, 1884. 
 
42 POLITICS AND LETTERS, [ii. 
 
 admitted by his bitterest detractors and enemies to be 
 a commanding force in the political life of England ; 
 to define some respects in which he differs from the 
 most distinguished of his contemporaries, and some 
 peculiarities which, in his seventy-sixth year, have 
 accompanied the successive stages of his political 
 development. 
 
 Fifty-two years ago, Mr. Gladstone entered Par- 
 liament as Tory member for Newark. Since then he 
 has travelled the whole distance which separates the 
 early Toryism of Sir Eobert Peel from the Liberalism 
 of Cobden and Bright, and far more than the distance 
 which separated Sir Eobert Peel's Protectionism from 
 his conversion to Free Trade. The contrast between 
 Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Gladstone, and between Mr. 
 Gladstone and Mr. Bright, is striking. The changes of 
 opinion undergone by Sir Eobert Peel are surpassed in 
 the changes illustrated in the career of Mr. Gladstone. 
 But in the case of Mr. Gladstone they have been ac- 
 complished far more gradually and laboriously than 
 in the case of Sir Eobert Peel. During the debates 
 on the Irish Church Act, the severest reproach which 
 Mr. Disraeli could bring against the author of the 
 measure was that he had formerly been a champion 
 of the Protestant Establishment in Ireland, and that 
 he had spoken in its favour when an undergraduate 
 at Oxford. Neither Mr. Disraeli nor any one else 
 could taunt Mr. Gladstone with having, like Peel, 
 been returned to power to give effect to one policy 
 and then espousing and executing another. 
 
II.] MB. GLADSTONE, 43 
 
 To say this is not to bring any charge against the 
 memory of one of the greatest Ministers of the century, 
 and, according to Lord George Bentinck's biographer, 
 ''the greatest Member of Parliament who ever lived." 
 Peel's hand was forced by famine. The arguments 
 with which imminent pestilence, bred of starvation, 
 and the murmurs of approaching revolution supplied 
 him, were unanswerable. He would have been no 
 true patriot or statesman if he had held out against 
 them. But though the desertion of his principles was 
 prescribed by a destiny whose decrees he could not 
 withstand, the fact of their unexpectedly sudden 
 desertion remains. 
 
 If Mr. Gladstone's position has been established 
 on the ruins of his old beliefs ; if he destroyed that 
 Irish Church of which he was once the enthusiastic 
 advocate ; if, in other fields of legislation, he has led 
 his followers to the attack of strongholds wliich he once 
 defended — it has been after due notice and upon clear 
 and unambiguous pretences. In '' A Chapter of Auto- 
 biography" he has demonstrated the processes by which 
 he arrived at the conclusion that the Established 
 Church in Ireland, which he had formerly held recon- 
 cilable with civil and national justice, could not be 
 perpetuated without gross injustice. His original 
 case, he says, was that " the Church of Ireland must 
 be maintained for the benefit of the whole people of 
 Ireland, and must be maintained as the truth, or it 
 cannot be maintained at all." The latter condition 
 was violated by the Maynooth grant ; the former was 
 
U POLITIGS AND LETTERS. [ii. 
 
 disposed of by existing facts. " I never held/' writes 
 Mr. Gladstone in this chapter, '' that a National 
 Church should be permanently maintained except for 
 the nation. I mean either for the whole of it, or at 
 least for the greater part, with some liind of real 
 concurrence or general acquiescence from the 
 remainder."^'' 
 
 This language explains how it was that in the 
 spring of 1868, in the debate on Mr. Maguire's 
 motion, Mr. Gladstone first declared that ''for the 
 settlement of the Irish Church, that Church as a State 
 Church must cease to exist." Mr. Disraeli's comment 
 was that "the right honourable gentleman had come 
 upon them all of a sudden like a thief in the night." 
 But this suddenness — and it w^as naturally exagge- 
 rated by the Tory leader — was an entirely different 
 thing from the adoption of a policy the exact opposite 
 of which his party and the country had entrusted to 
 a Minister ; and when Mr. Gladstone came into office 
 six months later, it was with a special commission to 
 disestablish the Irish Church. 
 
 The contrast between Mr. Gladstone and Mr. 
 Bright is even more strongly marked than that 
 between Mr. Gladstone and Sir Eobert Peel. As he 
 now draws towards the end of his career, Mr. Bright 
 cannot be charged with having abandoned, violated, 
 or withdrawn a single principle that he ever pro- 
 claimed. Not a flaw of inconsistency or blemish of 
 self-contradiction is to be seen in his whole career. 
 ^ *' Gleanings of Past Years," vol. vii., pp. 112, 113, et seq. 
 
II.] MB. GLADSTONE. 45 
 
 Others have come round to him ; he has lived to 
 behold the convictions, which he firmly embraced and 
 which were condemned as extravagant and absurd, 
 incorporated into the accepted doctrines of the Liberal 
 party and of all parties, and into the unquestioned 
 traditions of English policy. But though Mr. Glad- 
 stone's record and retrospect are of the most opposite 
 character, his mutations have never had anything in 
 them of vacillation ; they have partaken from the first 
 of the nature of a slow growth, and have indicated 
 the successive periods of an intellectual development. 
 Slowly, but with the certainty of daybreak, his 
 horizon has expanded. He has himself told us that 
 when he entered public life, he had but an imperfect 
 sense of the ineffable blessings of liberty. This defi- 
 ciency was not unnatural to one who had been 
 brought up in the straitest school of authority and 
 tradition, and who in early manhood was, in 
 Macaulay's familiar words, "the rising hope of the 
 stern and unbending Tories." As men rise on step- 
 ping-stones of their dead selves to higher things, so 
 Mr. Gladstone has throughout his whole public life 
 been engaged in bursting, and disentangling himself 
 from, the cerements of his dead faiths. Whether he 
 would have been greater or less than he is but for 
 this progressive movement of his mind may be ques- 
 tioned ; it is certain that he is indebted to it for much 
 of the power which he exercises over those who are 
 associated with him, however remotely or indirectly, 
 in public life. 
 
46 POLITICS AND LETTEBS. [ii. 
 
 It is because Mr. Gladstone has been so consis- 
 tently inconsistent, because the continuity of his 
 views and beliefs has known such decisive, if slowly 
 consummated, solutions, that he has carried with him 
 so large a group of politicians, and so overwhelming a 
 majority of the English people. The process of self- 
 education has enabled him effectually to educate 
 others. Those who have themselves learned slowly, 
 at school or college, were declared by Dr. Arnold to 
 make the best schoolmasters, because they could most 
 easily place themselves in the position of unreceptive 
 schoolboys. The wealth of words which Mr. Glad- 
 stone expends upon any proposal he introduces to the 
 House of Commons ; the variety of the points of view 
 from which he looks at it ; his minute weighing of 
 every sort of counter consideration ; the nice and, as 
 they may seem, the tedious and sophistical distinc- 
 tions which he draws between shades of thought and 
 forms of words — each of these reflects or suggests 
 some experience of his own mental discipline. There 
 are few objections to any policy or scheme of legisla- 
 tion which he has not appreciated, and which conse- 
 quently he does not set himself to remove. 
 
 For this reason he is in his treatment of public 
 topics the least dogmatic of statesmen. Mr. Bright, 
 who has neither receded from nor advanced beyond 
 the tenets with which he first entered public life, 
 cannot avoid a certain autocracy and absolutism in a 
 statement of opinion. He has been troubled with no 
 doubts, and even his fertile imagination can make 
 
II.] MB. GLADSTONE. 47 
 
 little allowance for doubters. But it is to the 
 doubters, the most illustrious of whom he himself has 
 been, that Mr. Gladstone chiefly addresses himself. 
 Hence the extraordinary complexity and comprehen- 
 siveness of his argumentation ; hence what may be 
 called the metaphysical quality in his eloquence, the 
 subtle series of appeals to the consciousness of his 
 hearers which runs like an undertone through his 
 most splendid orations, and which is perhaps the 
 secret of their occasional verbosity and even 
 obscurity. 
 
 Whatever history may say of Mr. Gladstone, it 
 will not say that he was a perfect leader of the House 
 of Commons. He fails to be this for the very reasons 
 which make him a great popular leader in the country. 
 He understands more of man in the abstract than of 
 man in the concrete; more of the passions which 
 sway humanity in the bulk, than of the motives to 
 which individuals are amenable, and the treatment to 
 be applied to them. He is at his best when he is the 
 exponent not so much of the policy of a party as of 
 the ideas which animate that policy, and which touch 
 the heart of nations. It was not till he had made his 
 famous " flesh-and-blood " speech that Mr. Gladstone 
 was really recognised as a great popular leader, and 
 struck a responsive chord that still vibrates in the 
 breasts of the English people. He had hitherto been 
 best known as a financier, as the greatest Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer England ever had, and as somewhat 
 academic, narrow, and exclusive in his sympathies 
 
48 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [ii. 
 
 and tastes. But this phrase, to which additional 
 effect was given by the glow of the language and the 
 atmosphere of ideas associated with it, produced an 
 instantaneous and almost electrical result. 
 
 The place into which he may be then said to have 
 leaped, he has continued to hold. Notwithstanding 
 his temporary retirement and the eclipse which, with 
 the metropolitan public, his popularity suffered in the 
 melodramatic days of Jingoism, events have con- 
 clusively shown that Mr. Gladstone surpasses all his 
 contemporaries in his power of interpreting, and 
 placing himself at the head of, public feeling, when 
 it is deeply moved. The Bulgarian atrocities supplied 
 him with one of those opportunities exactly con- 
 genial to his character and gifts. His Midlothian 
 campaigns, whether in their oratorical labours or in 
 the results that followed them, form a monument 
 which supplies a fair measure of the greatness of the 
 man. He took his stand upon general principles, 
 upon those elementary ideas of justice, of humanity, 
 which all can understand, and which he had, in his 
 reply to Lord Palmers ton thirty years earlier during 
 the Don Pacifico debate, clearly foreshadowed. This 
 reply is so remarkable, so appositely prophetic of the 
 attitude which in foreign policy Mr. Gladstone has 
 since repeatedly assumed, and so comparatively little 
 known, that no apology need be offered for quoting an 
 extract from it here : 
 
 The noble lord (Lord Palmerston) vaunted, amid the cheers 
 of his supporters, that under his administration an Englishman 
 
II.] MB. GLADSTONE. 49 
 
 should be, throughout the world, what the citizen of Eome had 
 been. But, I ask, what then was a Roman citizen % He was a 
 member of a privileged caste ; he belonged to a conquering race, 
 to a nation that held all nations bound down by the hand of 
 Imperial power. For him there was to be an exceptional system 
 of law ; for him principles were to be asserted and rights were to 
 be enjoyed, that were denied to the rest of the world. Is such, 
 then, the view of the noble lord as to the relation that is to sub- 
 sist between England and other countries 'J Does he make the 
 claim for us that we are to be uplifted on a platform high above 
 the standing-ground of other nations 1 It is indeed too clear that 
 too much of this notion is lurking in his mind ; that he adopts, in 
 part, that vain conception that we, forsooth, have a mission to be 
 the censors of abuses and imperfections among the other countries 
 of the world ; that we are to be the universal schoolmasters, and 
 that all who hesitate to recognise our office should have the war 
 of diplomacy, at least, forthwith declared against them. And cer- 
 tainly, if the business of a Foreign Secretary is merely to carry on 
 a diplomatic war, all must admit the perfection of the noble lord 
 in the discharge of his functions. But it is not the duty of a 
 Foreign Minister to be like a knight-errant, ever pricking forth, 
 armed at all points, to challenge all comers, and lay as many 
 adversaries as possible sprawling, or the noble lord would be a 
 master of his art ; but to maintain that sound code of international 
 principles which is a monument of human wisdom, and a precious 
 inheritance bequeathed by our fathers for the preservation of the 
 future brotherhood of nations. 
 
 This language explains why in foreign policy Mr. 
 Gladstone has at times reached the heart of the multi- 
 tude, precisely in proportion as he has dissatisfied the 
 cooler critics of the House of Commons, and tried the 
 patience of foreign statesmen and chancellors. It is 
 literally true of Mr. Gladstone to say that, Trojan or 
 Tyrian, Englishman, Egyptian, or Ethiopian, Bulgarian 
 peasant or Lancashire artisan, he holds any one of them 
 in no difference. To him the inhabitant of any country, 
 
50 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [ii. 
 
 in whatsoever quarter of the globe, and whatsoever 
 his complexion, is first of all a man ; to him he 
 appears denuded of all the accidents of his nation- 
 ality, isolated from the influence exercised on him by 
 custom and antecedents, merely a member of the 
 great family of the human race. As Bacon assumed 
 that the ingenia of all men were equal, so Mr. Glad- 
 stone seems to assume that all who are born into this 
 world have, innate in them, the same capacity as 
 Englishmen of the nineteenth century, to become the 
 orderly and prosperous subjects of a constitutional 
 and popular Government. There is steadily fixed in 
 his imagination the idea of a man, to which all exist- 
 ing types of humanity under heaven are conformable 
 — an idea gathered from his experience of his fellow - 
 men within the four seas. 
 
 This generous appreciation of the happy possi- 
 bilities latent in a universal humanity, this tendency 
 to reduce mankind to a common yet beatified denomi- 
 nator, commends itself to the fancy of the multitude 
 just as it exasperates those statesmen and diplomatists 
 to whom human beings are merely pawns on the 
 chess-board — the creatures of circumstance, dependent 
 for their capacities solely on geographical and physical 
 conditions. Whatever misconception of Mr. Gladstone 
 may exist in the mind of Prince Bismarck, or of any 
 other Continental statesman, arises entirely from the 
 circumstance that the point of view from which he 
 regards human nature is diametrically opposite to 
 that from which Prince Bismarck regards it. Hence, 
 
II.] MB. OLAB STONE. . 51 
 
 too, the difference which divided him from Mr. 
 Disraeh', who, in the tactical skill with which he dealt 
 with men as the members of a party, was as much 
 superior to Mr. Gladstone as Mr. Gladstone is saperior 
 to Mr. Disraeli in his insight into the control of those 
 perennial forces which dominate mankind in the 
 aggregate. 
 
 It is an often cited instance of Lord Althorp's 
 influence with the House of Commons that once, in 
 answer to a speech of Croker, he rose and merely 
 observed that he had made some calculations which 
 he considered as entirely conclusive in refutation of 
 the right honourable gentleman's arguments. But, 
 unfortunately, he had mislaid them, so that he could 
 only say that, if the House would be guided by his 
 advice they would reject the amendment ; which they 
 accordingly did. Nothing of exactly the same kind 
 is recorded of Mr. Gladstone, but in many cases he 
 has exercised, if not in the House of Commons, yet in 
 the country, an analogous authority. This prerogative 
 has been displayed not only among professed Liberals, 
 but among those very Conservatives who are most 
 of all impervious to new ideas — country gentlemen, 
 merchants, and country clergymen. 
 
 It may be doubted whether the Irish Church 
 would have been abolished, or the Irish Land Act of 
 1881 passed so easily, except for the personal ascen- 
 . dency of the Prime Minister. There is so large and 
 active a Conservative element in his nature that, 
 when he has advocated an organic change, some 
 
 E 2 
 
62 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [ii. 
 
 Conservatives, even though the leaders of the great 
 mass of the party may have denounced him with all 
 the bitterness and rancour which the English voca- 
 bulary can express, have secretly felt that Mr. Glad- 
 stone must be the victim of a great and overmastering 
 necessity. He has carried the day rather by his moral 
 influence than by his political cunning, and this 
 influence has in its turn been based upon his convic- 
 tion. And here it may be noticed that the doubts 
 cast upon Mr. Gladstone's sincerity, the abuse with 
 which, for qualities the exact opposite of sincerity, he 
 has been assailed, have only tended to confirm the 
 impression that above all things he is in earnest. 
 When men are denounced for hypocrisy, with the 
 animus which has characterised these denunciations in 
 the case of the Prime Minister, one may be pretty 
 sure that the real gravamen of the charge is an incon- 
 venient devotion to an unwelcome faith. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone's sincerity reveals itself in various 
 ways, some of them perhaps equivalent to congenital 
 defects in his judgment and character. Among the 
 many peculiarities of his mind few are more remark- 
 able than its extraordinary casuistical learning, coupled 
 as it is with intense interest in ecclesiastical questions. 
 The two traits together find their expression in refine- 
 ments of ratiocination which are often most puzzling 
 to his warmest admirers, and in occasional displays of 
 a want of anything like a due sense of proportion. 
 Thus he is frequently as much agitated about and 
 concerned in matters of the veriest detail as about 
 
II.] MB. GLADSTONE. 53 
 
 affairs involving the highest principles. During the 
 session of 1884, for instance, Mr. Gladstone showed 
 an eagerness for the Bishopric of Bristol Bill not 
 inferior to, and sometimes more aggressively visible 
 than, his eagerness for the Franchise Bill. ^^ Our mira- 
 culous Premier," The Times remarked in an article 
 unusually discriminating and able, '* has just given us 
 another opportunity of admiring his many-sidedness 
 and versatility. To-day begins an extraordinary 
 and probably momentous session of Parliament, for 
 which both sides have been preparing by two 
 full months of the most strenuous agitation. . . . 
 This is the occasion which he selects for issuing a 
 letter, more than a column in length, to a Welsh 
 Bishop on the subject of the Disestablishment of the 
 Church. It would seem, indeed, that except for the 
 little interlude of a run into Scotland, with the 
 twenty or thirty speeches which that entailed, the 
 Prime Minister's holiday has been given to topics 
 much less mundane thart the extension of the suffrage 
 to county householders. There was a preface to 
 write to the new edition of Hamilton's Catechism ; 
 there was the question of the Hittite Empire, and its 
 possible alliance with Troy, to be taken in hand.'' 
 
 Closely allied with the quality just noticed is his 
 persistent attention to debates which to others seem 
 duller than Saturnian lead. He has been known, and 
 doubtless will be known again, to sit for hours in the 
 House of Commons with only a score of members 
 present, listening, not merely with indefatigable 
 
H POLITICS AND LETTERS. [ii. 
 
 patience, but with positive entliusiasm, to a succession 
 of bores holding forth on a subject of no general 
 interest. Could there be a more touching testimony 
 to the infinite toleration of the Prime Minister ? 
 The charges often levelled at him by his opponents 
 are absolutely inconsistent with this attribute. It 
 may be observed incidentally, too, that they are 
 mutually destructive. If Mr. Gladstone is tossed 
 about by every gust of Radical passion, eager 
 only to anticipate the will of his revolutionary 
 associates, how can he be described as a despot and 
 dictator ? 
 
 Nor is the common impression that he is arrogant 
 and imperious in his official capacity less at variance 
 with the facts. In the Cabinet he is modest and 
 conciliatory to a fault. Again and again, when a 
 word from him w^ould settle a question, he allows it 
 to be discussed at length, and accepts without objec- 
 tion the decision of the majority. What is the 
 explanation of a conventional accusation, absolutely 
 unfounded upon any experience ? The answer is not 
 difficult. Power gravitates to the side of knowledge 
 and ability. "Water does not find its own level more 
 sure than ascendency comes to the hands of the 
 man who has the qualifications for it. Mr. Gladstone 
 is the most commanding figure in the House of 
 Commons. He is the best debater in it ; he has 
 had an unrivalled acquaintance with office^ and with 
 affairs. He is, in a word, the first man in the 
 popular Chamber of the Legislature, and his so- 
 
II.] MF. GLADSTONE. 55 
 
 called dictatorial arrogance is merely an admission of 
 the fact. 
 
 One of the reasons of Mr. Gladstone's influence 
 with the English middle class may not yet have 
 received the attention due to it. He is himself one of 
 the most brilliant ornaments that the middle class, 
 from which he himself is sprung, has ever possessed. 
 He is the true representative of many of the most 
 characteristic sentiments of this social order. Like 
 Sir Robert Peel, he has a thorough sympathy with 
 the aspirations of the commercial aristocracy, and in 
 a far greater degree than Sir Robert Peel he has flung 
 over the middle class a glamour higher than that 
 derived from mere material prosperity. Mr. Gladstone 
 is, in some respects, to look at him for a moment not 
 as a statesman but as an English gentleman, the 
 highest product of Eton and Oxford. As such he 
 would have won social distinction if he had never 
 plucked a single political laurel. The middle class, 
 therefore, is proud of him on grounds independently 
 of his achievements in statesmanship. At bottom it 
 admires him even when it may not quite understand 
 him. The very obscurity, which comes from subtlety, is 
 accepted by the persons now spoken of as flattering to 
 themselves, since it is the attribute of one who is in a 
 measure their progeny. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone's oratory is, as for that matter all 
 oratory is, the reflection of the intellectual being of 
 the orator. It is laboured and lengthy because the 
 mind and brain, which furnish the tongue with 
 
56 POUTIOS AND LljfTTEBS. [ii. 
 
 language, are so keenly appreciative of the difficulties 
 which may suggest themselves to hearers. If Mr. 
 Gladstone seldom touches a theme without adorning 
 it, he never touches a theme which he does not, for 
 the immediate purpose in hand, exhaust. His oratory 
 is didactic, homiletic, beseeching, commentatorial, 
 and microscopically minute, because he does not 
 forget how tardy the process of conviction is, and how 
 many obstacles must be disposed of before the desired 
 result is obtained. It is not long since one of his 
 colleagues gave an account of the difference between 
 his own oratorical method and that of the Prime 
 Minister. *^ When,'' he said, " I speak, I strike across 
 from headland to headland. But Mr. Grladstone 
 coasts along, and whenever he comes to a navigable 
 river he cannot resist the temptation to explore it to 
 its source." 
 
 All the dissertations on rhetoric since the world 
 began, from Aristotle to Cicero, Tacitus and Quintilian, 
 down to Whately, Alison, and Arnold, may be 
 searched before so happy and terse an illustration is 
 encountered. For the reason embodied in this 
 figurative definition of two oratorical schools, some 
 of Mr. Bright's single speeches are better than any- 
 thing of Mr. Gladstone's. Yet it may be doubted 
 w^hether there is anything finer in nineteenth-century 
 oratory than Mr. Gladstone's impromptu speech on 
 Mr. Disraeli's budget of 1853, or than his peroration 
 before the division on the second reading of Lord 
 Kussell's Keform Bill was taken in 1866. In the 
 
II.] MB. GLADSTONE. 67 
 
 same way his tribute to the memory of Lord 
 Beaconsfield in 1881 was not only a masterpiece of 
 taste and judgment, but of that peculiar class of 
 oratorical composition to which it belonged. It also 
 furnished a remarkable illustration of Mr. Gladstone's 
 felicity in quotations, an ornament of debate now 
 practically obsolete. On the whole Mr. Hayward's 
 estimate of Mr. Gladstone as a speaker leaves nothing 
 unsaid : " It is Eclipse first, and all the rest nowhere. 
 He may lack Mr. Bright's impressive diction — im- 
 pressive by its simplicity — or Mr. Disraeli's humour 
 and sarcasm. But he has made ten eminently suc- 
 cessful speeches to Mr. Bright's or Mr. Disraeli^s one. 
 His foot is ever in the stirrup ; his lance is ever in 
 the rest. He throws down the gauntlet to all comers. 
 Eight or wrong he is always real, natural, earnest, 
 un affected and unforced. He is a great debater, a 
 great parliamentary speaker." 
 
 He is also an eminently persuasive speaker, and 
 that explains why he is less condensed than Mr. 
 Bright. There is no writer the tones of whose voice 
 it is easier to hear with the ear of imagination in the 
 inflections and convolutions of his literary style than 
 Mr. Gladstone. There are few speakers whose speeches 
 it is less satisfactory to read. Yet nothing is more 
 certain than that if Mr. Gladstone's oratory were 
 better literature it would have been less fruitful of 
 results. The style is the man. The persistency and 
 ^ even the prolixity of the orator are the counterparts 
 and supplements of those qualities— the earnestness, 
 
58 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [ii. 
 
 the zeal, the wide-stretching sympathies — which have 
 made the statesman great. And if, as has been 
 admitted, there are single speeches of Mr. Bright's or 
 Mr. Disraeli's of a higher literary and intellectual 
 merit than any single speech of Mr. Gladstone's, Mr. 
 Gladstone has still delivered a host of speeches, every 
 sentence of which is stamped with intellectual power, 
 that could have come from no other statesman of the 
 day except himself. 
 
 To this order the first of his series of Mid- 
 lothian addresses in which he explained the whole 
 history of the Franchise Bill, belongs. Nor 
 perhaps was he ever surpassed in the faculty of 
 carrying the whole House with him in a dialectical 
 whirlwind when in the session of 1884 he demolished 
 Sir Stafford Northcote. Never, again, did he astonish 
 and delight the House with a finer display of physical 
 and intellectual vigour than when, after having been 
 worried for a couple of hours in the Commons, he 
 spoke for nearly three hours subsequently on the 
 Eastern question. On the whole the very finest 
 speech delivered by him during the lifetime of the 
 late Parliament was that delivered on the Bradlausrh 
 case. One quality is unquestionably wantiog in Mr. 
 Gladstone as an orator. He has little or no sense of 
 humour. He seldom makes a joke ; he seldom tries 
 to do so ; and if he tries, he very seldom succeeds. 
 
 If this were the place in which to say anything 
 about Mr. Gladstone as a private member of society, 
 it would, perhaps, be enough to remark that the 
 
11.] MB. GLADSTONE, 69 
 
 fullest materials for information on this point may 
 be found in the memoirs of distinguished men not 
 long since departed and some of them still with us, 
 which have recently been*published. Lord Malmes- 
 bury has recorded that when he first met the 
 present Prime Minister, then a rising young man, in 
 1842, he found him exceedingly agreeable. Much 
 more copious materials for his personal portraiture 
 w^ill be discovered in the life of the late Bishop 
 Wilberforce, written by his son. On the whole, how- 
 ever, those who will probably be spoken of as Mr. 
 Gladstone's equals know little or nothing more of him 
 than they know from their habitual contact with him 
 in public. Few statesmen of the first order possess 
 many very intimate associates among their political 
 peers or allies. Most of those who were once Mr. 
 Gladstone's peculiar friends have been carried away 
 by death. The few who still survive are either ranged 
 in a hostile camp or belong to a sphere of action and 
 thought so different that personal communication 
 with them has become impossible. 
 
 The persons who are now in his private con- 
 fidence appear to be chosen for reasons of the 
 validity of which Mr. Gladstone alone can judge. 
 Before the Prime Minister of England all doors fly 
 open, and even beyond the social limits of Liberalism 
 or Whiggism Mr. Gladstone is welcomed, and is 
 agreeably, though, as should probably be said, super- 
 ficially, known. The subjects in which he takes an 
 interest are multifarious. He reads immensely, and 
 
60 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [ii. 
 
 within five years of fourscore his intellectual activity 
 and resourcefulness are such that time is never 
 wanting to him when any subject he is deeply in- 
 teres^ted in comes to the front. Has he not just 
 written an introduction to a devotional volume ? 
 On December 11th and 12th, 1868, he was the 
 guest of Lord Salisbury at Hatfield, Bishop Wil- 
 berforce being one of the company. The episcopal 
 diary for the former of these days thus mentions 
 Mr. Gladstone : '^ Gladstone as ever ; great, earnest, 
 and honest; as unlike the tricky Disraeli as 
 possible." But next day the Bishop writes : " Morn- 
 ing walk with Gladstone, Cardwell, and Salisbury. 
 Gladstone was struck with Salisbury ; ' never saw 
 more perfect host.' . . . When people talk of Gladstone 
 going mad they do not take into account the won- 
 derful elasticity of his mind and the variety of his 
 interests. This moroing he was just as much inte- 
 rested in the size of the oaks and their probable age 
 as if no care of state ever pressed upon him." That 
 is a pleasant picture, and one intelligibly full of 
 charm to the good prelate who drew it, and who 
 subsequently speaks of Mr. Gladstone's power of 
 detachment from the controversial matters of passing 
 moment as his " chief safeguard." It may not, how- 
 ever, be his chief attraction to some of the more 
 prominent members of the party which he leads. 
 These would willingly hear him talk more about 
 the great political struggles in which he has been 
 and is engaged, and may attribute what seems to 
 
n.] ME. GLADSTONE. 61 
 
 them his lack of attractiveness in private life to his 
 superficial desultoriness and to his preference to dis- 
 cuss topics that are not of deep or living moment to 
 him. 
 
 Few persons will be disposed to deny that the 
 exact position which Mr. Gladstone fills in English 
 politics, and the precise influence he wields, belong 
 to himself alone, and that when he disappears he will 
 leave no successor in either of these capacities. Mr. 
 Gladstone served his parliamentary apprenticeship 
 under the old regime. Canning had not passed away 
 five years when he entered the House of Commons, 
 and many of the men with whom he first went into 
 the lobby were the associates and contemporaries of 
 Pitt and Fox. No man who has caught the dying 
 rays of the grand manner at St. Stephen's, who is so 
 deeply imbued with the already half-forgotten tradi- 
 tions of the place, classical, literary, as well as political 
 and ofiicial, has lived so long into, and has played so 
 prominent a part in, the new order of things. 
 
 Any man who had lacked Mr. Gladstone's force of 
 character, who had not combined even his moral 
 influence with his early associations, would have 
 failed to learn the era of democracy based on house- 
 hold suff"rage, with so many ideas of an essentially 
 Tory kind. He was, as he himself has said, brought 
 up at the feet of Canning ; and his first chief in the 
 active business of political life was Sir Eobert Peel. 
 Whatever may be thought of Mr. Gladstone's per- 
 sonal merits or demerits, it will at any rate be 
 
62 POLITICS AND LETTERS, [ii. 
 
 confessed that this particular combination is not 
 likely to present itself again. The statesman who 
 has inhaled the traditions of Toryism with his earliest 
 breath, who was saturated as a young man with 
 academicism and classicism, who in religious matters 
 was the friend of Newman and Keble, and who is 
 indebted for much or most of the hold he has had 
 upon the clergy — which is, after all, the most Con- 
 servative interest in the country — to his allegiance 
 to those sentiments which found expression in his 
 speeches on the Divorce Act, and again on the Public 
 Worship Regulation Act, is a phenomenon on whose 
 reappearance no one will count. 
 
 Already there has sprung up a school of political 
 thinkers who, while they follow Mr. Gladstone's 
 politics, have not the slightest sympathy with the 
 sources, or the quality, of the moderating control 
 which he exercises upon the progress of affairs. 
 There is an immense deal in common between Mr. 
 Gladstone and not only the old Whigs but the old 
 Tories, and if he ever seems to go to the verge of 
 the new Radicalism, it is with something more than 
 a last longing, lingering look behind — with an earnest 
 desire to which, as far as may be, he gives effect, to 
 guard against the possible errors of precipitancy and 
 excess. Mr. Gladstone's authority and experience 
 have upon different occasions, and at no time more 
 conspicuously than the present, induced his followers 
 to limit and curtail their demands. He has stood at 
 the parting of two ways, and by standing there has 
 
II.] ME. GLADSTONE, 63 
 
 prevented a separation of the two forces of which 
 Liberalism is composed. 
 
 The history of the Liberal party has illustrated 
 thus far, and will illustrate yet farther, the progres- 
 sive movement of Mr. Gladstone's own mind. Those 
 who affect to deplore the encouragement he has 
 given to advanced ideas will, when he has gone, have 
 abundant reason to regret the check he has imposed 
 to their translation into fact. It may be that his 
 departure will be followed by a schism in the Liberal 
 ranks. In that case what has happened before will 
 happen again, and the party of movement will carry 
 after it the party pf inaction and delay. Liberalism 
 and Kadicalism are only varying modes of the same 
 political agency. The difference between them is 
 one, not of principle, but of chronology. The part 
 played by Lord Palmerston has in some sort been 
 played by Mr. Gladstone, but, as far as it is possible 
 to frame any estimate of the political forces now at 
 work, Toryism will for the reasons already assigned 
 discover that the disappearance of Mr. Gladstone will 
 be the prelude to an era of organic political change 
 far more stirring and drastic than that which com- 
 menced with Lord Palmerston's death. 
 
III. 
 
 MEN OF LETTERS ON THEMSELVES/"^ 
 
 The two entertaining and instructive volumes in 
 whicli Mr. Edmund Yates has recorded the experi- 
 ences and reminiscences of a varied, animated and 
 successful career, had as their predecessors some inte- 
 restiug recollections by a popular novelist, and have 
 been followed by the narrative of '^ Episodes in the 
 Second Life " of a distinguished journalist, told by 
 himself. Certain characteristics are possessed by each 
 of these autobiographies in common. Mr. Yates com- 
 bines, or has combined, in his own person the function 
 of Mr. James Payn and Mr. Antonio Gallenga. Like 
 the former he is a novelist ; like the latter he is, or 
 has been, a writer of newspaper articles, and among 
 the most locomotive and picturesque of newspaper 
 special correspondents. With Mr. Yates, as with the 
 two other literary autobiographers, existence has been 
 a strenuous and prosperous aflfair, — full of labour and 
 
 * *' Edmund Yates : His Kecollections and Exioeriences." 2 
 vols. (Bentley). "Episodes of My Second Life," by A. Gallenga. 
 2 vols. (Chapman and Hall). " Some Literary Eecollections," by 
 James Payn. 1 vol. (Smith, Elder, and Co.). 
 
III.] MEN OF LETTERS ON THEMSELVES, 65 
 
 effort, but of effort ending in fruition, and of labour 
 sweetened by fame. Mr. Yates tells us how first, at 
 the. bidding of the Post Office authorities, he performed 
 rapid journeys between London and foreign capitals, 
 and how, when the Government was taking over the 
 telegraphs, he visited nearly every portion of the 
 United Kingdom ; how next, at the bidding of the 
 editor of The New Yorh Herald, he had no sooner 
 returned to England from America, than he was 
 summoned to Paris, an-d then instructed to proceed 
 without a moment's delay to Vienna or Madrid, to 
 St. Petersburg or Berlin. 
 
 The correspondence of Mr. Gallenga was for the 
 most part in a more serious vein than that of Mr. 
 Yates. He was present at scenes of greater historic 
 sigrnificance. and he chronicled the decision of more 
 momentous issues. But both men were in their sepa- 
 rate departments of journalism equally in the first 
 rank ; equally prompt, accurate, persevering, graphic. 
 This discipline, perhaps the most trying of any that 
 the press affords, was never submitted to by Mr. Payn, 
 between whom, however, and Mr. Yates there exist, 
 in spite of marked dissimilarities, some resemblances 
 or coincidences. Both may be said to have been 
 brought up in the school, and at the feet, of Dickens ; 
 both enjoyed in varying degrees his friendship ; both 
 formed his acquaintance about the same time, Mr. 
 Yates in 1854, Mr. Payn two years later; both made 
 their real literary debut in Household Words. The first 
 appearance of each in print was poetical — Mr. Yates 
 
66 POLITICS AND LETTEBS. [ni. 
 
 when a mere boy, sending to Mr. Harrison Ainsworth 
 some stanzas which were inspired by Thackeray's 
 *'At the Church Gate ;" and Mr. Payn at the same 
 tender age contributing a composition entitled ^' The 
 Poet's Death " to Leigh Hunt's journal. 
 
 Both have, or have had, many common friends, 
 and many of the same famous or familiar" characters 
 appear and reappear in the pages of the books of each. 
 The education, like the natural tastes and aptitudes, 
 of Mr. Payn and Mr. Yates was widely different. 
 The former, who went from Eton to Woolwich, and 
 from Woolwich to Cambridge, was without any turn 
 whatever for languages. " Languages," he writes, 
 '^ have been always as unattainable to me as the 
 science of music. I spent many years over French 
 and German, but could never read, far less converse 
 in, either tongue with facility." Mr. Yates received 
 the rudiments of a sound classical and general 
 training at High gate School, was transferred to Dtis- 
 seldorf and Bonn, whence in nine months' time he 
 returned to England with a perfect command of the 
 German vocabulary and accent. It is to his know- 
 ledge of French and German that Mr. Yates attributes 
 much of his success in life, and notably the oppor- 
 tunities of studying men, manners, and cities, which 
 his Continental missions for the Post Office supplied. 
 
 One admirable quality pervades, in a conspicuous 
 degree, each of these works. " I do not think," writes 
 Mr. Yates in his preface, ''1 have said any harsh 
 thing of any person alive or dead. I am certain that 
 
III.] MIJN OF LETTERS ON* THEMSELVES. 67 
 
 I have not said such a thing consciously." As a 
 matter of fact, Mr. Yates has not said it at all. 
 ''Whatever judgment," writes Mr. Gallenga, '*I may- 
 have passed upon myself, whether the picture of my 
 character resulting from the narrative of my thoughts 
 and deeds be too partial or too severe, I must at least 
 be held guiltless of having indulged in any personality 
 offensive to the dead or living." 
 
 As for Mr. Payn, he makes no professions, because 
 he spares himself the trouble of a preface, but he is 
 consistently amiable and genial. It is only natural that 
 there should be more traces of a melancholy humour, 
 bordering on bitterness, in Mr. Gallenga than in Mr. 
 Yates or Mr. Payn. In the firsf place, he was a patriot 
 and an exile. He took life seriously ; he felt acutely the 
 vicissitudes and humiliations to which, in his earliest 
 attempts to earn a living in America and in England as 
 a teacher of languages and a writer of magazine articles, 
 he was compelled to submit. In the second place, though 
 the success which Mr. Gallenga achieved as an English 
 journalist and the command he acquired of forcible 
 and correct English are for a foreigner unique, he never 
 forgot that he was a stranger living among strangers. 
 '* In spite," he writes, '' of the unfailing kindness and 
 deference which I received abroad, I was full of silly 
 complaints borrowed from Dante about the salt that 
 savours other people's bread, and the hardship of 
 climbing and descending other people's stairs." But 
 he had other hardships than these, and for some years 
 he was a man with a grievance. He could not get 
 
 F 2 
 
68 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [iii. 
 
 back his manuscripts when he wanted, or see editors 
 when he called. " Paying editors were not many, and 
 were accessible to none but their intimate friends. '^ 
 Of Delane and Morris, under whom he did much 
 splendid work for The Times, he speaks in terms of 
 unstinted admiration ; but, with the exception of 
 Mr. Sala, there is no one about whom he expresses 
 himself with more than conventional cordiality. 
 
 Elected in 1853, after his name had been down 
 nine years, a member of the Athenaeum Club, "he 
 did not much value the mere honour of belonging to 
 a learned society. As," he continues, '* members 
 have to wait at least a score of years before they 
 are balloted for, by far the greatest number consisted 
 of twaddling and cackling fogies, whose bald pates, 
 toothless gums, and rickety limbs sent a chill through 
 my veins, and acted as an unpleasant reminder that I 
 also had left the mid career of life behind me. I met 
 but few old friends, and made fewer new ones." 
 Again, *' The Athenaeum Club was to me a work- 
 shop where I saw few I knew, and hardly spoke to 
 those few. Literary men like Bulwer and Disraeli ; 
 statesmen like Lord Clarendon, Lord Granville, Lord 
 Salisbury, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Forster, and Lord 
 Hartington ; diplomatists like Lord Lyons, Lord 
 Cowley, Lord Ampthill, Lord Lytton, Lord Howden, 
 have all come within the orbit of my acquaintance ; 
 but with all the good- will on my part and all the 
 courtesy and amiability on theirs, the intercourse 
 almost invariably ended where it began." 
 
III.] MEN OF LETTERS^ ON THEMSELVES. 60 
 
 The truth is, as he explains, Mr. Gallenga was 
 very busy, very shy, and very near-sighted. Mr. Payn, 
 indeed, is uniformly cheery, sometimes positively 
 chirpy. Yet a bubbling drop of something very like 
 acrimony occasionally wells up to the smooth and 
 smiling surface. " My experience," he says, " of men 
 and women of letters, which has been continuous, and 
 extends over thirty years, is that for kindness of heart 
 they have no equals. I have known but one absolutely 
 offensive man of letters, and even he was said to be 
 pleasant when sober, though as I only met him some 
 half-dozen times, and his habits were peculiar, I never 
 had a fair chance of finding him in that condition." 
 " I am well av/are," he writes in another place, " that 
 there are a good many people who dislike me very 
 cordially. If they do so for a good reason I exceed- 
 ingly regret it. But there are some folks whose 
 animosity is the highest of compliments. There is, 
 in my opinion, no more fatal weakness in human 
 nature than the desire to be thought well of by 
 everybody " — a doctrine to which perhaps no one 
 can take exception. 
 
 Neither Mr. Payn nor Mr. Gallenga is as uni- 
 formly charitable and kindly, as absolutely free from 
 all afterthought of rancour, all hinting of faults and 
 hesitating of dislikes, as Mr. Yates, who, indeed, 
 shows himself in these volumes to be the incarnation 
 of buoyancy, good-nature, and good-fellowship. Mr. 
 Payn and Mr. Yates seem both of them to be brim- 
 ming over with an exuberance of joyousness which 
 
^0 POLITICS AND LETTEBS. [ni. 
 
 may well excite the admiration of those whose moral 
 mercury seldom rises above a figure contemptibly 
 low. It is not so long since, if I remember correctly, 
 that Mr. Payn published a volume of stories called 
 '' High Spirits." Mr. Payn's title has been from his 
 earliest youth Mr. Yates's property, and as Mr. Payn, 
 although he was not addicted to any form of physical 
 exercise, had as a boy a fatal propensity towards 
 practical jokes ; so Mr. Yates's inborn vivacity was 
 so indomitable that his departmental chief in the 
 Post Office bade him, as a preliminary discipline to 
 the day's routine, walk from St. John's Wood to St. 
 Martin's-le-Grand instead of being driven on the 
 omnibus. For genuine amiability, as has been said, 
 the palm must be given to Mr. Yates. His volumes 
 are not only in their way a masterpiece, excellently 
 written, whether as regards taste or literary style, 
 with their component parts admirably arranged, the 
 product at once of an exceedingly clever man, 
 wielding a practised and artistic pen ; they are also 
 the product of a kindly, courteous, and considerate 
 nature, strong and impetuous, but sympathetic even 
 to tenderness. 
 
 Unless Mr. Yates was endowed in an unusually 
 liberal measure with these qualities, it is certain that 
 he would not have refrained from some animad- 
 versions which might have been pardonably severe on 
 Thackeray. Mention is made of Thackeray by Mr. 
 Payn and Mr. Gallenga as well. Mr. Payn tells 
 what some persons may suppose to be a characteristic 
 
III.] MEN OF LETTERS ON THEMSELVES. 71 
 
 anecdote of the great novelist. ''Even B — I will 
 call him B, for indeed he was busy enough, though 
 he made no honey — speaking to Thackeray of Leitch 
 Kitchie, admitted that he was ' a very gentlemanly 
 man/ 'But how does B Jcnoivf said Thackeray." 
 Mr. Gallenga, as an instance of Thackeray's playful- 
 ness, cites the following : 
 
 One day, at a large men's party^ when we were sixteen present, 
 as I was seated nearly at the lower end of the table and I was 
 talking to my neighbour on the right, our host, from the opposite 
 end, where the conversation was flagging, suddenly and apropos 
 to nothing, called out loudly to me across the table, and asked : 
 *' Pray, Mr. Gallenga " (he never omitted the mister), " pray, who 
 is your dentist?" There was instant silence, and most of the 
 guests looked up at me. But I was ready with my answer and 
 spoke out instantly : "John Heath, No. 11, Albemarle Street, the 
 best in London." Upon which the guests looked at each other for 
 a few moments wondering, and soon the confused buzz of voices 
 went on as before. What whim was it that prompted Michael 
 Angelo Titmarsh with that apparently idle question 1 Did it arise 
 from an ill-natured desire to call attention to the havoc that time 
 might have made with my jaws and at the truly marvellous skill 
 with which art now repairs the grievous losses of nature 1 Did he 
 expect me to blush or faint like any middle-aged madam, the 
 mystery of whose golden chignon or rosy cheek is by some un- 
 toward accident brought into light in the presence of her most 
 devoted admirers 1 Or was that merely his pleasantry, his wish 
 to give a fillip to a languid conversation by supplying a new sub- 
 ject which might raise a laugh no matter at whose expense? If 
 the latter was his purpose, it flew wide of the mark, for though 
 some of our friends may have been struck by the strangeness of 
 his sudden sally, no one seemed to perceive its drift. No one 
 noticed its "fun" or humour. The joke, if joke it was, fell flat. 
 
 As there were reasons which might have excused 
 Mr. Yates if he had adopted a very dijQferent tone in 
 
72 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [m. 
 
 regard to Thackeray, so there is much in the un- 
 avoidable circumstances of a literary career which 
 might have prompted him, as well as Mr. Payn and 
 Mr. Gallenga, to reflections far more acrimonious than 
 are to be found in any of the volumes I am now 
 considering. The life of a writer was defined by 
 Pope as " a warfare upon earth." Few warriors could 
 have illustrated the principles of amnesty with more 
 generosity than Mr. Yates. Speaking of literature, 
 Mr. Payn says there is "no calling so bright and 
 pleasant, so full of genial friendship, so radiant with 
 the glories of success ; but there is also no pursuit so 
 doubtful, so full of risks, so subject to despondency 
 and disappointments, so open to despair. Oh, my 
 young friend, with a turn for literature, think twice 
 and thrice before committing yourself to it, or you 
 may bitterly regret to find yourself where that turn 
 may take you.'' 
 
 Yet though these are Mr. Payn's sentiments, 
 everything is rose-coloured in his autobiography, and 
 as it is with Mr. Payn so is it in a greater degree 
 with Mr. Yates. Now it is no sufiicient explanation 
 of this circumstance in the case of a man like Mr. 
 Yates to say that he has been brilliantly successful. 
 Success in most men is no remedy for resentment, 
 and does not remove the causes of embitterment. 
 If there ever existed a calling which could justify 
 embitterment and resentment, it is that of the pro- 
 fessional writer. Thackeray in one of the most acid 
 chapters in his " Book of Snobs," after having shown 
 
III.] MEN OF LETTERS ON THEMSELVES. 73 
 
 that literature was full of them, exclaimed in bitter 
 irony, "There are no snobs in literature." Mr. Yates 
 has had a good deal more to do with journalism than 
 Mr. Payn ; he has therefore been brought more into 
 contact with all kinds and conditions of gentlemen 
 who write. He has had as many opportunities as an 
 Old Bailey barrister, or Mr. George Lewis himself, 
 of seeing the seamy side of human nature. 
 
 It is not too much to say that the social com- 
 merce and the professional intercourse inseparable 
 from a literary life is to moderately sensitive natures 
 a protracted torture. The competition which must 
 be encountered and defeated before the position is 
 won, is incessant, bitter, and frequently humiliating. 
 When a sort of table-land of success and influence 
 has been reached, and the competitor has at his dis- 
 posal some degree of literary patronage, he is upon 
 the threshold of fresh troubles. The responsible 
 conductor of any literary enterprise has to deal with 
 every sort of knavery and incapacity — as to which let 
 the intelligent reader consult Mr. Paynes remarks in 
 the last hundred pages of his volume. He is per- 
 petually assailed by the importunity of incompetence 
 and the impudence of inaptitude. He will find 
 himself beset alternately by the entreaties and im- 
 pertinences of the opinionated dullard whose conceit 
 is a bar to his improvement, and who in his relations 
 with the men whose kindly offices he solicits begins 
 with flattery, then breaks into a snarl, and ends by 
 suing with a whine. The monitions of experience 
 
U POLITICS AND LETTERS. [m. 
 
 are thrown away upon these persons. They are the 
 parasites of our literary system, and it is infinitely 
 to the credit of Mr. Yates's native kindliness that 
 he should have been able to practise a self-control 
 beyond that of Mr. Payn, and not have had an 
 unkind word to say upon the subject. There is, I 
 firmly believe, no instance on record of a man of 
 letters who, having trodden so persistently the uphill 
 path of an opposed career as Mr. Yates, and having 
 gone through such a series of exertions and en- 
 counters, ever took so urbane and kind a retrospect 
 of the past. 
 
 In his chapter entitled " The Influence of ' Pen- 
 dennis,' " Mr, Yates gives us what is, from an auto- 
 biographical point of view, one of the most interesting- 
 portions of his work : 
 
 To get admitted into the ranks of literary men, among whom I 
 might possibly, by industry and perseverance, rise to some position, 
 began to be my constant thought ; and I was encouraged in the 
 hope that I might succeed, perhaps more than anything else, by 
 reading the career of " Pendennis," which, in its well-remembered 
 yellow cover, had then been appearing month by month for the 
 last two years, and in its complete form was just obtainable at the 
 libraries. There is no prose story in our English language, not 
 even the "Christmas Carol," not even "The Newcomes," not even 
 the " Scenes of Clerical Life " or " Silas Marner " — and now I 
 have named what are to me the most precious — which interests 
 and affects me like " Pendennis." It had this effect from the very 
 first. I knew most of it so thoroughly. The scenes in the pro- 
 vincial theatre — the Fotheringay, her father, the prompter, the 
 company — were such perfect creations (to this day I have never 
 seen any hint as to where Thackeray got his study of these people, 
 who were quite out of his usual line) ; the position of Pendennis 
 and his mother was so analogous to that of me and mine — her 
 
III.] MEN OF LETTERS ON THEMSELVES. 75 
 
 devotion, his extravagance; the fact that I was personally ac- 
 quainted with Andrew Arcedeckne, the original of Foker, in whom 
 he was reproduced in the most ludicrously lifelike manner : all 
 this awakened in me a special interest in the book ; and when, in 
 the course of Pen's fortunes, he enters upon the literary career, 
 writes his verses for the Spring Annual^ dines with Bungay, visits 
 Shandon, is engaged on the Pall Mall Gazette, and chums with 
 Warrington, who makes that ever-to-he-quoted speech about the 
 power of the press : " Look at that, Pen ! There she is, the great 
 engine ; she never sleeps," etc. — when I came to this portion of 
 ■the book my fate was sealed. To be a member of that wonderful 
 Corporation of the Goosequill, to be recognised as such, to be one 
 of those jolly fellows who earned money and fame, as I thought, 
 so easily and so pleasantly, was the one desire of my life ; and, if 
 zeal and application could do it, I determined that my desire 
 should be gratified. 
 
 One can understand that men should, even from 
 the sober eminence of middle age, look back to the 
 novels of Marryat or Lever as the sources from which 
 they first derived their passion for a naval or military 
 career. But this is very different from a man of Mr. 
 Yates's maturity and experience deliberately asserting 
 that " Pendennis " impelled him into literature. It 
 may be so, and there seems throughout Mr. Yates's 
 nature a strong vein of sentiment which would par- 
 tially account for the fact. But the prosaic critic 
 may be pardoned for suspecting that he has uncon- 
 sciously exaggerated the influence of the book. Mr. 
 Yates had from the very first, partly, it may be, as 
 a result of his thorough training in French and 
 German, partly as a gift of nature, a real capacity 
 for literature. He has always possessed a faculty of 
 neat and concise expression, flavoured by wit, fun. 
 
76 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [m. 
 
 and irony, that is exceedingly rare amongst English 
 writers, and that renders him, in certain kinds of 
 composition, unsurpassed by any and unapproached 
 by most of his contemporaries. Ability of this sort 
 would have found its right field of display, and if 
 Mr. Yates will forgive "the young gentleman, then 
 fresh from Oxford, who called upon him in 1866, at 
 the Post Office, with a letter of introduction from 
 Tom Hood," and of whose articles in Temple Bar 
 he was good enough to approve, for saying it, neither 
 " Pendennis " nor its author had perhaps as much to 
 do as he supposes with the initial step he took on 
 the road to literary fame. At the same time Mr. 
 Yates ought to know — and the fact that he is now 
 deliberately of opinion that such is the case, even if 
 he misconceives the circumstances, furnishes a sug- 
 gestive clue to, and is a significant commentary on, 
 the appreciative, impulsive, and sympathetic aspects 
 of his character. 
 
 It is curious that if " Pendennis " first made Mr. 
 Yates a writer, the author of '^ Pendennis " should have 
 been directly instrumental in investing the year 1858 
 with " the vast importance " with which, in his 
 seventh chapter, Mr. Yates says **it was fraught to 
 him." The reference is to the events that led to 
 Mr. Yates's withdrawal from the Garrick Club. Both 
 for its interest and its taste the Garrick chapter is 
 excellent. '* The most striking portion of the club in 
 those days was the smoking-room on the ground 
 floor, built out over the ' leads ' — a good-sized apart- 
 
III.] MEN OF LETTERS ON THEMSELVES, 77 
 
 ment, comfortably furnished, well ventilated, and 
 adorned by large pictures specially painted for it by 
 Stanfield, David Roberts, and Louis Haghe.'' Among 
 the habitues of the establishment were Charles 
 Kemble, '* Assassin" Smith, Clarkson Stanfield, Sir 
 William de Bathe, Samuel Lover, Robert Bell, Charles 
 Reade, Peter Cunningham, Frank Fladgate, better 
 known as " Papa," and J. D., *' most mellow of 
 elderly topers, with all the characteristics of * Bardolph 
 of Brasenose ' — a veteran who drank and swore in the 
 good old-fashioned way, and who came to a sad end, 
 poor fellow, dying alone in his Temple chambers, on 
 a Christmas Eve, of loss of blood from an accident, 
 while the men in the rooms below heard him stagger- 
 ing about and groaning, but took no notice, as they 
 fancied their neighbour was only in his usual condi- 
 tion." Thackeray was the presiding genius of the 
 place. As Mr. Gallenga has said in his concluding 
 chapter, " Thackeray was a member but not much of 
 a frequenter of the Athenaeum Club, his preference 
 being all for the Garrick, a club better suited to the 
 free and easy, somewhat Bohemian, tastes and habits 
 of his early days." 
 
 When Mr. Yates was first admitted to the Garrick 
 he was not eighteen years of age. When he left it 
 he was twenty-seven, and Thackeray, who was the 
 cause of his leaving it, was forty -seven. The little 
 article contributed by Mr. Yates to a paper long 
 since dead, at which Thackeray took grave umbrage, 
 scarcely deserves the censures passed upon it by its 
 
78 POLITICS AND LETTEBS. [in. 
 
 author. It is simply a piece of smart, hurried, im- 
 pertinent, and curiously young writing. Now, as 
 Thackeray was then twenty years Mr. Yates's senior, 
 what one might have expected from him was, if he 
 had been incurably wounded, silent contempt ; or, if 
 he had been merely annoyed, a sharpish caution to 
 Mr. Yates. The article in question did not violate 
 the sanctity of club life. It disclosed no private or 
 semi-private conversations ; it said absolutely nothing 
 more about Thackeray than was at the time on the 
 lips of every one, and was, therefore, public property. 
 Thackeray, however, very absurdly, as all cool- 
 headed persons will think, addressed to Mr. Yates a 
 formal letter, which, as its recipient says, was severe 
 to the point of cruelty — being, indeed, an inexplicably 
 bitter outburst of personal feeling, and "a censure, in 
 comparison with the offence committed, ludicrously 
 exaggerated." 
 
 What, however, under the circumstances, Mr. 
 Yates ought to have done is perfectly clear. Young 
 men of twenty-seven cannot allow themselves the 
 luxury of engaging their superiors and elders in 
 single combat. Their business is to be conciliatory 
 and to wait. Mr. Yates should have written to 
 Thackeray an apologetic disclaimer, assuring the 
 great novelist that he had misunderstood the motives 
 with, and the conditions under, which the offending 
 article was penned ; that on re-reading it the author 
 recognised its impropriety, and that doing this he could 
 only cry " Peccavi ! " express his extreme regret, and 
 
III.] MEN OF LETTERS ON THEMSELVES. 79 
 
 throw himself on his elder's consideration. One of two 
 things must then have happened : either Thackeray 
 would have accepted the apology and condoned the 
 offence, or, by refusing to do so, he would have made 
 a graceless exhibition of churlishness, and public 
 opinion, even the opinion of the Garrick Club, would 
 have been with Mr. Yates. The letter which Mr. 
 Yates prepared in draft, so far from being an 
 apology, was a challenge, a justification of all he had 
 originally said, and a justification by reference to 
 instances which would have been most exasperating 
 to Thackeray. *^ I took the liberty," to quote his own 
 words, *' of reminding Thackeray of some past errors 
 of his own, not the result of the hasty occupation of 
 an hour, but deliberately extending over a long space 
 of time, and marked by the most wanton, reckless, 
 and aggravating personality." 
 
 I reminded him how, in his " Yellowplush Correspondence," he 
 had described Dr. Lardner and Sir E. L. Bulwer : " One was pail, 
 and wor spektickles, a wig, and a Avhite neckcloth ; the other was 
 slim, with a hook nose, a pail fase, a small waist, a pare of falling 
 shoulders, a tight coat, and a catarack of black satting tumbling 
 out of his busm, and falling into a gilt velvit weskit." How he 
 had held them up to ridicule by calling them "Docthor Atha- 
 nasius Lardner " and " Mistaw Edwad Lytton Bulwig," by repro- 
 ducing the brogue of the one and the drawl of the other, and by 
 exhibiting them as contemptible in every way. 
 
 In regard to the Garrick Club, I called Mr. Thackeray's atten- 
 tion to the fact that he had not merely, in his " Book of Snobs," 
 and under the pseudonym of Captain Shindy, given an exact 
 sketch of a former member, Mr. Stephen Price, reproducing Mr. 
 Price's frequent and well-known phrases ; he had not merely, in 
 the same book, drawn on a wood-block a close resemblance of 
 
80 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [iii. 
 
 Wyndham Smith, a fellow-member, which was printed among the 
 " Sporting Snobs," Mr. W. Smith being a sporting man ; he had 
 not merely, in "Pendennis," made a sketch of a former member. 
 Captain Granby Calcraft, under the name of Captain Granby Tip- 
 toff, but in the same book, under the name of Foker, he had most 
 offensively, though amusingly, reproduced every characteristic, in 
 language, manner, and gesture, of our fellow-member, Mr. Andrew 
 Arcedeckne, and had gone so far as to give an exact woodcut 
 portrait of him, to Mr. Arcedeckne's intense annoyance. 
 
 Although this letter was not sent, the spirit of 
 Mr. Yates's actual rejoinder, approved though it was 
 by Dickens, was scarcely more conciliatory. There is 
 no need to pursue the details of the incident. The 
 alternative was at last presented to Mr. Yates of 
 apologising to Thackeray or of quitting the club. 
 Here Mr. Yates made a second mistake. He declined 
 to apologise, and preferred the doom of exile. That 
 he was to a great extent in the right ought really not 
 to have weighed with him. Matters of this sort are 
 practically decided, not on their merits, but by the 
 prejudices and the partialities of a majority. Mr. 
 Yates has given the facts ; only a few remarks are 
 necessary to place them in their proper perspective. 
 The inference is irresistible that Thackeray's feelings 
 were worked upon from outside, and that influences 
 hostile to Mr. Yates were from the first brought to 
 bear upon him. Dashing and successful young men 
 of strongly defined " personality," and superabun- 
 dance of animal spirits, are never likely to be popular 
 among their elders. It also seems reasonable to 
 suppose there may have been a clique antagonistic 
 to Mr. Yates in the Garrick Club, of which Mr. 
 
III.] MEN OF LETTERS ON THEMSELVES. 81 
 
 Yates's friend, now deceased, who mentioned to 
 Thackeray the authorship of the article which pro- 
 duced the mischief, was possibly the leader. Again, 
 Mr. Yates's champion and adviser in the whole 
 matter was Thackeray's rival, whom Thackeray him- 
 self, however fervently he could, as Mr. Payn shows 
 was the case, admire his genius, personally disliked. 
 In this matter there can be no doubt that Dickens 
 showed himself as bad an adviser as Delane, practised 
 man of the world though he was, did upon another 
 occasion when Dickens invoked his services as a 
 counsellor. 
 
 It would be exceedingly presumptuous on the 
 part of one who never had the honour of being in 
 Thackeray's company — except, indeed, once, some 
 thirty years ago, when the great man, coming down 
 to West Somerset to inspect a small country house 
 which he then thought of buying or renting, noticed 
 him as a child — to attempt any estimate of Thackeray's 
 character. Anthony Trollope, who on the strength of 
 a seven years' (though exceedingly slight) acquaint- 
 ance with the author of Vanity Fair, dared to pen a 
 monograph of him, was called to account with con- 
 temptuous severity by the surviving relatives of the 
 object of his admiration. 
 
 Some of the stories told by Mr. Yates of Thackeray 
 are as good as anything of the kind which can be 
 expected. There are also, as we have seen, some 
 reminiscences of him in Mr. Gallenga's work, and 
 a few pages are devoted to him by Mr. Payn. But 
 
82 POLITICS AND LETTEBS, [iii. 
 
 tliey really tell us nothing. Death, the great leveller, 
 is also the great distorter, and it is the most difficult 
 thing in the world to arrive at anything like a com- 
 plete idea of the identity of so many-sided a man as 
 Thackeray. Lord Beaconsfield in his last novel, 
 '* Endymion,'' drew him, as to Disraeli the younger 
 he seemed to be, at full length in St. Barbe. But 
 then Lord Beaconsfield may have travestied his 
 original, just as we are assured he caricatured and 
 calumniated John Wilson Croker. Upon those who 
 were personally acquainted with a great man gone, 
 death produces an effect upon the moral features of 
 their illustrious friend analogous to that which it is 
 said to produce upon the human physiognomy. 
 Countenances which, while the breath remained in 
 the body, were unlovely, harsh, angular, or coarse, 
 are traditionally supposed to be invested with 
 a spiritual beauty and ennoblement directly the 
 muscles, sinew, and marrow are reduced to inanimate 
 clay. It is the fashion nowadays for the moral being 
 of a man to undergo a similar transformation. Again, 
 what is called character is habitually invested with 
 an unreal unity. Pope's celebrated couplet, 
 
 Nothing so true as what you once let fall, 
 Most women have no character at all, 
 
 is applicable to the majority of the stronger as well 
 as to the weaker sex. 
 
 Consistency is the last thing one should look for, 
 except amongst the most elevated, and not always 
 
III.] MEN OF LETTERS ON THEMSELVES. 83 
 
 with them. It is just possible that the infinite 
 variety of the man and the inconsistency and contra- 
 dictions which it involved, may be the chief reasons 
 that render it so hard for those who never knew him 
 personally to form a notion of what manner of man 
 Thackeray was. What are called estimates of cha- 
 racter are in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out 
 of a thousand the records of personal, of interested, 
 and of, therefore, more or less untrustworthy impres- 
 sions. They are true as far as they go and no farther. 
 If of two mendicants, who meet a pedestrian, one at 
 the top and the other at the bottom of the street, the 
 former receives sixpence and the latter nothing, the 
 estimates which they each form of the same individual 
 will be diametrically opposite. The beggar who has 
 pocketed the dole will heap blessings upon him ; the 
 beggar who has failed to secure a copper will pursue 
 him with execrations. Of Thackeray no biography 
 worthy of the name has yet been published, and even 
 when it is published it will fail to supply us in all 
 probability with any formula of manageable dimen- 
 sions in which we can apprize the man. 
 
 Everything about him, says Mr. Gallenga, his humour, his 
 countenance, his voice, was changeable. In the depth of his heart 
 I am inclined to believe he was all kindness,, but all sourness and 
 uncharitableness on the surface. Like Carlyle, he spoke precisely 
 as he wrote. His cynicism, his misanthropy and pessimism, his 
 hatred of mobbism and flunkeyism, were with him inexhaustible 
 themes. But it was in a great measure mere bounce — rhodomontade 
 and fanfaronade — and it grew louder and more blatant in propor- 
 tion as his domestic fortunes improved, and his real good-nature 
 ripened and mellowed. 
 
 02 
 
84 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [ni. 
 
 Mr. Yates' volumes, apart from their purely 
 personal interest, have^-and the remark holds, to 
 some extent, good of Mr. Gallenga's and Mr. Payn's 
 — a genuine historical value. Mr. Gallenga's book, 
 indeed, contains a succinct, lucid and admirably- 
 written account of the patriotic movement in Italy 
 which came to a triumphant close when, on that 
 memorable 20th of September, 1870, the troops of 
 General Cadorna passed into the Eternal City. Mr. 
 Gallenga occupies a prominent place in that brilliant 
 galaxy of special and war correspondents, the other 
 bright particular stars of which are W. H. Russell, Sala, 
 Forbes, and Cameron of The Standard. He has also, 
 as a political writer, especially on foreign affairs, left 
 behind him a reputation in Printing House Square 
 which will never be forgotten. 
 
 Personally I do not think that any work I was allowed to do 
 in my time was ever rewarded by a word of praise more gratifying 
 to ray self-esteem than that which Delane bestowed upon me from 
 the beginning to the end of that seven years' severe trial. He had 
 great confidence in my judgment and knowledge of continental 
 affairs, and allowed me to conduct the wars and revolutions of that 
 eventful period at my own discretion. He heard that The Times 
 authority on military subjects never stood higher. He was told 
 by club quidnuncs, who congratulated him on the war articles in 
 the great journal, that there was only one man in England 
 who understood such subjects so thoroughly, and that was Sir 
 John Burgoyne, and he laughed in his sleeve as he answered that 
 they — the quidnuncs — "were perhaps not much out in their sur- 
 mises." At the same time, however, there were many anxious 
 moments at the various stages of the Franco-German war, espe- 
 cially during the three great days before Metz, towards the close of 
 the siege of Paris, or the campaign of Aurelles de Paladine and 
 
III.] MIJN OF LETTERS ON TEEMSELVU8. 85 
 
 Chanzy on the Loire, in which a sudden turn in the fortune of 
 arras seemed probable, seemed imminent, and when, nevertheless, I 
 pinned my faith to Moltke's genius, and staked, as it were. The 
 Times' reputation on the German's complete final victory; and 
 then my good editor came to me late in the evening pale with 
 anxiety, begging me not to be rash, not too confident, for he had 
 seen this, and he had heard that, and competent judges, whom he 
 
 named — among others Colonel B had assured him that we 
 
 were venturing too far, and that events would soon contradict our 
 statements and demolish our theories, greatly to the loss of The 
 I'lmea' prestige. When Paris surrendered, and Moltke and I had 
 triumphed over prostrate France, my dear Delane drew a long 
 breath and wrote to me a kind letter of congratulation, stating how 
 glad he was that he had trusted me, that I had always been right 
 in my forecast, and had not, b}'- one single false step during that 
 long warlike crisis, misled the English reading public. I have 
 still the letter before me, and I value it far more highly than 
 any Ked or Black Eagle that Bismarck could have bestowed 
 upon me. 
 
 When, therefore, Mr. Gallenga says, ''I might 
 also feel tempted to flatter myself that my career as 
 a journalist was not an absolute failure/' he speaks 
 with unnecessary diffidence and modesty. In talking 
 of " the cut and dry manner which has become almost 
 the technical and conventional style of the Press, 
 especially since the invention of electric wires has 
 sunk the correspondent's business to the level of that 
 of the mere telegraph clerk," he will be held by com- 
 petent judges to be in error. The injfluence of tele- 
 graphy upon the style of the special and war 
 correspondent has certainly not been hostile, still 
 less fatal, to vigour and picturesqueness ; witness the 
 marvellous despatches of Mr. Cameron and Mr, 
 Forbes. On the other hand, it has probably robbed 
 
86 POLITICS AND LUTTEBS. [iii. 
 
 the resident correspondent in foreign capitals, and 
 therefore the Press generally, of some of its own 
 authority. Instead of the well-weighed and instruc- 
 tive letters on foreign affairs, which used to be highly 
 profitable reading, and which have now almost 
 entirely disappeared from journalism, — The Times, 
 The Morning Post, The St, James's Gazette, and The 
 Globe alone being permitted by inexorable exigencies 
 of space occasionally to publish them, — we have to be 
 content with telegraphic despatches which are ad- 
 mirable as viewy condensations of the latest news, 
 but which have little permanent value, and which 
 scarcely help the average reader to form an intel- 
 ligent notion of a political situation in a remote 
 capital. 
 
 Mr. Gallenga makes some suggestive remarks on 
 the social revolution which has been accomplished 
 since the period of his first stay in England. " Men,'' 
 he tells us, " then travelled little ; the women seldom 
 left home, except for their three weeks' sea-bathing at 
 Heme Bay or Broadstairs. They seldom saw the 
 inside of a theatre, and few of them were great 
 readers, for Mudie was not yet, nor Westerton, nor the 
 Grosvenor, nor the London Library, and books were 
 hard to borrow and dear to buy." When Mr. Yates 
 first knew London, Butcher Hall Lane had not dis- 
 appeared, Alton Ale houses abounded to the east of 
 Temple Bar, Almack's was in its zenith, the Adelaide 
 Gallery had just been taken by Laurent, the Holborn 
 Eestaurant was a swimming bath, Vauxhall, though 
 
III.] MEN OF LETTERS ON THEMSELVES. 87 
 
 in its decadence, " dingy, dear, and absurdly ex- 
 pensive," was popular, the Overland Route was on 
 view in Waterloo Place, the Park was full of pro- 
 digious dandies, cheap chop-houses and foreign 
 eating-houses were in vogue, Paddy Green was in his 
 patriarchal bloom. There was none of the display, 
 luxury, and glitter of these latter times ; but there 
 was much comfort, much geniality, and an amount of 
 sociability, and a facility for cheap amusements now 
 unknown. Bohemia then occupied a recognised and 
 considerable place in the map of London. Mr. Sala 
 was brought from Rule's oyster shop to be presented 
 to the Duke of Sutherland, then Marquis of Stafford, 
 who was loud in praise of " Colonel Quagg s Con- 
 version," at the Fielding Club. Robert Brough was 
 denouncing the sham culture of pseudo-classicists in 
 his lyrics, and published in his " Songs of the 
 Governing Classes " a passionate attack upon social 
 distinctions with the refrain — 
 
 'Tis a curse to the land, deny it who can, 
 That self-same boast, I'm a gentleman. 
 
 Mr. Edmund Byng, Mr. Yates's godfather, enter- 
 tained the most select of guests with the plainest and 
 best of dinners, and young men, " who to-day sit 
 down to soup, fish, entrees — then called ' made 
 dishes ' — a roast, a bird, a sweet, a savoury, and a 
 bottle of claret, would then have been content with a 
 slice off the joint, a bit of cheese, and a pint of beer." 
 Even Mr. Yates, when he first married, as he " could 
 
88 POLITICS AND LETTEBS. [iir. 
 
 not aflford to give his friends good wine, and would 
 not give them bad," regaled them on bitter ale. 
 Lucky friends ! though one may hope that if, even in 
 this degenerate epoch, Mr. Yates were starting afresh 
 he would not be so far borne away by the vicious 
 contagion of fashion as to endeavour to sap the 
 digestion of his company by the loaded acidity which 
 is called claret, and the abominable decoctions of 
 sugar and petroleum known as champagne. 
 
 London, Lord Beaconsfield remarked some months 
 before his death, which was once a very dull place, is 
 now a very amusing place, and so from one point of 
 view it is. But the impression left upon the reader 
 who was not personally acquainted with the metro- 
 polis during the first decade of the Victorian era, as 
 he lays down Mr. Yates's volumes, is, that if we have 
 gained considerably, we have also lost not a little. 
 There is much that is cheap and nasty now ; there 
 was much that was cheap and pleasant then. 
 " Timmins's little dinners" had not become regular 
 events, and the trail of Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkins 
 was not over us all. In yet another respect, of a far 
 more important character, was there a distinction 
 between the epoch when Mr. Yates commenced his 
 active existence and the present. No such central 
 figures in literature — Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay 
 — as existed then exist now. The general average of 
 literary productiveness has immensely increased, but 
 the stimulating influences of individual genius, placed 
 upon a high pedestal, have disappeared. Literature, 
 
III.] MEN OF LETTERS ON THEMSELVES. 89 
 
 and especially periodical literature, has become more 
 highly organised, and therefore more of a business. 
 The result has been favourable to the social and moral 
 welfare of the literary class, but it has involved the 
 sacrifice of not a little freshness and of a great deal of 
 fun. 
 
IV. 
 
 LOED HOUGHTON. 
 
 The delusion of comparisons is as dangerous a fallacy 
 in the estimate of character as the falsehood of ex- 
 tremes. If there was ever any man the surest way 
 to misrepresent and misestimate whom would be by 
 resorting to that classification so dear to an age of 
 schoolmasters and auctioneers, it was the late Lord 
 Houghton. Remarkable for many things, he was re- 
 markable chiefly for his strong individuality. He was 
 a great social figure for considerably more than half a 
 century. Yet it would be impossible to place him 
 exclusively in the category of men whose reputation 
 was social alone. A similar remark would hold good 
 if he were looked at from the point of view of ^y 
 other of his more commanding attributes. In the 
 same way, to assert that he was a second-rate poet — 
 the violet a second-rate flower ! — or a politician who 
 never attained political eminence, or a man of letters who 
 never did justice to his literary capacities, or a speaker 
 who missed being an orator, or a student of human 
 nature who never rose to the lofty levels of divine 
 philosophy, would, even if it were true, be to give 
 
IV.] LOBD SOUGHTON. 91 
 
 an altogether false idea of the brilliant and accom- 
 plished man who, less than a fortnight ago,* bade 
 adieu to a prolonged, an eventful, and on the whole 
 a singularly happy existence, in the manner which, 
 above all others, he might have desired : 
 
 Oh, that each of us might die 
 
 When we are at the best, 
 Pass away harmoniously 
 
 To some fitting rest. 
 
 So wrote Milnes in his remonstrance upon the 
 habit — a flat blasphemy against youth as it seemed 
 to him — of using the words, " second childhood," as a 
 synonym for extreme senility. There is nothing 
 specially excellent in the lines, but they embody the 
 aspiration for the Euthanasia that was the lot of 
 their author. There was no dreary interval for him 
 between enforced withdrawal from the world and the 
 end of everything ; no gloomy tarrying in the vesti- 
 bule of death before the final release came. The 
 curtain fell suddenly, and all was over. Fortunate in 
 his life, Milnes would have assuredly esteemed him- 
 self not less fortunate in his death. 
 
 The exceptional circumstances of his earlier days 
 must have tended to sustain and intensify the origi- 
 nality of a fresh and buoyant nature, which never 
 lost the wild charm of being untamed, unsubdued. As a 
 boy he was brought up entirely at home and by private 
 tutors. Whatever disadvantages his inexperience of 
 public school life may have entailed, one can hardly 
 * August nth, 1885. 
 
92 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [iv. 
 
 conceive of any conditions better calculated to stimulate 
 the free play and spontaneous growth of his gifts. 
 Nor were the scenes and the social environment of 
 his boyhood less conducive to this end. Till a short 
 time before he went to Cambridge he lived much in 
 Italy. Who can doubt that it was the free, unfettered 
 life beneath an Italian sky, to the influences of which 
 he was indebted for that abandon which, as it is 
 entirely the reverse of English, is without any English 
 equivalent, and which was the dominant trait of his 
 manner and his mind. Intellectually he was as much 
 the child of Italy as if he had been of Italian birth, 
 nor did the gay idiosyncrasies which he had con- 
 tracted in the South desert him in after years. 
 
 At Cambridge he asserted himself and showed his 
 quality as naturally, and with the same absence of 
 cautious self-restraint that he afterwards showed in 
 the turmoil of what is called London Society. To 
 the social position he was indeed born. His father — 
 " single-speech Milnes " — was a man well know^n. He 
 was offered, and he declined, the post of Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer by Spencer Perceval, as he was 
 subsequently offered and refused a peerage. His son, 
 Kichard Monckton, the future Lord Houghton, 
 married Miss Crewe, a great favourite in that social 
 realm which associated itself with Lansdowne House ; 
 and the house (No. 16, Upper Brook Street) in which 
 Milnes, during many years, collected all that was 
 greatest and most intellectual, and above all most 
 poetical, in the London world, had a " pedigree," if 
 
IV.] LOBD HOUGHTON. 93 
 
 so we may speak, connecting it not only with the 
 famous assemblies of Mrs. Cunliffe Offley (the aunt of 
 Miss Orewe), but also, unless we mistake, with the 
 " Mrs. Crewe and True Blue ! " who answered the 
 Prince of "Wales's toast with her " True Blue and all 
 of you ! " 
 
 Never did there live a poet of any order who was 
 so warm a friend of poets as Milnes. If he loved 
 poetry much he loved the makers of poetry even 
 more. Their merit as poets w^as not with him the 
 only question. What he admired and what interested 
 him was the poetic impulse. On the occasion of one 
 of his daughters' marriages, he especially aimed at 
 securing the company of all the English bards of 
 every degree whose addresses he could discover. Nor 
 should it be forgotten that in his capacity of the 
 poet's friend he placed on record one illustration of 
 his power which will always be gratefully remembered. 
 It was under the counsel of Milnes that the Laureate- 
 ship was conferred on his college friend, Tennyson. 
 Already, as one of that little band of Cambridge 
 undergraduates, surnamed the Apostles, most of 
 whom became famous themselves, he had obtained a 
 hearing for Tennyson, and had, not without difficulty, 
 forced him upon a somewhat reluctant, and, at first, 
 a very much puzzled world. The difficulty of the 
 task and the unattractiveness which the Muse of the 
 new singer had for much of the culture of the da}^, 
 may be judged from a single incident. Miss Berry, 
 one of the brightest and most intellectual women of 
 
94 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [iv. 
 
 her day, piqued herself upon her capacity for keeping 
 pace with the intellect of the younger generations. 
 At the instance of some of the men who, like Milnes, 
 were then preaching up the new poet, she seriously 
 set to work to read Tennyson. Educated in the 
 school of Pope, and habituated to classical models, 
 she could make nothing of him. Perplexed and 
 chagrined, she suspected that she was the victim of an 
 amiable imposture, and full of misgivings proceeded 
 confidentially to interrogate a common friend of her 
 own and Milnes* on the point. 
 
 For the most part Lord Houghton's influence 
 was disproportionate to his position as a leading 
 Member of Parliament, to his abilities, to his social 
 opportunities and rank. Ascendency is to the stern, 
 is perhaps even to the fierce, while Milnes was the 
 most kindly, forgiving, tolerant, and indulgent of 
 men. '^Houghton,'' writes to me one who knew him 
 well, "with all his high gifts, had, like most really 
 noble men, a good deal of the woman in his nature, 
 not only of the gentle, the merciful woman, but also 
 of the woman excelling man by her ready initiative, 
 by her swift sagacity transcendent of the reasoning 
 process, and now and then by her nimble, her clever 
 resort to a charming little bit of stage artifice. My 
 laundress had come to me one day in a flood of tears 
 because her little boy of eleven years old, but looking 
 she said much younger (being small of stature), had 
 wandered off with another little boy of about the 
 same age to a common near London, where they 
 
IV.] LORD HOUGHTON. 95 
 
 found an old mare grazing. The urchins put a hand- 
 kerchief in the mouth of the mare to serve as a bridle, 
 got both of them on her back, and triumphantly rode 
 her off, but were committed to Newgate for horse- 
 stealing ! My laundress (not wanting in means) took 
 measures for having her child duly defended by 
 counsel, but I thought it cruel that the fate of the 
 poor little boy should be resting on the chances of a 
 solemn tri^l, and I mentioned the matter to Milnes. 
 He instantly gave the right counsel. ' Tell your laun- 
 dress to take care that at the trial both the little boys 
 — both, mind — shall appear in nice clean *' pinafores." ' 
 The effect, as my laundress described it to me, was 
 like magic. The'' two little boys in their nice ' pina- 
 fores ' appeared in the dock and smilingly gazed 
 round the court. ' What is the meaning of this ? ' 
 said the judge, who had read the depositions and now 
 saw the 'pinafores.' 'A case of horse-stealing, my 
 lord.' ' Stuff and nonsense ! ' said the judge with 
 indignation* VHorse-stealing, indeed! The boys 
 stole a ride.' Then the 'pinafores' so sagaciously 
 suggested by Milnes had almost an ovation in court, 
 and all who had had to do with the prosecution 
 were made to suffer by the judge's indignant 
 comment." 
 
 There were many other essentially feminine traits 
 in his nature ; prominent among them his love of 
 domestic management. Although he was ever sur- 
 rounded by the ladies of his family, and was com- 
 forted in late years especially by the society of his 
 
96 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [iv. 
 
 sister, Lady Gal way, with whom as a boy he had 
 been brought up, and who devoted herself to him 
 with an affection and assiduity infinitely touching 
 and beautiful, he wrote his notes of invitation with 
 his own hand, and himself made the arrangements for 
 the reception, the departure, and the general enter- 
 tainment of his guests at Fryston. 
 
 It was owing, perhaps, to this womanly element in 
 his nature that he sometimes elicited confessions of a 
 sort not often vouchsafed to men. During one of 
 the divisions on the Jew Emancipation Bill, which 
 was taking place at a time when the success of the 
 measure was virtually assured, Milnes, finding him- 
 self by the side of Disraeli in the Lobby, made bold 
 to congratulate him in his character of a Jew. 
 ''Yes," observed Disraeli, " I am a Jew and a 
 Eadical, and I defy anybody to say I ever pretended 
 the contrary." The true meaning of this little speech, 
 which only stupidity can misconstrue, is obvious. 
 What Disraeli desired to convey was not of course 
 that he had never worn the Church of England and 
 the Tory cockade, but that what he had worn was 
 only, after all, a cockade, and that having enlisted 
 with the Conservatives, he desired to help them for 
 his own sake in fighting their battles, without really 
 playing the hypocrite to the extent of making any 
 intellectual man fancy that he really shared their 
 notions. 
 
 The mention of Mr. Disraeli's name suggests 
 another of Lord Houghton's distinguishing qualities. 
 
IV.] LORD HOUGHTON. 97- 
 
 In a letter written to me by the late Mr. Hayward, 
 eight years ago, apropos of an opinion I had pre- 
 sumed to offer on Lord Houghton, are these words : 
 *' Houghton's is a fine intellect, spoiled by paradox." 
 A paradox is conventionally supposed to imply some- 
 thing in the nature of a contradiction — to involve on 
 the face of it some aggressive inconsistency. One 
 should rather understand by it something that runs 
 counter to the received opinion, and inasmuch as 
 there is always an d priori objection to the truth of 
 whatever does this, every paradox may be thought to 
 bring us to the verge of romance. With Milnes, 
 paradox was generally an instrument either for the 
 suggestion of truth, in which case it served the same 
 logical purpose as analogy, or for stimulating conver- 
 sation and eliciting the opinions of others. 
 
 It was, thus, the precise sort of intellectual weapon 
 natural to one who was not what the French call un 
 homme serieux, who was always pursuing truth tenta- 
 tively, and who, with that aim, loved to throw out 
 views which were not necessarily the less sound 
 because they might be strange. When, for instance, 
 Milnes declared some forty-four years ago that 
 Disraeli, then strange and actually repulsive to the 
 House of Commons, would achieve the highest place 
 in Parliament, he was thought by those who heard 
 him to be uttering a mere piece of uninteresting 
 nonsense. It took the slower world years to learn 
 that he had truly divined the future. An instance of 
 the second kind of paradox, the paradox with a pur- 
 
98 POLITICS AND LBTTEB8. [iv. 
 
 pose, in which Milnes delighted, was the audacity 
 with which, at a dinner table, he once improvised a 
 vindication of deception and falsehood. The object 
 was rendered immediately apparent because it 
 '^drew'^ Carlyle, who proceeded to do exactly that 
 which Milnes had meant him to do, vehemently to 
 take up the cudgels in favour of the Eternal Verities. 
 No one who has ever possessed anything like 
 Lord Houghton's intellectual power has qualified it 
 by so much of sportiveness. And perhaps it would 
 not be wrong if one were to say that intellectual 
 sportiveness and intellectual curiosity were the two 
 dominant " notes " of his mind. In one of his poems, 
 " The Men of Old," he contrasts the old Pagan thinkers 
 and patriots with their latter-day successors. " I 
 know not," he writes, "that the men of old were 
 better than men now." Yet on the whole he gives 
 the palm to the former, of whom he says : 
 
 Blending their soul's sublimest needs 
 
 With tasks of every day, 
 They went about their gravest deeds 
 
 As noble boys at play. 
 
 The words, '^ noble boys," carry with them a 
 touch of illumination to those who have heard Lord 
 Houghton talk of the intellectual friends with whom 
 he lived at Cambridge as his " playfellows " — a pretty, 
 and, on his lips, singularly appropriate expression. 
 He was a worker, but he worked in his own light- 
 hearted fashion ; he was a searcher after truth, but in 
 
IV.] LORD HOUGHTON. 99 
 
 his own easy way. Aristippus, the Cyrenaic, often 
 wished that he could for a short time be a woman, 
 and there was a heroine of Greek mythology, Csenis, 
 who, prompted by an analogous motive, actually suc- 
 ceeded in effecting a corresponding transformation, 
 and was henceforth known as Cseneus. If Milnes 
 never gave articulate utterance to the wish of Aris- 
 tippus, he at least went so far in that path as to 
 play Shakespeare's Beatrice in some theatricals at 
 Cambridge. There was much, as will be presently 
 pointed out, in common between the genius of 
 Houghton and the genius of the poets of classical 
 Hellas. He resembled, too, the more restless of the 
 Hellenic speculators by the intensity of his intel- 
 lectual inquisitiveness. His impassioned eagerness, 
 ever of an intellectual kind, distinguished him from 
 all other people. 
 
 "If," writes to me the friend from whose instructive 
 letter I have already quoted, " you had had the devil 
 himself staying with you, Houghton would have almost 
 turned you out of your own house, in order to learn 
 all that your guest could tell him ; would have turned 
 the conversation abruptly to the subject of * hoofs 
 and horns ; ' would have asked whether the prowess 
 of the Angel Michael was not greatly exaggerated ; 
 and would not have gone away till he had mastered 
 the whole subject of the Evil One, and his relations 
 with the heavens above and the earth below. He 
 never, like other young men, affected a love of 
 dangers ; but under the impulsion of insatiable 
 
 H 2 
 
100 POLITICS AND LETTEES. [iv. 
 
 curiosity he would brave anything. I once knew 
 him go up in a balloon. This, a descent in a diving- 
 bell excepted, was probably the only achievement 
 approximating to athletic which Lord Houghton ever 
 attempted. Prodigious though as a young man, and 
 even as a man matured or advanced in years, his 
 energy was, it displayed itself always in an intellectual 
 field. He was never a sportsman. He never hunted 
 and he never shot." 
 
 There can be little doubt that what constituted to 
 a large extent Lord Houghton's intellectual and social 
 charm was an obstacle in the way of his political 
 advancement. He was not naturally a good speaker. 
 Such, however, were the pains which he took with 
 himself that he ended by acquiring the art, and what 
 he once said to the Prince of Wales, " The two best 
 after-dinner speakers, sir, are your Eoyal Highness 
 and myself," was literally true. On occasions of a 
 graver character he never commanded an equal suc- 
 cess. The intellectual inquirer was so prominent in 
 his nature, that although he might speak quite 
 positively without uttering a word which tended 
 to disclose the arriere-pensee, he always found it 
 impossible to induce his hearers to take him in 
 earnest. There is reason to suppose that he was 
 well aware of this difiiculty. What he lacked by 
 nature he endeavoured to make good by art. 
 He even went so far as to assume in his speeches 
 a kind of gravity or solemnity absolutely foreign 
 to himself. Undertaking once at the Cambridge 
 
IV.] LOBD HOUGHTON. ''"''"" ' ' lOl 
 
 Union to deliver an oration glorifying the genius of 
 Milton, he attempted to rise worthily to the height 
 of his great argument by reverently calling the 
 author of "Paradise Lost" Mr. Milton. As an 
 inevitable result, he threw the whole assembly into 
 ^roars of laughter. 
 
 No one had a larger store of learning or of 
 precepts on the subject of oratory in the House 
 of Commons, and many are they who have profited 
 by his counsels. Yet he could not practise what 
 he preached. He could not make his audience 
 take him as un homme serieux. One need not, 
 therefore, wonder that he failed to obtain the official 
 rank which he coveted. His intellect indeed was 
 so bright, so discursive, and his individuality so 
 splendidly strong, that he was not a man to be put in 
 a team under the harness of the public service. Yet 
 he did not think so himself, and was eager to take 
 office, singling out the most laborious office in the 
 world — the Under-Secretaryship of Foreign Affiiirs ; 
 and, as his abilities were universally recognised, his 
 knowledge vast, his speaking fully good enough for 
 the purpose, and his acquaintance with public men 
 abroad and at home almost universal, whilst, more- 
 over, he enjoyed the esteem and confidence of Sir 
 Eobert Peel, the Prime Minister, and was afterwards 
 on terms of friendship with Lord and Lady Palmer- 
 ston, it might seem that there was absolutely nothing 
 to prevent his attaining the object in view ; but the 
 one cause of the obstruction was assigned by Lady 
 
' lOii ' ' ' ■'•'■''' POLJTIGS AND LETTERS. [iv. 
 
 Palmerston, in three words spoken one day when 
 Palmerston was forming a Government. To a friend 
 of hers who had mentioned Milnes praisingly, she 
 said simply, " Yes, but I observe that men smile when 
 they speak of him, as if they did not think him quite 
 serious." 
 
 Speaking of the Palmerstons, " Milnes," again to 
 quote my correspondent, " was with them at Broad- 
 lands in the Christmas of 1851, when no other guest 
 was in the house. All at once — I think in the even- 
 ing — there came a despatch, brought by a Queen's 
 messenger. Palmerston read the despatch quietly 
 without betraying any emotion, or even any particular 
 interest, and handed it silently to Lady Palmerston. 
 She seized its import at a glance, and putting no 
 restraint upon herself burst out into violent wrath. 
 The despatch was one from ' Lord John/ simply dis- 
 missing Palmerston from his office of Secretary of 
 State for Foreign Affairs ! The blow was the more 
 startling, since ' dismissal ' — unmitigated, unveiled 
 * dismissal ' under any such conditions — had at that 
 time become obsolete. I dare say Milnes to the 
 utmost of his kindly nature shared the indignation of 
 Lady Palmerston ; but he loved the drama, and could 
 not have helped being interested by seeing a blow 
 delivered so apparently powerful and decisive, yet 
 destined, as perhaps he foresaw, to be after all so 
 harmless. Before many more weeks had passed, the 
 tables were turned on ' Lord John.' " 
 
 There is a sense in which this great lover of 
 
IV.] LOBD HOUGHTON. 103 
 
 paradox illustrated in his life a paradox far more 
 striking than any of those which he ever propounded 
 in speech. Forced by the eagerness of his nature to 
 be always in a crowd, whether in London society, in 
 assemblies of politicians, of philanthropists, of poets, 
 of philosophers and publicists, he was yet at heart the 
 least gregarious of men. In his mind, at least, he 
 never "trooped,'' never "flocked," never "herded" 
 with any of the myriads of his fellow-creatures. 
 Perhaps the man himself never spoke more sincerely, 
 or more from the depths of his heart than in what, 
 though I believe it has been vulgarised by being set 
 to jingling music, is one of the finest and pro- 
 foundest of his poems, " Strangers Yet." Take these 
 
 two stanzas : 
 
 Strangers yet ! 
 After strife for common ends, 
 After title of " old friends," 
 After passions fierce and tender, 
 After cheerful self-surrender 
 Hearts may beat and eyes be met, 
 And the souls be strangers yet. 
 
 Strangers yet ! 
 Oh, the bitter thought to scan 
 All the loneliness of man. 
 Nature, by magnetic laws. 
 Circle unto circle draws, 
 But they only touch when met, 
 Never mingle — strangers yet. 
 
 It was not any instinctive tendency to go in the 
 
 beaten track of humanity but the inexhaustible kind- 
 
 . ness of his own good heart which bound him to his 
 
104 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [iv. 
 
 beloved fellow- creatures. AVhether this individuality 
 would have remained throughout so strong, whether 
 he would have always stood firm as a rock against 
 the examples of people about him, but for the con- 
 ditions under which he had been brought up, his 
 home education and the early Italianisation, to use a 
 barbarous compound, of his mind, may be doubted. 
 But of the fact itself there can be no doubt whatever. 
 The merit and beauty of Lord Houghton's poetic 
 performances are in an inverse ratio to their length. 
 He is seen at his best, his thought is most felicitous 
 and his diction most polished, in his shorter pieces. 
 He was, as Lord Beaconsfield described him, under 
 the guise of Mr. Vavasour in '' Tancred " — a descrip- 
 tion so admirable that it practically exhausts the 
 man — " a poet and a real poet." But then " his life 
 was a gyration of energetic curiosity ; an insatiable 
 whirl of social celebrity. There was not a congre- 
 gation of sages and philosophers in any part of 
 Europe which he did not attend as a brother. He 
 was present at the camp of Kalisch in his yeomanry 
 uniform, and assisted at the festivals of Barcelona in 
 an Andalusian jacket." An existence of this kind 
 could not but have the effect of withdrawing atten- 
 tion from his poetry. Speech in the House of Lords ; 
 meeting at Marlborough House ; speech by the chair- 
 man of this society ; speech by the chairman of that 
 - — no one reading of these labours every day in his 
 Times would incline to turn from his newspaper to 
 the lovely poems of Milnes' early days ; and it is only 
 
IV.] LOBB HOUGHTON. 105 
 
 now, when the grave has closed over him, that he 
 will cease to intercept the public appreciation of his 
 works. For years together a great critic, who never 
 tired of declaring his exalted estimate of Houghton's 
 genius, used to work himself into a perfect fury of 
 passion at the spectacle of his poet appearing so con- 
 stantly in public life. 
 
 Intense sympathy is, perhaps, the key-note of 
 Houghton's poetry, as it is of his character. He did 
 not describe so much as interpret. Instead of draw- 
 ing a mere picture of Oriental personalities, or of the 
 heroes of the old Greek mythology, he identified him- 
 self with them, and told the world what they felt. 
 Other poets, proceeding objectively, produced more 
 or less frigid and inanimate presentments of the 
 heathen life of Hellas, or of the sensuous existence of 
 the gorgeous past. Houghton brought the subjec- 
 tive treatment to bear on old times and made them 
 aglow with the warmth of actual being. Contrast 
 the treatment of classical themes, as shown in " The 
 Tomb of Laius " or '' The Flowers of Helicon," with 
 the treatment of Shelley or Keats. Contrast his 
 handling of the life of the harem with that of Moore, 
 and a difference, as between that of life and death, at 
 once discloses itself. 
 
 Houghton loved to linger on the borders of 
 wonderland. He was for ever labouring to believe. 
 There was no mystery of the hour in which he did 
 not strive to initiate himself. As it was with thought- 
 reading, so had it previously been with table-turning. 
 
106 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [iv. 
 
 No yearning could be more insatiate than his to find 
 that the destiny of poor mortality might not, after 
 all, be so narrow, so meaningless, as science demon- 
 strated it to be. He was enamoured of credulity ; 
 and although his keen, clear intellect and his sense 
 of the ludicrous prevented the gratification of his 
 passion, he still held that, impossible as it was to 
 push his search after knowledge beyond the limits 
 inexorably set, there still might be bliss, actual bliss, 
 in belief resting on fancy. " We would," he writes 
 in *'Anima Mundi :" 
 
 We would, indeed, be somewise as Thou art, 
 
 Not spring and bud, and flower, and fade, and fall, 
 
 Not lix our intellects on some scant part 
 Of nature, but enjoy or feel it all. 
 
 We would assert the privilege of a soul, 
 
 In that it knows to understand the whole. 
 
 The lines italicised seem exactly to explain the 
 attitude of Houghton's intellect towards the pro- 
 blems of the universe. He was, as he may have 
 called himself in the lines entitled "The Peace of 
 God," " this life's inquiring traveller," endlessly busy 
 with the unravelling of complicated truths and the 
 solution of dark enigmas, ever analysing the complex 
 aggregate of human sentiment, ever impressed by the 
 hidden analogies and resemblances of things, now 
 ready to elevate the creations of his fancy to the 
 dignity of immortal verities, now asking whether 
 there be such a thing at all as Truth. 
 
 In some of the most exquisite of his earlier verses 
 
IV.] LOBB HOUGHTON. 107 
 
 he laments the rapid, irretrievable passing away of 
 youth. '* Youth," he exclaims, "is gone away; 
 cruel, cruel youth ! " And he concludes : 
 
 We are cold, very cold — 
 All our blood is drying old, 
 And a terrible heart-dearth 
 Eeigns for us in heaven and earth. 
 Forth we stretch our chilly fingers 
 In poor effort to attain 
 Tepid embers, where still lingers 
 Soul-preserving warmth, in vain. 
 
 But the youth whose flight the poet deplores is 
 not merely the freshness of man's existence, it is the 
 freshness of the world. It is more than the indi- 
 vidual man that is growing old, it is the round earth 
 and everything that is thereon. The ancients were 
 the youths of humanity ; we moderns, as Bacon said, 
 are the true ancients. Houghton bewails the disap- 
 pearance of the primitive Paganism of mankind as if 
 it were a personal loss which he had himself sus- 
 tained. He writes on all these subjects like one born 
 out of his due time. In those days in which he seems 
 to say he fain would have lived, there was no depress- 
 ing consciousness of the world's failures, there w^ere 
 no gloomy yesterdays of aspirations baffled and sor- 
 rows accumulated on which to look back. The retro- 
 spect was bright in fancy ; the prospect glorious with 
 hope. What matter if the heathens of classic antiquity 
 lived in an atmosphere of vain imaginings, and fed 
 themselves only on the fictions of their fancy. It was 
 
108 POLITICS AND LETTEBS. [iv. 
 
 enough for them ; their fancies were to them as facts, 
 and they therefore supplied a faith. 
 
 The feeling which Houghton betrays in his clas- 
 sical poems towards these men is one of almost 
 passionate envy. With such thoughts the poetry of 
 his best and earliest period is charged. He realised 
 and gave articulate expression to the sentiments and 
 aspirations of Pagan antiquity with an enthusiasm 
 and pathos that in their way have never been sur- 
 passed and seldom approached. Again and again he 
 speaks as from the very soul of one of his Hellenic 
 heroes or favourites who were troubled by no doubt 
 that their worthy resolves would be sanctioned by the 
 approving thunders of Zeus, might even be followed 
 by counsels from the lips of Pallas Athene herself. 
 He could not, like the Emperor Julian, undertake to 
 bring back into life the past which he loved so much 
 by any positive edict, but he could testify his desire 
 to do so, he could proclaim his sympathy with the 
 vanished epoch through the mouth of his muse. As 
 in Edward Bunbury's great history of ^'Ancient Geo- 
 graphy" and its illustrative maps we see the small 
 circlet of territories within the ring-fence of Oceanus, 
 which was all that had then been irradiated by the 
 mind and imagination of Greece, so under the spell of 
 Houghton's genius the circlet becomes all aglow with 
 the rapturous fervour of a life illumined and glorified, 
 and almost created by poetry. 
 
TWO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS— 
 EOME AND LONDON, a.d. 408 and 1875. 
 
 If any one wishes to study a microcosm and epitome 
 of the grand world in London, as it is to be seen 
 during the present season, let him go to Hyde Park 
 on what day he will between the hours of five and 
 seven p.m. He will find no single feature in our 
 fashionable civilisation unrepresented. Vienna may 
 have its Prater, Berlin its Unter den Linden, Eome 
 its Corso and its Pincian, Paris its Bois de Boulogne, 
 New York its Broadway, St. Petersburg its Nevske 
 Perspective. The spectacle of the Row in the season 
 is unrivalled in either hemisphere. Thirty years ago 
 the number of well-appointed equipages, which "a 
 stranger, seated on the rails near our great captain's 
 statue, might see pass before him to the Mall in all 
 the pomp of aristocratic pride," within the space of 
 two hours, was calculated by '' Nimrod " at a thou- 
 sand ; that estimate, to be adequate, should now be 
 quadrupled. "Old Seneca," writes the chronicler of 
 the Chase, the Turf, and the Road, best known by 
 
no POLITICS AND LETTERS. [v. 
 
 Lis already-mentioned 7iom de plume, *' tells us such 
 a blaze of splendour was once to be seen on the 
 Appian Way. It might be so ; it is now to be seen 
 nowhere but in London." 
 
 To discover something like a prototype for Eotten 
 Row and the London season, it is not necessary to travel 
 the full interval of time which separates us from the 
 age of the great Stoic moralist. Let us ask the reader 
 to suppose himself in the thick of a Roman season, two 
 hundred years and more after Lucius Annseus Seneca 
 had bequeathed to his friends and to posterity "the 
 image of his life." We are, in fact, in Pagano-Christian 
 Rome, about the date 408 of this era of grace. Society 
 Lad its historians, its satirists, and its preachers, 
 pretty much as society has now. It had, too, its 
 follies, its foibles, its extravagances, much after the 
 pattern which Babylon sets the world to-day. For 
 our edification the records of all these survive. Am- 
 mianus Marcellinus and the Cbristian Fathers them- 
 selves abound in sketches which have the stamp of 
 truth, and we must be dull indeed if we miss their 
 application to our own epoch. It is overpoweringly 
 hot in the Seven-hilled City. The Roman season of 
 408 languishes to its end. But the cypresses which 
 line the Appian Way cast as grateful a sLadow as the 
 elms which flank Rotten Row. The gorgeously-deco- 
 rated carriages are surmounted with skilfully-devised 
 awnings, and tall footmen, stationed on the splash- 
 board behind, hold over the heads of patrician dames 
 gilded umbrellas with silken folds. 
 
v.] TWO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS. Ill 
 
 Still it is " quite too awful, this heat : how de- 
 licious to be in Iceland ! " It was not exactly in this 
 language that the Roman ladies of the period ex- 
 pressed themselves, but if Ammianus Marcellinus is 
 to be trusted, the sentiment conveyed was identical. 
 " Should a sunbeam," he writes, ** penetrate through 
 some unguarded and imperceptible chink they deplore 
 their intolerable hardships, and lament in aflfected 
 language that they were not born in the land of the 
 Cimmerians, the region of eternal darkness." The 
 crowd of carriages — carrucce is the name given them 
 by the Roman historian, and they may be said 
 roughly to correspond to our modern barouches — 
 grows denser every minute. At the first mile-stone 
 from the Servian gates, and from thence to the tomb 
 of the Scipios, hard by the hollow of the Aqua Crabra, 
 the equipages press so closely on each other that they 
 can only proceed at a snail's pace. Nearer to the 
 city still, as the road becomes a street, and is inter- 
 sected by various thoroughfares, the stream of vehicles 
 disperses in different directions, and the equipages of 
 matrons and ladies set off at a sharp trot '* round the 
 immense space of the city and suburbs. Their long 
 robes of silk and purple float in the wind, and as they 
 are agitated by art or accident they occasionally dis- 
 cover the rich tunics embroidered with the figures of 
 various animals." 
 
 Are the fair occupants of the carrucce supplied to 
 the present generation by such purveyors as Messrs. 
 Laurie aiid Marner ignorant of similar innocent little 
 
112 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [v. 
 
 devices for displaying the elegant fit of a bodice, or 
 the graceful fold of a mantilla ? 
 
 But Eotten Eow is not exclusively dedicated to 
 the presence of ladies whose social position is well- 
 defined and indisputable. The half- world of M. Dumas 
 supplies a conspicuous contingent. The Marchioness 
 of Carabas's victoria is immediately followed by 
 Anonyma and her ponies. A very considerable 
 sensation was once caused in Hyde Park by the 
 pertinacity with which a certain Liliputian equi- 
 page, drawn by a pair of miniature horses, on 
 one of which was seated a diminutive postilion, made 
 its appearance within the fashionable enclosure day 
 after day ; and great ladies, while betraying signs of 
 deep curiosity as to the status and the antecedents of 
 the proprietress of this bijou vehicle, were heard to 
 express their disgust at the frequent signs of recog- 
 nition which she elicited from the gilded youth and 
 the more patriarchal dandies grouped on the adjacent 
 footpath. Strangely enough Ammianus indicates 
 something very like a parallel to this. " If," he tells 
 us, and he is speaking of the Koman nobles, "in 
 their places of mixed and general resort they meet 
 any of their favourites they do not refrain from open 
 salutation." Unless Chrysostom grievously exagge- 
 rates the phenomena of his age, institutions closely 
 analogous to the afternoon teas which attract a con- 
 siderable proportion of the members of two Pall Mall 
 Clubs to the neighbourhood of St. John's Wood and 
 South Belgravia, were not unknown to the young 
 
v.] TWO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS. 113 
 
 officers of the Imperial army, taking their holi- 
 day in the Seven-hilled City after the labours of 
 an arduous campaign among the border tribes of 
 Scythia. 
 
 Nothing can be more dramatically complete than 
 the entire picture presented by the historian, on 
 whom the author of the '* Decline and Fall " has so 
 largely drawn, of high life at E^me, and of the 
 characters and customs of an aristocracy which had 
 long since lost its influence, because it systematically 
 ignored its duties. And a new aristocracy, that of 
 wealth, had asserted its existence in the social hie- 
 rarchy of Kome. In nineteenth-century London, a 
 good many highly respectable people flaunt armorial 
 bearings, crests, and mottoes, to which they have no 
 legal or heraldic claim, and are supplied by obliging 
 dealers with faithful portraits of a remote and mythical 
 ancestry. Changes of patronymic are not unknown. 
 Neither were they unknown in the epoch of which 
 Ammianus gives us a faithful narrative. These 
 shoddyites — plebecula is the Latin expression — 
 " contend," he remarks, " with each other in the 
 empty vanity of titles and surnames — curiously select 
 or invent the most lofty and sonorous appellations." 
 Thus some wretched terrcB Jilius who had made his 
 fortune by a successful venture in Asiatic merchandise 
 or Greek fruit, would from plain Faber, swagger before 
 the Koman world as Reburrus or Fabunius, Pagonius 
 or Tarrasinus — titles, observes our author, " which 
 seem to impress the ears of the vulgar with astonish- 
 
 I 
 
114 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [v. 
 
 merit and respect. From a vain ambition," he con- 
 tinues, " of perpetuating their memory, they affect to 
 multiply their likenesses in statues of bronze and 
 marble." Have we not here something like an antici- 
 pation of those ''Portraits of a Gentleman" which 
 now form so prominent a feature in the annual exhi- 
 bition at Burlington House ? 
 
 Let us select another point of coincidence between 
 the two cities and the two seasons. The gambling 
 hells of London no longer exist. But is the social 
 reform which we pride ourselves on having consum- 
 mated genuine ? If we have no Crockford's, have we 
 no Arlington and no Portland ? If we do not play 
 high in public, what passes in private ? If there are 
 no organisations out of doors for the promotion of 
 ecarte and roulette, is there any person at all ac- 
 quainted with the vie intime of Mayfair and St. 
 James's who cannot mention half-a-dozen domiciles, 
 pretty and innocent enough as to their exterior, but 
 to which no visitor would be welcome after the 
 shades of night had fallen, unless he was willing to 
 stake sums for something more than " fun " or 
 *' love," on the turn of the dice or the colour of the 
 cards. Are there no Becky Sharpes and Eawdon 
 Crawleys to preside over such delightful little estab- 
 lishments as these ? " Another method," we quote 
 the garrulously circumstantial chronicler, *' of intro- 
 duction into the houses and society of the great is 
 derived from the profession of gaming, or, as it is 
 more politely styled, of play. The confederates are 
 
v.] TWO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS. 115 
 
 united by a strict and indissoluble bond of friend- 
 ship, or rather of conspiracy : a superior degree of 
 skill in the Tesserarian art (which may be interpreted 
 the game of dice and tables) is a sure road to 
 wealth and reputation." Captain Deuceace and Mr. 
 Eocketer may be glad to know that they each of 
 them have their prototypes in Ammianus Marcellinus. 
 Perhaps if we could recover some of the lost books of 
 Ammianus' history, we should read of the woes of 
 ''plungers " and the sorrows of " pigeons." 
 
 The effect produced on the reader of these records 
 resembles that which follows on a survey of the 
 excavated remains at Herculaneum and Pompeii. 
 We are brought face to face with a civilisation which, 
 as we gaze at it, lives again. The Koman nobles of 
 whom Ammianus tells us are not phantoms — they 
 are realities. We can see their consequential swagger 
 as they walk in the direction of the Campus Martins ; 
 our eyes are blinded by the dust-clouds raised by 
 their whirling equipages ; we are conscious of ofifence 
 at the contemptuous arrogance of their manner ; we 
 do not fail to see the settled sneer that curls upon 
 their upper lip. If we were to follow them, after the 
 conclusion of their drive through the Appian Way, 
 into their palaces grouped on or around the hills of 
 the city, we should be impressed with a sense rather 
 of glare and glitter than of elegance or comfort. Mr. 
 Disraeli, in one of his novels, has described a certain 
 order of banquets as marked by *' coarse plenty and 
 barbaric splendour." In the great houses of Pagan o- 
 
 I 2 
 
116 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [v. 
 
 Christian Rome there was magnificence rather than 
 grandeur, luxury rather than refinement. The dinners 
 and suppers of the aristocracy were conceived on a 
 scale of gorgeous abundance ; there was a dazzling 
 profusion of plate ; the air was heavy with perfumes 
 of sickly sweetness ; but there was an absence of all 
 humanising influences. The impression conveyed by 
 a perusal of such a treatise as Muller's opus magnum 
 on the '' Genius, the Character, and the Learning 
 of the Age of Theodosius" is one of ostentatious 
 vulgarity. 
 
 Yet even in the chapter of Ammianus on the 
 Eoman nobility there are one or two brief passages 
 not unsuggestive of a certain degree of parallelism. 
 As we read of proud and wealthy senators who 
 " when in the country welcome a casual acquaintance 
 with such warm professions and such kind inquiries 
 that he retires enchanted with the aff'ability of his 
 illustrious friend, and full of regret that he had so 
 long delayed his journey to Rome ; " as we hear the 
 sequel — how when the provincial makes the solicited 
 visit to his potens amicus in the capital, at his town 
 house, " he is mortified by the discovery that his 
 person, his name, and his county are already for- 
 gotten," are we not reminded of the episode in which 
 a well-known personage replying on the flag-stones of 
 Pall Mall to the eff'usive salutation of a rural acquaint- 
 ance, said that as he had known him in the country 
 before, so he should be happy to know him when he 
 was in the country again ? While rustic cousins were 
 
v.] TWO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS. 117 
 
 uot more courted in Eome than in London, foreigners 
 were in a measure the fashion. My Lord Fabunius, 
 Viscount Pagonius, or Earl Tarrasinus welcomed with 
 open arms the stranger who hailed from Athens or 
 the shores of the Levant. There are members of the 
 peerage in England who appear to believe that a 
 sea voyage has the same effect upon the human 
 character as on wine, and who extend to the 
 smallest of Transatlantic authors a reception which 
 they would shudder to give to a man of letters of 
 their own country. 
 
 Let us suppose that the Eoman season of the year 
 408 A.D. is over, and that the representatives of Eoman 
 fashion have retired from the capital for the purpose 
 of recruiting after its fatigues — even as in August 
 the broken hearts of London will wing their flight to 
 Scarborough and the blighted beings find refuge at 
 Cowes. Italy had both its Cowes and its Scar- 
 borough. The painted galleys which sailed upon the 
 waters of the Lucrine lake, w^hat were they but the 
 forerunners of the fairy craft which flit up and down 
 the Solent ? We have heard of yachtsmen who 
 object upon principle to lose sight of their clubhouse 
 on the coast, and who are careful not to go so far in 
 their expeditions as to be unable to recognise the 
 signal which a kindly chef displays communicating 
 to them the contents of the dinner menu of the day. 
 The fine ladies and gentlemen who trusted themselves 
 to the surface of the Mediterranean off Baise and 
 Cayeta were, we gather from Ammianus, very fair- 
 
118 POLITICS AND LETTEBS. [v. 
 
 weather sailors indeed. '* Sometimes," writes this 
 Due de Gramont of his age, *' these heroes undertake 
 more arduous achievements — they visit their estates 
 in Italy, and procure themselves by the toil of servile 
 hands the amusement of the chase." 
 
 Did Ammianus intend to make any prophetic 
 allusion to the modern battue f Before we quit this 
 part of our subject, let us give a further extract from 
 our historian. '^The acquisition of knowledge seldom 
 engages the curiosity of the nobles, who abhor the 
 fatigue and disdain the advantages of study. . . . 
 But the costly instruments of the theatre, flutes and 
 enormous lyres, are constructed for their use; and 
 the harmony of vocal and instrumental music is 
 incessantly repeated in the palaces of Eome. In 
 those palaces sound is preferred to sense, and the 
 care of the body to that of the mind. . . . The 
 distress which follows and chastises extravagant 
 luxury often reduces the great to the use of the most 
 humiliating expedients, and when they desire to 
 borrow they employ the base and supplicatory style of 
 the slave in the comedy." We think it was Mr. Gaston 
 Phoebus who said that the great point in the training 
 of our governing classes is that they never "read." 
 Have not the theatre and its accompaniments become 
 of late a fashion to an extent only known since the 
 model of social Paris has been set up and worshipped 
 in London ? While as for the Nemesis of insolvency 
 which dogged the footsteps of the " extravagant " 
 habits of the nobles in the reign of Honorius and 
 
v.] TWO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS. 119 
 
 Constantine, has it been unknown since the accession 
 of Queen Victoria ? 
 
 The question of the populousness of Eome at 
 this period is one which, notwithstanding the im- 
 mense amount of speculation and research that it 
 has excited, has not been settled. Whether we fix 
 the number of its inhabitants at 1,200,000, or at 
 little more than half that sura, it is at least certain 
 that in the dense crowding of its dwellings, in its 
 close and vivid contrasts between pauperism and 
 opulence, in the local proximity of the dens of squalor 
 and misery to the palaces of a profligate aristocracy, 
 Eome resembled London more nearly than any other 
 city has ever done before or since. Then, as now, 
 St. James and St. Giles were next-door neighbours, 
 and had some Koman senator cared to take up such 
 a social question, he might have found abundant 
 material for a measure analogous to Mr. Cross's 
 " Eookeries Bill." Into such matters as these the 
 great world of Pagan o-Christian Eome did not care 
 to inquire ; and the languid ladies who wore all kinds 
 of devotional and religious devices embroidered on 
 their dainty robes — even as our own ''girls of the 
 period '^ burden their bosoms with crosses, and show 
 a penchant for Brummagem rosaries — bestowed not a 
 thought upon the wretched, ragged specimens of 
 humanity whom they encountered in the course of 
 their afternoon drive. Yet these high-born dames 
 and demoiselles prided themselves above all things on 
 the orthodoxy of their theological faith. The religion 
 
120 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [v. 
 
 of Christianity had already become highly fashion- 
 able at Kome. Six years before the Gothic siege, 
 St. Melania returned to the Italian capital after 
 an absence of some duration for purposes of piety. 
 On this occasion, as we learn from Paulinus No- 
 lanus, the Appian Way was one uninterrupted blaze 
 of splendid carriages, containing the wives and 
 daughters of the chief nobles and senators of the 
 city, magnificently dressed in the most elaborate 
 toilets which the costumiers of the age could 
 manufacture. 
 
 Kome had, in truth, come out to meet and greet 
 thq fashionable saint in much the same way that 
 London debouches into Hyde Park when the Princess 
 of Wales, for the first time in the season, comes forth 
 to gladden with her presence the eyes of the motley 
 concourse at the West End. A motley group, too, it 
 was which welcomed, a.d. 402, the divine Melania to 
 the city of her adoption. There, in the midst of a 
 throng, habited in a multitude of fashions, and re- 
 splendent with all the colours of the rainbow, were a 
 sprinkling of men and women whose garments and 
 whose mien struck the eye as a protest against the 
 levity and ostentation of the crowd — w^omen in serge 
 dresses and with covered faces ; men who, as they 
 hurried onwards to catch a glimpse of her whom 
 Heaven was supposed to have visited with such ex- 
 ceptional marks of favour, muttered a prayer under 
 their breath, descril)ed upon their breast the sign 
 of the cross, made a gesture, as who would say, 
 
v.] TJVO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS, 121 
 
 Apage, Satanas ! while their toga of coarsest cloth or 
 untarmed skin trailed behind. 
 
 It was these latter who constituted the Eoman 
 clergy, and who were the spiritual guides, pastors, 
 and confessors of the feminine rank and fashion of 
 the Eternal City. The resemblance presented by the 
 interior of a fashionable church at Eome to what is 
 to be witnessed any Sunday at any one of the 
 Ritualistic establishments in London must have been 
 curiously close. 
 
 In a church that is furnished with mullion and gahle, 
 With nave and with chancel, with reredos and groin, 
 
 The penitents' dresses are sealskin and sable, 
 The odour of sanctity's Eau de Cologne. 
 
 But only could Lucifer flying from Hades 
 
 Gaze down on this crowd with its panniers and paints. 
 
 He would say, as he looked at the lords and the ladies, 
 " Oh, where is All Sinners, if this is All Saints T' 
 
 So has written an epigrammatist of our day, and 
 there are passages in the writings of St. Chrysostom, 
 St. Ambrose, and St. Augustine which read like 
 ancient homilies on the modern text. The w^omen, 
 we are told by these Fathers of the Church, take their 
 places and offer up their prayers loaded with rings 
 and chains. The air is filled with strange scents 
 and exquisite odours. Eeligion itself is made sub- 
 servient to vanity and display. Even in the House 
 of God matrons wear their hair brought up to an 
 enormous height, especially affecting the golden dye 
 [mark these w^ords !] from which propensity they are 
 
122 POLITICS AND LETTEBS. [v. 
 
 not to be deterred by any motives of religion. In a 
 similar vein St. Jerome, reviewing the persoimel of 
 the congregation which attended his own chapel, 
 asks, in one of his sermons, '' What business have 
 rouge and paint on a Christian cheek ? Who can 
 weep for her sins as she hears the just wrath and sure 
 judgments announced, if she knows that the tears 
 will wash her face bare and leave furrows on her 
 skin ? With what trust can faces be lifted up 
 towards heaven which the Maker cannot recognise 
 as His workmanship ? " St. Gregory of Nazianzen, 
 while preaching a funeral sermon on his sister 
 Gorgon ia, takes the opportunity of satirising the 
 feminine follies and foibles of the day, and by 
 anticipation, of a day also for which the world was 
 to wait some fourteen centuries. " Her only orna- 
 ments," quoth the saintly pulpiteer in reference to 
 the object of his panegyric, " were pure manners 
 and a pure air. She wore no jewels, no fine trans- 
 parent robes, no hair crisped, no extravagant head- 
 dress, no paint, no false colours. Gorgonia's red was 
 given by modesty, her white by fasting." ** Those 
 pigments," exclaims TertuUian, '' that ye use for your 
 cheeks, that red dye which ye place upon your lips, 
 that black with which ye mark your eyebrows — 
 what are they but open disdain for God's work ? 
 In God's likeness ye were made, and of that 
 similitude ye do your utmost to destroy all trace." 
 
 Yet, notwithstanding these very plain animadver- 
 sions, delivered Sunday after Sunday from the pulpits 
 
v.] TWO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS. 123 
 
 of the Eoman churches against the iniquities of fashion, 
 the clergy were high in fashionable favour, and their 
 sermons were listened to by overflowing congre- 
 gations. The Eoman ladies appear to have had the 
 same taste in the matter of pulpit oratory as that 
 attributed by Mrs. Oliphant in ''Chronicles of Car- 
 lingford " to one of her heroines, and to have been 
 chiefly attracted by *' real, rousing-up discourses." 
 One preacher might say that " women had always 
 some contest with saints ; and that the enmity 
 of Jezebel to Eli as, and of Herodias to John the 
 Baptist, was typical of a strife that was being- 
 waged every day in the world." Tertullian might 
 blindly exclaim, *' You women are the cause of the 
 sin of the world, and yet you delight thus to attract 
 notice to yourselves ; " or might, by a fanciful com- 
 bination of ideas, carry his hearers in thought 
 from the serpent to the devil, and from the devil 
 to womankind by the following images : " Pearls, 
 which are the ornaments of women, are taken out 
 of the heads of serpents : this only was wanting 
 to Christian women to be indebted to the serpent 
 for the improvement of their beauty." Is this the 
 way in which they seek to carry out the spirit of 
 the prophecy, '' She shall bruise his head " ? 
 
 Nor was Chrysostom more reserved or compli- 
 mentary. ''Your fine linen," he said, "will not 
 shield you from the flame ; your purple will not 
 keep ofi" the fire of hell." There is nothing to 
 show that these expostulations and invectives pro- 
 
124 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [v. 
 
 duced much in the way of result. It was to no 
 purpose that these patristic Boanerges reminded 
 their flocks that they were told by the inspired 
 Word to work out their salvation with fear and 
 trembling, and yet that, in the face of this Divine 
 information, they appeared before Him week after 
 week, with faces confident and satisfied, as if their 
 silks, their laces, ponderous buckles and diamonds, 
 could purchase safety for their souls. If " the body 
 of a little woman could be made to bear a load of 
 riches, and carry about with it an entire estate," did 
 the wearer of that wealth remember that, as she had 
 brought nothing into the world so she could take 
 nothing out ? When St. Jerome, as he thundered 
 forth his eloquent and impassioned diatribes against 
 the sins of his generation, saw depicted on the 
 countenances of his hearers a keenly critical plea- 
 sure, and recognised in their manner a tendency to 
 demonstrate their approval by words and signs, he 
 indignantly deprecated any such manifestation. " Let 
 me," he cried, *' hear rather the groans of the people 
 than their acclamations ; let the only applause given 
 me be their tears." 
 
 At this period no fewer than thirty-nine churches 
 existed on the sites of Pagan temples. The Bishop 
 of Eome had already become a considerable personage 
 in the realm. His power was supreme over the 
 urban clergy, and extended to a wide suburbicarian 
 district as well. The clerical establishment which he 
 ruled in the city itself was composed of forty-six 
 
v.] TWO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS. 125 
 
 presbyters, seven deacons, as many sub-deacons, forty- 
 two acolytes, fifty-two exorcists, and a host of wardens 
 and door-keepers. In the splendours of its cere- 
 monial, Roman Christianity did not yield to Eoman 
 Paganism. The propriety of this magnificence in the 
 services of the Church was not, however, undisputed. 
 We may even trace in the difference of sentiment and 
 practice which prevailed on the subject, the germs of 
 that feud which has continued for centuries among 
 professing Christians, and which divides the Church 
 of England at the present day — between the sup- 
 porters of a gorgeous symbolism in ecclesiastical 
 ordinances and the cultivators of a studied and 
 severe simplicity. 
 
 It is clear that then, as now, the religious world 
 was divided into the opposing camps of Ritualism and 
 Evangelicism. The cultus of primitive Christianity, 
 which was distinctively Roman, had not suff'ered 
 itself to be betrayed into extravagance. The increase 
 of religious pageantry was the result of a twofold 
 influence — first, the necessity of a successful competi- 
 tion with the ceremonies of Paganism ; secondly, the 
 force of the example of the Eastern Christian Church. 
 In the age of which we write the pomp of Byzantine 
 usage had grafted itself on the once almost puri- 
 tanically simple Church of Rome. Still the inno- 
 vations were (in some quarters) strongly opposed ; 
 and while it was urged, on the one hand, that 
 religion, in winning souls to the Saviour of mankind, 
 should without hesitation avail itself of all the allure- 
 
126 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [v. 
 
 ments of sense, it was contended, on the other, that 
 the aesthetic emotions were at best an untrustworthy 
 basis for moral practice or for theological conviction.'" 
 Strangely enough, as if a premonitory sign of the 
 warfare in after ages to be waged by opposite 
 schools of thought as to the text of the spiritual 
 songs and psalms in use in their churches, a severe 
 conflict had already arisen on the subject of ecclesi- 
 astical hymnals and their appropriate musical accom- 
 paniment. Any person who knows the bone of 
 contention which the publication entitled " Hymns, 
 Ancient and Modern" is among the clergy of the 
 present day will regard the dispute as ominously 
 prophetic. 
 
 Old Eome — the Kome of the Caesars, of Jupiter, 
 of the worship of Vesta, the Kome whose glory and 
 protection were the special care of all the members of 
 the Olympian hierarchy — had passed away. The new 
 order of things had been already entered upon. The 
 religion of Christianity was popular ; excommunica- 
 tion w^as a social and a fashionable penalty, and 
 involved a species of ostracism from the most select 
 of Eoman coteries. The Church was not merely the 
 home of piety ; it was a court of modish honour. 
 The supremacy of the pontiffs bade fair to rival that 
 of the Emperors ; and in the relations which existed 
 betw^een Valentinian and Damasus, we may see the 
 
 * In his "Early Cliristianity " (iii. 30), Dean Milman has 
 traced the gradual transfiguration of the ritual of the Eoman 
 Church, and its social and religious results. 
 
v.] TWO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS. 127 
 
 first beginnings of that strife between Pope and 
 Kaiser which runs through the whole web of 
 European history. " When I consider, '^ says Am- 
 mi anus, speaking of the contest between Damasus and 
 Ursinus for the pontifical chair, " the splendour of 
 tlie capital, I am not surprised that so valuable a 
 prize should inflame the desires of ambitions men. 
 The successful candidate is secure that he will be 
 enriched by the offerings of the matrons ; as soon as 
 his dress is composed with becoming care and elegance 
 he may proceed in his chariot through the streets of 
 Eome ; and the sumptuousness of the Imperial table 
 will not equal the profuse and delicate entertainments 
 provided by the taste and at the expense of the 
 Koman pontiff's. How much more rationally w^ould 
 these pontiffs con suit, their true happiness, if, instead 
 of alleging the greatness of the city as an excuse for 
 their manner, they would imitate the exemplary life 
 of those provincial bishops whose temperance and 
 sobriety, whose mean apparel and downcast looks, 
 recommend their pure and modest virtue to the Deity 
 and His true worshippers ! " 
 
 We need not have much difficulty in finding 
 points of social detail in which the ecclesiastical 
 system of Pagano- Christian Eome suggests a re- 
 semblance to that of Christian and fashionable 
 London. The '' pet parsons " and the '* fast clergy- 
 men " of modern society had their faithful prototypes 
 in the fifth century. The Eev. Morj)hine Velvet of 
 Mr. Samuel Warren, and the Eev. Charles Honeyman 
 
128 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [v. 
 
 of Mr. Thackeray, had their prototypes in the ranks of 
 the primitive Eoman hierarchy. The spirit which 
 prompts young ladies of the present day to overwhelm 
 the celibate curate or the rector (unattached) with gifts 
 of slippers and curiously emblazoned book-markers, 
 animated the matrons and the maids, whose ances- 
 tresses had bowed their pious knees in the temple of 
 Jupiter Capitolinus. St. Jerome takes the younger 
 clergy of his communion severely to task because 
 they do not abstain from mingling in the giddy 
 crowd on the Appian Way, or even from assisting at 
 the shows of the theatre and the spectacles of the 
 circus. " You," he exclaims with righteous wrath, in 
 one of his addresses, " who by your vows have dedi- 
 cated your lives to the Divine service, are you not 
 ashamed to devote hours and days to attendance on 
 these idle women, who, while they prattle about the 
 things of the next world, have their hearts and their 
 afifcctions solely fixed upon the things of this ? Does 
 no feeling of reverence and awe prevent you from 
 laying aside the garb which is intended to proclaim 
 to all men your sacred calling, and assuming a dress 
 which has in it no trace of the priesthood ? Does no 
 fear lest your souls should contract pollution from the 
 levity and profanity of the conversation to which you 
 must listen come over you when you take your places 
 at those banquets of the great ? " 
 
 St. Jerome may possibly have fallen into an 
 excess of severity in these denunciations of his 
 weaker brethren. But he appears to describe pheno- 
 
v.] TWO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS. 129 
 
 mena with which we are curiously familiar. We shall 
 be pardoned if we suggest that the number of 
 Anglican clergymen who are to be met with in Hyde 
 Park during the season, on the course at Ascot during 
 the Cup day, or in the Duke of Richmond's park during 
 the Goodwood week, in 7nufti, might cause the bones 
 of the old Eoman saint to turn with indignation in 
 their sepulchre. It is perfectly possible to distinguish 
 between two classes of the Christian priesthood, each 
 of them possessing considerable social influence at 
 Eome, and diligently cultivating the families of the 
 Eoman nobility. On the one hand, we have the 
 monkish heredipedists, or legacy-hunters — the priestly 
 successors of the testamenti captatores lashed by 
 Juvenal — who, on the strength of their spiritual 
 influence with the opulent households of the capita], 
 laid the foundation of the temporal wealth of their 
 Order ; on the other, we have those who take ad- 
 vantage of their priestly position and privileges to 
 acquire, in Gibbon's language, ** the most desirable 
 advantages of the world; the lively attachment, 
 perhaps, of a young and beautiful woman ; the deli- 
 cate plenty of an opulent household, and the respectful 
 homage of the slaves, the freedmen, and the clients of 
 a senatorial family."* When we remember that in 
 the early days of the Christian Church at Eome 
 celibacy was not uniformly compulsory on her priest- 
 hood, the position or the possible pretensions of the 
 ecclesiastical cavalier servente provide us with the 
 * '• Decline and Fall," chap. xxv. 
 
130 POLITICS AND LETTEBS. [v. 
 
 outline of a picture that, mutatis mutandis, might 
 have been drawn from the life of to-day. 
 
 In alluding to the power exercised by the Christian 
 clergy over the fair members of their congregation, 
 we are reminded of a change that had already taken 
 place in the social and legal position of the entire sex, 
 which must on the whole be allowed to bring us very 
 near to the modern order of things. The condition 
 of the Eoman wife had become totally revolutionised. 
 The family was no longer constructed on the prin- 
 ciple of marital autocracy, but of co-equal partner- 
 ship. The legal rights of women as regarded the 
 tenure of property, independent of the jurisdiction of 
 their husbands, were as complete as the late Mr. Mill 
 would have desired. The fortunes of many of the 
 Eoman ladies were immense, and, in the manner 
 which has been described above, not unfrequently 
 found their way into the coffers of the Church — a 
 destination which was by no means discontinued 
 after the issue of Yalentinian's edict illegalising 
 testamentary dispositions made in the interest of 
 ecclesiastics. Socially, the Roman lady was free to 
 order her movements as she would, nor can Mayfair 
 or Belgravia boast of more perfect specimens of femi- 
 nine independence than abounded in the fashion- 
 able neighbourhood of the Palatine. Marriage was 
 regarded, the protests of the Church notwithstanding, 
 as a civil contract terminable at will, and one of the 
 consequences of the practical adoption of this view 
 was that a phenomenon which the student of English 
 
v.] TWO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS. 131 
 
 sociology will recognise as strangely on the increase 
 in our own favoured century was very prevalent 
 at Kome. Probably every third carriage which 
 passed in that glittering string described by 
 Ammianus Marcellinus down the great promenade 
 of the city contained a divorcSe, or a marketable 
 widow. 
 
 St. Jerome mentions a lady of fashion at Rome 
 who was married to her twenty-third husband, she 
 herself being his twenty-first wife. Incompatibility 
 of temper, difference of religious belief, mere dislike 
 of the married state — these were admitted as suffi- 
 cient causes for a final suspension of all matrimonial 
 relations. A divorcee is eyed with suspicion in 
 London or at Brighton, where they are probably 
 more numerous than ia any other town in the United 
 Kingdom, or even in Paris. But though pulpits 
 echoed Sunday after Sunday with denunciations of 
 divorce as an institution ineflfably offensive to the 
 Divine will, the custom was regarded with something 
 more than social toleration. The lady who had sepa- 
 rated from her husband by mere process of law 
 enjoyed a greater amount of liberty than her un- 
 married friend, and, in spite of the fervour of the 
 patristic condemnation, her position suggested itself 
 to her friends as only less desirable than that of the 
 widow. On the widow of the period, not less than ' 
 on the divorceey St. Jerome is particularly severe. 
 "They are used," he says, "to paint, to dress in silk, 
 wear jewels, and sprinkle themselves with perfumes. 
 
 K 2 
 
132 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [v. 
 
 They mourn for their husbands as if they rejoiced 
 that they are at last freed from bondage, and may 
 look after other husbands." Before we take leave of 
 the impassioned invective of this saintly censor, we 
 may say that there is one class in the world of 
 Roman fashion whom he assails with more indignant 
 remonstrances than worldly-minded clerics, divorced 
 wives, or frisky widows — the passe dowagers and the 
 decaying dandies, who, " though the tomb is waiting to 
 receive them, still flock to the theatres and sun them- 
 selves in the park." " You dress well," he says, 
 speaking to some Major Pendennis of his day, '*you 
 wear rings, you adjust in proper form the few hairs 
 that remain on your autumnal head. Has not the 
 hour come for more serious thoughts ? '^ St. Salvian's 
 language is even more emphatic, and his " senes 
 improbi mundi usibus dediti" may be translated 
 with accuracy if not with elegance, '* fashionable old 
 
 sinners." 
 
 Twenty-five years ago there was no more common 
 theme of priestly invective in the pulpits of our 
 English churches than the stage. The Puritan ani- 
 mosity against the theatre as the temple of the devil 
 and the anteroom of hell had not yet died out. For 
 two reasons these diatribes are heard with much less 
 frequency now : first, a more comprehensive and 
 robust view is generally taken of dramatic art ; 
 secondly, the objections which a quarter of a century 
 since might have been advanced, not without injus- 
 tice, to the immorality of its accessories, are now 
 
v.] TWO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS, 133 
 
 anachronous. Vice itself may not have decreased; 
 but the venue of vice has been shifted, and the music- 
 hall has purged the playhouse. Even our professed 
 teachers of religion and morality have recognised the 
 truth, that nothing is gained by obscurantism at least 
 here ; and that if the art of the playwright or the 
 novelist be the representation of human nature, sin 
 and misery, crime and sorrow, come within the legiti- 
 mate sphere of literary or dramatic treatment. The 
 writings of the moralists and divines contemporary 
 with St. Jerome are full of unmeasured strictures 
 upon spectacles, which are sometimes roughly identi- 
 fied with the theatrical performances of our own 
 time. 
 
 I venture to think it is an entire mistake to sup- 
 pose that the genuine dramatic exhibitions of the 
 nineteenth century were included by anticipation in 
 the patristic anathemas of the fifth. The gymnastic 
 games of the circus, and the presentation of the 
 comedies of Plautus, Terence, and their successors, 
 were not placed under the ban of the Primitive 
 Church. St. Cyprian is, perhaps, of all others the 
 writer and preacher who discusses the topic at the 
 greatest length, and who subjects the influence of the 
 pageants of the stage on those who thron^^ to witness 
 them to the most unsparing analysis. But his ani- 
 madversions are only applicable to the drama in its 
 most debased form ; to the brutalising combats 
 between gladiators and wild beasts in the amphi- 
 theatre ; to the »ross mimes of Liberius ; and to the 
 
134 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [v. 
 
 indecent dances of a nude corps de ballet. It can 
 only be said that theatrical exhibitions were con- 
 demned unreservedly by the Fathers of the Church, 
 when it is alleged — as with but a very partial degree 
 of truth it can be — that the only shows which the 
 public at Kome cared to witness were of this order. 
 The taste of a public accustomed to have its passions 
 stirred by the sight of mortal combats between man 
 and man had become almost irredeemably debauched. 
 As is ever the case, cruelty and sensuality went hand 
 in hand, and if there were exhibitions that fairly 
 rivalled these bloodstained prize-fights, they were 
 exhibitions which provoked desire and symbolised 
 lust. 
 
 Was there no species of histrionic or scenic enter- 
 tainment in fifth-century Rome, occupying a mean 
 point between these two extremes ? We believe that 
 there was. The pantomimist of the Imperial city had 
 acquired an evil name in the days of Tacitus ; the 
 pantomime itself was not necessarily an indecorous 
 amusement in the days of Theodosian.'"' With the 
 charming account of the representation of the fable of 
 Paris, as given by Apuleius in the Tenth Book of his 
 " Metamorphoses," before us, it may reasonably be 
 contended that the Roman pantomime was inferior 
 neither from an ethical nor aesthetic point of view to 
 
 * The themes of these pantomimes comprehended the whole 
 cycle of Greek and Eoman mythology, the stories of Medea and 
 Jason, Tereus and Philomela, Perseus and Andromeda, etc. etc. 
 Sidonius ApoUinaris fills twenty-six lines with these enumerations. 
 
v.] TWO OITIES AND TWO SEASONS. 135 
 
 the operas bouffes of Offenbach and to the burlesques 
 and extravaganzas of our own stage. In such exhibi- 
 tions as these Roman ladies of birth and fashion did 
 not shrink from taking a part, and we may gather 
 from the varied information which is incorporated in 
 the pages of Friedlander, that they occasionally paid 
 theatrical managers large sums in consideration of 
 being allowed the privilege of publicly appearing 
 behind the footlights. A misguided taste, it is true, 
 but one which we may as well recollect is not un- 
 known in some eminently respectable circles of English 
 society ; while if English theatrical managers were to 
 consent to sacrifice the sums which they are said to 
 receive from debutantes and their friends, on the occa- 
 sion of ** first nights," they would forego one of the 
 most profitable sources of their revenue. 
 
 Roman pantomimes might not always be so inno- 
 cent as that described by Apuleius ; but, judged by 
 the standard of the general morality and sentiment of 
 the two ages, it cannot be said that the Pagano- 
 Christian public of fifth-century Rome exhibited a 
 greater degree of indifference to theatrical decorum 
 than the wholly Christian public of nineteenth- 
 century LondoD, in the eagerness with which it flocks 
 to see Schneider in the " Grande Duchesse," to witness 
 the unlovely motions of the can-can, or to contem- 
 plate the last edition of a very questionable ballet 
 dance newly imported from the Porte St. Martin. 
 Barbarous and brutal enough the gladiatorial spec- 
 tacula in the amphitheatres were, as any one who had 
 
136 POLTTIGS AND LETTERS. [v. 
 
 seen the pictures of Gerome will feel with a little 
 shudder. Still, when it is remembered that the 
 multitudes who thronged to see these were the 
 descendants of a people who had been assiduously 
 taught during successive generations 'to hold blood- 
 shed as nothing by the side of patriotism ; when it is 
 considered that in the brute courage and bull-dog 
 resolution with which those brawny figures met death 
 in the arena below, the crowd which cheered to mad- 
 ness saw the exaltation of the national ideal of excel- 
 lence — it may be doubted whether a grosser sentiment 
 of cruelty was appealed to than that which thrills ati 
 English mob at the sight of the hazardous feats of the 
 flying trapeze, or the more select circles who gather at 
 Hurlingham to witness the 'tournament of doves," or 
 which animates Admiral Rous in his defence of cock- 
 fighting ! * 
 
 The chief interest in the study of the period on 
 which we have dwelt, arises from its prophetic pre- 
 sentment of the spirit and the circumstances of a 
 later generation. Christianity in its infancy is not 
 unmarked by those features of sectarian strife which 
 are visible in its maturity. The intellectual keynote 
 
 * To class the public spectacles of Eonie at this period under 
 their different heads, they must he divided as follows : (1) Gym- 
 nastic Games (our own Athletic Sports) ; (2) The Plautine and 
 Terentian Drama^ (Legitimate Drama) ; (3) Mimes (Burlesque) ; 
 (4) The Sports of the Amphitheatre (with which compare the 
 trapeze, Hurlingham, and, if it exists anywhere still, the Prize 
 Ring) ; (5) Chariot Races — an institution which corresponds ex- 
 actly to our own "Turf." 
 
T.] TWO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS. 137 
 
 of the two ages gives forth a nearly identical sound. 
 In the Rome of Ammianus Marcellinus, one system of 
 thought and religion had decayed without another 
 having yet completely taken its place. It was a 
 period of transition, and like all periods of transition 
 it was one in which conviction was weak, and super- 
 stition and scepticism strong. " There are many," 
 says Ammianus, speaking of the Roman nobles, " who 
 do not presume either to bathe, or to dine, or to 
 appear in public till they have diligently consulted, 
 according to the rules of astrology, the situation of 
 Mercury and the aspect of the moon. It is singular 
 enough that this vain credulity may often be dis- 
 covered among the profane sceptics who impiously 
 doubt or deny the existence of a celestial power." 
 St. Augustine's testimony is of similar significance. 
 " There are," he tells us, *' men who, though they act 
 as if they believed not in God, yet when seized with 
 fear, suddenly cross themselves." 
 
 We may smile at the traits of heathen super- 
 stition mentioned by Ammianus, but we may as well 
 recollect that we ourselves live in the time when the 
 spirits of the departed are believed by not a few to 
 embody themselves in the panels of oak sideboards, 
 and to take up their temporary habitation in the 
 legs of mahogany tables. Gibbon fills page after 
 page with instances of the power and charm w^hich 
 the miraculous had already begun to exercise with 
 the children of the Christian Church. Relics of in- 
 estimable value and sanctity were perpetually being 
 
138 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [v. 
 
 discovered : ^' The bones of martyrs, their blood, their 
 garments, were supposed to contain a healing power ; 
 and their preternatural influence was communicated 
 to the most distant objects without losing any part of 
 its virtue."* Pilgrimages had already begun to be 
 undertaken by members of fashionable Rome to shrines 
 and sepulchres ; and the follies of the Eoman season 
 were considered to be amply atoned for by one of 
 these pious progresses. In the fifth century the 
 expeditions were performed on foot ; in the nine- 
 teenth the pilgrims travel first-class express. That is 
 the chief extent of the difierence. 
 
 But fashionable and popular as Christianity liad 
 become, it was scarcely yet a nationally animating 
 power. Its doctrines created a vivid superficial 
 enthusiasm ; they sank in few cases to the depth of a 
 profound moral conviction. Rome has not yet had 
 time to recover from the pernicious effects created by the 
 juxtaposition of the multitudinous worships that had 
 asserted themselves in the time of Augustus, and that 
 had ''effected," as Mr. Lecky justly remarks,t '' what 
 could not have been effected by the most sceptical 
 literature or the most audacious philosophy : " the 
 complete annihilation of the moral influence of re- 
 ligion. Stoicism was still the gospel of a majority of 
 the intellectual men at Rome, even though, in defer- 
 ence to the feelings of their wives and daughters, they 
 professed themselves believers in the Galilean revela- 
 
 * " Decline and Fall," chap, xxvii. 
 
 t "History of European Morals," vol. i. chap. ii. p. 178. 
 
v.] TWO CITIES AND TWO SEASONS. 139 
 
 tion. The teachings of Epicurus obtained the sym- 
 pathies of the mass, and Epicureanism was nothing- 
 less than the principle of national disintegration. The 
 wealth acquired by the middle classes, combined with 
 the supineness of the aristocratic order, had eflfectually 
 removed the impassable social barrier which had till 
 then existed between the two. 
 
 Rome had taken its rank as Cosmopolis ; the cos- 
 mopolitan spirit had supplanted the national ; the 
 entire community were steeped to the lips in national 
 as well as in political indifferentism ; patriotism had 
 expired ; and a regime of public greatness and gran- 
 deur had been succeeded by one of ambitious luxury. 
 It was to no purpose that Christian preachers en- 
 deavoured to awake the public mind to a sense of the 
 inevitable catastrophe in store. A Jerome or a 
 Chrysostom might crown his denunciations of the 
 sins and the apathy of the time by telling his 
 audience that the Goths were at their gates. They 
 were. In less than eight years after the occasion on 
 which fashionable piety gave St. Melania so superb a 
 welcome on the Appian Way, Roman civilisation 
 received its death-blow from the hands of Attila and 
 his hosts. 
 
 If in all this there is nothing that is strictly 
 analogous to our own national conditions, is there 
 nothing which appeals to us in accents of salutary 
 warning ? The foundations of social order may be 
 fixed too deep in England to render us apprehensive 
 of social dissolution. It was the absolute supremacy 
 
140 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [v. 
 
 of the Eoman empire — the absence of all competition 
 with its resources and prestige in the lists of the 
 world — which paved the way for its fall. It perished 
 of its own security, and was buried beneath the 
 monument of its own greatness. From this danger 
 we are happily free. We have rivals abroad ; we 
 have at home men marked out by the combined 
 qualifications of birth, character, and position as the 
 natural leaders of the people, who are able and ready 
 to play their part in the national history. This was 
 a boon never vouchsafed to Pagano- Christian Rome. 
 Nevertheless, are we not, too, passing through a 
 period of transition — of transition political, social, 
 religious, philosophical? Is not our lot cast also 
 amid the conflict of creeds and the fierce antagonism 
 of ideas ? Are we beset by no perils of political in- 
 fidelity and national selfishness ? If this is the case, 
 then the contrast which in these pages it has been 
 attempted to draw cannot be otherwise than season- 
 able and suggestive. 
 
VI. 
 
 JOHN BKIGHT. 
 
 It is seldom that men who have taken a prominent 
 part in the history of their time are able to anticipate 
 with calmness and confidence the verdict of posterity 
 upon their character and their achievements. For 
 the most part they have commenced enterprises, and 
 been associated with movements, the true merits of 
 which must be judged by slow results. Years may 
 conclusively prove the soundness of their judgment 
 and the accuracy of their prevision, but are, perhaps, 
 just as likely to show that the measures which they 
 laboured to advance were crudely formed and pressed 
 forward in ignorance of the difficulties and compli- 
 cations which posterity is quick to see in their 
 development. It would be confessedly premature to 
 attempt to define the place which Lord Beaconsfield 
 will permanently fill in the gallery of English states- 
 men. It would be yet more difficult to forecast the 
 final award of political and national criticism in the 
 case of Mr. Gladstone. 
 
 But with Mr. Bright there is none of this un- 
 
142 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vi. 
 
 certainty. The foundations of his fame are not laid 
 more securely than its quality is decided, irreversible. 
 He is already an illustrious figure of the past. His 
 voice is still listened to wherever it is heard ; the 
 familiar presence is gazed at with admiration wherever 
 it is seen. But alike as statesman and orator, 
 reformer and partisan, John Bright belongs to a by- 
 gone generation, and his fellow-countrymen have long 
 since come to an agreement as to the measure and 
 kind of distinction that is his due. It is not that he 
 has outlived his powers, or has worn away to the 
 shadow of his former self. His parliamentary elo- 
 quence is still occasionally impressive. He can hold 
 vast audiences in the country spell-bound by the 
 rhetoric which is always more or less autobiographical ; 
 his intellect is yet clear and powerful ; his memory 
 is undimmed, and his faculty of appreciation and en- 
 joyment of existence is singularly keen. But the 
 cause for which he battled was long ago definitely 
 won ; the strongholds of exclusiveness, privilege, and 
 monopoly which he entered public life to attack have 
 all surrendered ; the fruits of his service to political 
 progress and popular enlightenment have been 
 gathered into the storehouse of history, and weighed 
 in an unerring balance ; the questions which were 
 open in his early, and even in his mature, manhood 
 are closed ; the principles for which he first contended, 
 and which were denounced by those who differed 
 from him as involving consequences disastrous to 
 English trade and industry, to the whole structure of 
 
vl] JOBN bright, 143 
 
 English society, and to the British empire itself, have 
 become the postulates and commonplaces of poli- 
 ticians of every school. 
 
 Free Trade, parliamentary reform, religious equality, 
 the assimilation — gradual and qualified though it be — 
 of the government of Ireland to that of England ; the 
 removal of Irish grievances ; the avoidance by every 
 legitimate expedient of friction between England and 
 Ireland; these are the objects round, which Mr. 
 Bright's activities chiefly centred at successive stages 
 of his career, which incurred for him an amount of 
 personal obloquy and bitterness proportionate, per- 
 haps, to the vehemence of his own attacks, and w^hich 
 are now resrarded as nothinoj more than reasonable 
 and right. Periodically feeble attempts are made to 
 propose Fair Trade as an alternative for Free Trade, 
 to check the political enfranchisement of whole classes 
 of the population, and to revert in other matters to 
 the policy of an extinct period. But every serious 
 politician in England knows that it would be just as 
 possible to rebel against Free Trade as to mutiny 
 against the law of gravitation, and that whenever the 
 question of a further enlargement of the electoral 
 suff'rage is raised, it will not be dropped till it has 
 been settled in the aflirmative. 
 
 In other matters than these, John Bright is 
 to the English public to-day what he will be to the 
 English public a century hence. He is not known, 
 and he never will be known, as a great administrator, 
 as a great legislator, or as a great master of parlia- 
 
144 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vi. 
 
 mentary detail. He cannot even be considered a 
 debater of the first order. He is a man, however, 
 just as indispensable to the legislation which has 
 been accomplished during his career as the Minister 
 who conducts a Bill through Parliament. As an 
 orator he has acquired an equal renown in the House 
 of Commons and on popular platforms. Such are the 
 power and fervour of his eloquence that it has always 
 constituted a force with which responsible statesmen 
 have been compelled to reckon. Disraeli once said 
 of Cobden that, " he was the greatest politician that 
 the upper middle class of England had produced, 
 and that he was not only an ornament to the House 
 of Commons, but an honour to his country." It 
 may be asserted of Mr. Bright that he has surpassed 
 all his contemporaries in the art of giving simple and 
 weighty expression to the views and aspirations of 
 the English multitude. He has been called a dema- 
 gogue. As a matter of fact, no man was ever less of 
 a demagogue. Had he been capable of pandering to 
 the popular sentiment of the hour, he would not have 
 resisted the Ten Hours Bill, nor would he have lost 
 his seat for Manchester twenty-seven years ago by 
 denouncing the foreign policy of Lord Palmerston in 
 China and in Kussia. It would be unjust to say 
 of him that he was ever the mere mouthpiece of 
 public feeling. He has acted as the champion of the 
 popular cause just so far as he could identify that 
 cause with, and vindicate it by reference to, what 
 
VI.] JOHN B BIGHT. 145 
 
 have seemed to him the eternal laws of justice and 
 right. 
 
 There were Radicals before Mr. John Bright. 
 There are, and will continue to be, Radicals after him. 
 But as he had little in common with many of those 
 who were spoken of as his allies at the beginning of 
 his public life, so he has slight sympathy with the 
 most powerful and representative Radicals whom he 
 sees round him as the shadows of his life begin to 
 lengthen. The Radicalism of Roebuck and of the 
 hard-headed political economists of The Westminster 
 Revieiv was as different from the Radicalism of 
 Mr. Bright as is that of Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. 
 Chamberlain. The political convictions and aims of 
 Cobden's friend were traversed by a vein partly of 
 deep sentiment, partly of moral indignation peculiar 
 to himself and to his era. What impressed his mind 
 was not merely the need of giving unfettered play to 
 the law of supply and demand, or of removing purely 
 political inequalities. He looked and he saw around 
 him a great mass of men and women whose daily lot 
 was one of want and misery, attributable to the ope- 
 ration of unjust laws. He would never have wielded 
 so mighty an instrument in the work of political 
 reform if he had not possessed so large a share of the 
 fiery spirit of a moral reformer. A sense of righteous 
 resentment against the state of things under which 
 oppressive taxes were levied, and poverty stood in 
 the place where pleiity and happiness ought to be, 
 
 L 
 
146 POLITICS AND LETTERS, [vi. 
 
 animated him in his first political efforts. The gift 
 of oratory was innate in him ; but over and above 
 that, he possessed something of the old Israelite — 
 something of the old Puritan-spirit, which impelled 
 him to assail secular abuses and political wrongs with 
 an ardour greater than ordinary political passion 
 could generate. 
 
 The secret of this must be largely found in the 
 conditions of his birth and the associations of his 
 childhood. The tale of civil and religious oppression 
 was the first to which the second son of Martha and 
 Jacob Bright, born on the 16 th November, 1811, 
 ever listened. His father, as a staunch Quaker, per- 
 sistently refused to pay Church rates. These were at 
 that time legal and compulsory, and Mr. Bright, 
 senior, was therefore the victim of habitual distress 
 warrants, which were satisfied not in cash, but in 
 kind. Cotton twist was the principal article seized 
 upon, but on several occasions cotton shirting to the 
 value of four or ^wq pounds was taken. Is it sur- 
 prising if the hardship and humiliation of these 
 exactions produced an abiding effect on the mind of 
 so quick and sensitive a child as John Bright was ? 
 Nor were the circumstances of his boyhood less 
 stirring in other respects. Rochdale, where his earlier 
 years were spent, was the head-quarters of a chronic 
 agitation in favour of parliamentary reform. Colli- 
 sions between the popular meetings held and the 
 military were frequent. 
 
 The young John Bright, if not an actual spectator 
 
VI.] JOHN BRIGHT, 147 
 
 of the Peterloo massacre, had drunk in with eager 
 ears all the local narratives of it. It is not so long 
 ago that in a speech delivered at Birmingham he 
 stated that some articles published in a Lancashire 
 journal had a very great effect on his mind. ** I 
 must," he continued, *' say that I date some portion 
 of my political activity to the influence of that paper 
 over me in those days." Before he was twenty-one 
 years of age he had seen the Reform Bill of 1832 
 become law, the Test and Corporation Acts repealed. 
 Catholic emancipation carried, and a French sovereign 
 driven by revolution to the shores of England. More- 
 over, the value of goods taken from his father's pre- 
 mises under warrants for Church rates amourated 
 during this period to only a little less than a hundred 
 and ten pounds. Whatever of deep and inspiring 
 sentiment the events of this epoch could excite, com- 
 municated itself to John Bright. A literary and 
 philosophical society was formed in Rochdale, and the 
 weekly discussions held by its members provided him 
 with his first opportunities for the display of his 
 oratorical power. He was an indefatigable reader, 
 and soon knew many of the most famous passages in 
 Milton's ''Paradise Lost " by heart. 
 
 A visit which he paid to Jerusalem in his 
 twenty-sixth year marked an epoch in his intel- 
 lectual development. It was about this time, too, 
 that he formed the acquaintance of Mr. Cobden, and 
 in 1839 he took part in an open-air Anti-Corn Law 
 meeting. " The question," he said, "lay between the 
 
 L 2 
 
148 POLITIGS AND LETTERS. [vi. 
 
 working millions and the aristocracy." But the 
 Church rate controversy was not yet at an end, and 
 Mr. Bright, who had now become a celebrity in 
 his neighbourhood, delivered a series of powerful 
 and characteristic speeches against the rate. With 
 the Church itself, he had, he protested, no quarrel. 
 " I would/' he exclaimed, in a passage curiously pro- 
 phetic of some of his subsequent oratorical triumphs, 
 *' that that venerable fabric" — and here he pointed 
 to the parish church of Eochdale — " were the re- 
 presentative of a Church really reformed ; of a 
 Church separated from the foul connection with the 
 State ; of a Church depending upon her own resources, 
 upon the zeal of her people, upon the truth of her 
 principles, and upon the blessings of her spiritual head." 
 Meanwhile, an event that was to have a more 
 decisive influence upon Mr. Bright's career than 
 any which had yet happened was at hand. Two 
 years after his marriage — in September, 1841 — 
 his wife died. Cobden called upon him the next 
 day, and, finding him prostrated by the blow, 
 said: "Do not allow this grief, great as it is, to 
 weigh you down too much. There are at this 
 moment in thousands of homes in England wives 
 and children who are dying of hunger made by the 
 law. If you will come with me, we will never rest 
 till we have got rid of the Corn Law." These words 
 have been often quoted, but, like the circumstances 
 under which they were uttered, they are important, 
 because they indicate the state of mind in which, 
 
VI.] JOHN BRIGHT. U9 
 
 together with Cobden, Bright entered upon the great 
 labour of his life. As, years earlier, it was the con- 
 sciousness of domestic suffering that inspired him 
 with hatred of the Church rate, and of the physical 
 maltreatment of the Peterloo mob that gave him his 
 first bias in the direction of parliamentary reform, so 
 it was the sense of personal bereavement — the loss 
 of a young wife in childbed — that sent him forth 
 against the upholders of monopoly. In each instance 
 anguish of soul was transformed into political vigour, 
 and the keynote of Mr. Bright's public character 
 and career will be missed if this fact is not borne 
 in mind. 
 
 The experiences encountered by him during the 
 next few years, painful and agonising as they often 
 were, of the evils and suffering involved in the opera- 
 tion of the Corn Laws, account not only for much of 
 the passion he infused into his crusade, but for what 
 has often seemed to the public the exaggerated self- 
 satisfaction with which he has since been in the habit 
 of recounting the story of his triumph. He addressed 
 himself to the enterprise as a social reformer and 
 philanthropist rather than as a political agitator, and 
 it is not too much to say that neither then nor after- 
 ward did he magnify his apostleship on political, still 
 less on partisan, grounds. One of the first important 
 incidents in his An ti- Corn Law campaign was his 
 earliest meeting with Mr. Gladstone, who, with Lord 
 Ripon as his chief, was Vice-President of the Board of 
 Trade in 1842, when Mr. Bright was one of a deputa- 
 
150 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vi. 
 
 tion sent to London on the subject of Free Trade. 
 Commenting upon Bright's statement that the Lan- 
 cashire operatives who could raise enough money 
 invariably emigrated to America, Lord Eipon re- 
 marked that the Americans themselves had a law 
 against the admission of Canadian wheat. ^'Yes/' 
 was the immediate rejoinder, ^'and the carriers of 
 that measure quoted your example as a precedent." 
 
 Mr. Gladstone, without volunteering an opinion 
 on the matter, asked if there was any symptom of 
 improvement in trade, and was informed that, on 
 the contrary, distress was greatly aggravated. The 
 American tariff of 1828 exercised the most disastrous 
 influence on the flannel trade of Rochdale, one-third 
 of which had been previously done with the United 
 States. ■ In 1831 wages in Lancashire were forty per 
 cent, below the average of 1828. In 1840 the 
 decrease was fifty per cent. On the 13th of December, 
 1841, the local medical men testified that, '^ owing to 
 the high price of food, and the want of employment, 
 the labouring classes in the borough of Rochdale and 
 its neighbourhood are suffering appalling privations." 
 '^ Misery," was Mr. Bright's comment, " is to be seen 
 in the house of every poor man. Haggard destitution 
 and extreme poverty are the most prominent things 
 in the family. The consequence is that discontent 
 has so pervaded the country that scarcely any working 
 man will lift a finger in defence of those institutions 
 which Euglishmen were wont to be proud of. Neither 
 the monarch nor the aristocracy is safe under a state 
 
VI.] JOHN BRIGHT. 151 
 
 of things that would blast the fairest prospects, and 
 destroy the most powerful nation that ever existed." 
 Chartism was rampant, and Bright did his utmost 
 to divert into a healthier channel the energies which 
 Chartism enlisted by pursuing the Anti-Corn Law 
 agitation. Throughout the whole of the north of 
 England immense Free-Trade meetings were held. 
 In March, 1843, Drury Lane Theatre, London, was 
 the scene of a huge demonstration, at which Mr. 
 Bright was the first speaker. ''There is," he said, 
 amid tremendous applause, ''no institution of this 
 country, the monarchy, aristocracy, Church, or any 
 other whatever, of which I will hesitate to say, attach 
 it to the Corn Laws, and I will predict its fate." 
 Presently he quoted the couplet : 
 
 There's yet on earth a far auguster thing, 
 Small though it be, than Parliament or King. 
 
 John Bright, indeed, was fast becoming a power 
 in the country. He was invaluable to Cobden, and 
 the two worked together upon a regular system. 
 First, at any great public gathering, Cobden would 
 deliver a speech, defining the area of dispute, bristling 
 with statistics, facts, and figures. Bright spoke last, 
 summing up and embellishing with his eloquence all 
 that had been said by those who had preceded him, 
 and finally dismissing his audience in a state of 
 rapturous enthusiasm. In the summer of 1843 he 
 was elected Member for Durham ; on the 7th of 
 August he delivered his maiden speech in the House 
 
152 POLITICS AND LETTEBS. [vi. 
 
 of Commons in support of Mr. E wart's motion for 
 the reduction of import duties. The effort, if not a 
 striking success, was far from being a failure. He 
 was a little nervous at first, and in his trepidation 
 did injustice to his voice. But the parts of his dis- 
 course were so admirably arranged, he so soon re- 
 covered his self-possession, there was so transparent a 
 depth of moral earnestness in his pleadings, above all 
 his language was so happily chosen and simple, that 
 he commanded the attention of his hearers, and great 
 things were at once prophesied for him. 
 
 It is probable that but for the exceptionally 
 bountiful harvest of 1844 the repeal of the Corn 
 Laws would not have been delayed by two years. 
 The Protectionists began to be sanguine as to their 
 power ultimately to repel the attack made upon them. 
 Mr. Bright replied that "though Providence might 
 send one or two good harvests more, the course of 
 the seasons could not be changed to suit the caprice, 
 the folly, or the criminality of human legislation." 
 Nor, as a matter of fact, did the movement ever flag. 
 Tens of thousands of pounds poured in from every 
 side. Tracts were circulated by millions. Free 
 Trade had its bard in Ebenezer Elliott ; skilled 
 lecturers visited every town and village in the 
 kingdom. Sir Robert Peel had already somewhat 
 modified the duties on corn, and now proceeded to 
 reduce or abolish duties on seven hundred and fifty 
 other articles. A year later famine in Ireland forced 
 his hand. He proposed the total repeal of the Coru 
 
VI.] JOEN BRIGHT. 153 
 
 Laws, and carried it by a majority of forty-seven. It 
 is needless to dwell upon the parliamentary incidents 
 of this memorable period ; on Mr. Disraeli's famous 
 attacks on the Conservative Premier for his desertion 
 of Protectionist principles and betrayal of his political 
 friends. But it may be mentioned that on the last 
 night of the debate, Mr. Bright eulogised Sir Eobert 
 Peel's conduct in words that brought tears to the eyes 
 of a statesman usually immovable and cold. Of the 
 speech which the Prime Minister had delivered on 
 the preceding evening, he said : ''It has circulated 
 by scores of thousands throughout the kingdom and 
 throughout the world, and wherever a man is to be 
 found who loves justice, and a labourer whom you 
 have trampled under foot, it will bring joy to the 
 heart of the one and hope to the breast of the 
 other." 
 
 This is not the place in which to enumerate all 
 the social and industrial results of Free Trade. 
 Speaking some twenty years after the Corn Laws 
 had been repealed, Mr. Bright was able to say that 
 nearly 500,000,000 pounds' worth of food which that 
 law was intended to prohibit, had, since 1846, been 
 imported into England, and that, notwithstanding 
 the diminution in the actual production of each 
 worker, wages had increased from thirty to forty 
 per cent. In 1846 the whole foreign commerce of 
 the United Kingdom did not exceed £134,000,000. 
 In 1876 it had risen to the total of £665,000,000. 
 In that same year John Bright, quoting from 
 
154 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vi. 
 
 Scripture the words, *' The earth is the Lord's 
 and the fulness thereof," was able to say : '* We 
 have put Holy Writ into an Act of Parliament, 
 and since then — since, that is, 1846 — of that ful- 
 ness every man and woman and little child in this 
 country may freely and abundantly partake." As 
 has been already said, the same principles on which 
 Mr. Bright collaborated with Cobden on the abo- 
 lition of the Corn Laws seemed to him to justify, 
 or rather demand, opposition to the Bill intro- 
 duced for compulsorily limiting the hours of labour 
 in factories. He believed it would be better for 
 working-men to labour ten hours than twelve; but 
 he objected to the rigid system of Protection, and 
 as he was careful to say, he used the word in 
 the same sense in which it had been used by all 
 who were in favour of monopolies. He has often 
 been taunted since with his action in this matter ; 
 but that it was approved by the public, and espe- 
 cially the industrial opinion of the period, may be 
 judged from the fact that in the next year, on 
 the 29th of July, 1847, Mr. Bright was elected 
 Member for Manchester. 
 
 We may now consider that Bright had entered 
 upon the second great stage of his public career. He 
 had accomplished the first supreme object which he 
 proposed to himself. The Corn Laws were abolished. 
 He now rested on his oars for a little, or, as it would 
 perhaps be more correct to say, he proceeded to 
 strengthen and broaden the foundations of an ora- 
 
VI.] JOEN BBIGHT. 155 
 
 torical fame and excellence already securely estab- 
 lished and generally confessed. During the next two 
 decades John Bright was nearly the most impressive 
 figure in English history. He had entered Parlia- 
 ment ten years later than Mr. Gladstone or Disraeli, 
 and he and Cobden were among the very few great 
 speakers of the Victorian era who had not a seat in 
 the first House of Commons constituted after the 
 accession of her present Majesty to the throne. It is 
 enough to glance at him in some of the best-known 
 aspects of his career between 1847 and the year in 
 which he became a responsible Minister of the Crown. 
 In English politics this period was principally remark- 
 able for the sustained ascendency of Palmerston. 
 Although Mr. Bright gave a general support to the 
 various Kussell and Palmerston Governments, he had 
 little or no sympathy with the spirit which animated 
 Palmerston or Russell in his foreign policy. Both 
 of these statesmen, and in a special degree the former, 
 seemed to Bright the exponents of what he might 
 have called the purely pagan idea in politics. 
 
 No one can doubt that the illustrious subject of 
 this sketch honestly endeavoured to introduce into 
 politics the canons of Christianity and the standards 
 of Scriptural religion. It was no narrow sectarian 
 bigotry which prompted him to condemn the Crimean 
 war and to inveigh against the aggressive militarism 
 with which he regarded that war as identical. From 
 the first he protested that it was avoidable, and the 
 impartial verdict of history has confirmed his judg- 
 
156 POLTTIGS AND LETTERS. [vi. 
 
 merit. He knew well enousfh that he was out of har- 
 mony with the general feeling of his countrymen. He 
 felt and he spoke as one who was conscious of belong- 
 ing to a small minority, but who was strong and 
 bold in the conviction that in the eyes of Heaven he 
 was right. No man, whatever his genius for elo- 
 quence, unless animated by such a belief as this, 
 could have delivered the oratorical masterpieces with 
 which Bright's name will ever be associated in the 
 House of Commons : first, when we were on the eve 
 of war with Eussia ; secondly, when the war was in 
 progress. He had no formal connection with the 
 Peace Society which sent out a deputation to the 
 Czar to deprecate, and if possible to prevent, the viola- 
 tion of the peace of Europe. But he believed war to 
 be an evil generally, and the Crimean war in parti- 
 cular to be a preventable evil. He denounced it, 
 therefore, in a series of harangues that have already 
 attained the dignity of parliamentary classics, and 
 that for sublimity and simplicity, pathos and power, 
 are the most marvellous compositions contained in the 
 book of Hansard. He held Parliament spell-bound, 
 and when it was known he was upon his legs not a 
 bench was empty. His doctrines, indeed, did not 
 commend themselves to the judgment of the English 
 people or to their representatives ; but who could 
 resist their charm, or be blind to the beauty of those 
 superb descriptions of the horrors of battle, of the 
 misery and havoc which war meant to private house- 
 holds and to peoples ; of the picture drawn by the 
 
VI.] JOHN BRIGHT. 157 
 
 orator of the angel of death, '' the beating of whose 
 wings," he said, *' he could almost hear ! " 
 
 At this juncture of his career Bright spoke less 
 to convince men than because he was convinced him- 
 self. More than once he confessed his distrust of the 
 temper of the English democracy. The war, as the 
 result showed, saturated the country with the leaven 
 of militarism ; and when a little later Lord Palmers ton 
 appealed to the constituencies, asking them to sustain 
 him in his Chinese policy, and to sanction his chas- 
 tisement of the '^ insolent barbarian who, wielding 
 authority at Canton, had violated the British flag, 
 broken the engagements of treaties, offered rewards 
 for the heads of British subjects, and planned their 
 destruction by murder, assassination, and poison," 
 the English people rallied to the summons, and 
 Bright and Cobden, together with Milner Gibson, 
 W. J. Fox, Layard, and many others, lost their seats. 
 Within six months Bright was returned for Birming- 
 ham, and, though for nearly two years his healtli 
 prevented him from taking an active part in parlia- 
 mentary warfare, he was not forgotten by his country- 
 men ; nor was it till he had earnestly ranged himself 
 on the side of the reformers that a fresh instalment 
 of parliamentary reform became an effective political 
 cry. 
 
 The commercial treaty between England and 
 France was negotiated and effected in 18 GO by the 
 joint efforts of Cobden and Bright. It was Cobden 
 who first suggested the idea of an interview with 
 
158 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vi. 
 
 Napoleon III. ; it was Bright who had taken the 
 initiative with regard to the new international com- 
 pact. With two other great public questions John 
 Bright's name was soon prominently coupled — the 
 repeal of the paper duties, which made the penny 
 newspaper press in England possible; and the American 
 civil war. Cobden, like Bright and all the survivors 
 of the Manchester school, was the champion of the 
 North. Before this he had incurred much unpopu- 
 larity by the line of argument he adopted in the 
 Alabama debate, and had elicited from Mr. Laird, 
 who was responsible for the construction and putting 
 to sea of that cruiser, the taunt that he '' would 
 rather be known as the builder of a dozen Alabamas 
 than be a man who, like Mr. Bright, had set class 
 against class." 
 
 Ireland, and especially the Irish Church, were also 
 subjects on which Mr. Bright delivered several famous 
 speeches during this period of his career. He pleaded 
 vehemently for a relaxation of the punishment meted 
 out to those who had taken part in the Fenian rising 
 of 1867, and he denounced the Irish religious estab- 
 lishment in language which heralded its doom. Dif- 
 ficulties of the gravest nature, he admitted, were yet 
 in the way ; but he reminded the House of Commons, 
 in tones which will never be forgotten by any of 
 those who heard them, that ''to the upright there 
 ariseth light in darkness." 
 
 Mr. Bright had now obtained a position amongst 
 his countrymen as commanding as the power instru- 
 
VI.] JORN BRIGHT. 159 
 
 mental iu securing it for him was unique. Tliere was 
 no great popular movement of his time which, by his 
 eloquence and by the intensity of the moral zeal under- 
 lying his eloquence, he had not helped forward. The 
 Tories, under Mr. Disraeli, had carried reform ; but it 
 was Bright, more than any of his contemporaries, who 
 had rendered that consummation possible, and who, by 
 the unflagging zeal of his advocacy, had kept the fire 
 of reform alive. In the same way Mr. Gladstone 
 recognised the fact that his old friend's harangues on 
 the condition of the Sister Island had more than any- 
 thing else contributed to bring the disestablishment 
 and disendowment of the Anglican Church on the 
 other side of St. George's Channel within the limits 
 of practical statesmanship. When, therefore, Mr. 
 Gladstone was called upon in 1868 to form his first 
 Cabinet, it was natural, and it was right for two 
 reasons, that he should press Mr. Bright to occupy a 
 place in it. First, Mr. Bright enjoyed a larger share 
 of the confidence of the Liberal party in the English 
 constituencies, and especially of the Nonconformist 
 section of it, than any other public man, Mr. Glad- 
 stone himself not excepted. Secondly, it is a whole- 
 some doctrine that responsibility should be the 
 accompaniment of power, and that a statesman and 
 orator who has wielded at will the British democracy 
 should, when the time comes, submit to the test his 
 capacity for moulding the legislation that he has 
 encouraged it to expect. Mr. Bright recognised the 
 force of both these considerations, and, after having 
 
166 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vi. 
 
 told the electors of Birmingham that for his part he 
 had no ambition for office, but would be well con- 
 tent, like the Shunamite woman, to live amongst his 
 own people, accepted the Presidency of the Board of 
 Trade. Office had, from the point of view taken by 
 the English people, become inevitable to him, and 
 the fact that he did not prove a great administrator 
 cannot be cited as an argument which would have 
 j ustified his refusal of it. 
 
 In one sense, however, his political career, so far 
 as achievement is concerned, was as much at an end 
 in 1868 as in 1874. His health once more showed 
 signs of failing, his absences from the House of 
 Commons were frequent, and he entered but seldom 
 into the war of parliamentary debate. Yet his 
 speech on the Irish Church Bill, on the Ballot Bill, on 
 the indirect Alabama claims, and on other matters, 
 were as fine and as effective as any he had ever 
 delivered. At the Board of Trade he continued till 
 1873, when, a redistribution of Cabinet offices taking 
 place, he was appointed to the Duchy of Lancaster. 
 This office he again occupied, when, after an interval 
 of six years, during which the Conservatives, under 
 Lord Beaconsfield, were in power, the constituencies 
 once more declared for Liberalism. He resigned it 
 only in 1882 because, like not a few other members 
 of his party, he disapproved of the Egyptian policy of 
 the Government, which for the time — it has gone 
 througli many critical developments since then — cul- 
 minated in the bombardment of Alexandria. During 
 
VI.] JOHN BBIGBT, 161 
 
 the past two years (1883-4) Mr. Bright has addressed 
 the House of Commons and popular audiences upon 
 several occasions in his old manner ; but it is no 
 disparagement to his fame, and to the great work 
 which he has accomplished in the past, to say that 
 he has ceased to be an elemental force in politics, or 
 that he receives the admiration and homage of his 
 countrymen less on the ground of present performances 
 than of past services. 
 
 " There are some men," said Mr. Disraeli, in a 
 speech (from which a brief extract has been already 
 given) in the House of Commons on the day of 
 Cobden's death, *' who, although they are not present, 
 are still members of this House, independent of disso- 
 lution or the caprice of constituencies, and even of 
 the course of time. I think that Mr. Cobden is one 
 of these men." Mr. Bright, one may venture to say, 
 is another. If a perfect mastery of the art of parlia- 
 mentary debating is an essential element in the fame 
 of a great orator, then Bright has' several equals and 
 one or two superiors, notably Mr. Gladstone himself. 
 But if it is the cardinal condition of oratory of the 
 first rank to produce with the simplest instruments 
 magnificent effects; to strike right home to the 
 hearts of hearers with words that come even more 
 from the heart than from the head ; to combine with 
 the most perfect propriety of phrase the most studied 
 absence of theatrical declamation ; to know intui- 
 tively how wit and humour may be made to serve 
 the same purpose as, and to work in unison with, 
 
162 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vi 
 
 tragedy and pathos; to display, as, according to 
 Tennyson, it is the mission of the poet to display, the 
 " hate of hate, the scorn of scorn ; " to run in half-a- 
 dozen sentences the whole gamut of human feeling ; 
 to say the aptest things in the aptest voice, now full 
 and resonant, now low and clear, but always pitched 
 in the key precisely consonant to the sentiment con- 
 veyed, and exactly calculated to impress those who 
 listen with the emotion of him who speaks ; — then, 
 unquestionably, John Bright is the greatest orator 
 that our age has beheld. 
 
 Nature has denied him none of the attributes 
 necessary to so exalted a reputation. " There came 
 up a lion out of Judah," was Charlotte Bronte's ex- 
 clamation when she was present at one of Thackeray's 
 lectures. The same remark will have suggested itself 
 to many persons who have witnessed John Bright on 
 the occasion of one of his great oratorical efforts. 
 The massive, well-set head, the lofty brow, the 
 clear blue eye, as "Saxon in its expression as the 
 language of the speaker, have immediately arrested 
 the attention of all spectators. Yet, in the House 
 of Commons, the visitor may have failed to re- 
 cognise immediately the voice and the presence 
 of its greatest orator. Slow, low, and distinct in 
 his commencement, he has appeared to be suffer- 
 ing from a nervous hesitation which those who 
 have never heard him previously might doubt 
 whether he would succeed in overcoming. But in 
 five minutes all apprehensions on this score have 
 
VI.] JOHN BEIOHT. 163 
 
 disappeared. The popular chamber is crowded, for, 
 with the speed of electricity, the news that " Bright 
 is up" has run the round of lobbies, library, and 
 smoking-room. Never has there been associated in 
 the same speaker and in the same speech merit so 
 sustained with excellence so rare. Mr. Bright has 
 spoken, no doubt, not infrequently below himself; 
 but when he has spoken at his best, or at anything 
 like his best, he has been at his best throughout. 
 His eloquence may be compared to the glow of 
 a clear fire steadily burning almost at a white heat. 
 There is nothing fitful or spasmodic about it. The 
 solemn and the sportive are interwoven as natu- 
 rally as the serious and comic scenes in one of 
 Shakespeare's masterpieces. Mr. Bright has pro- 
 bably coined as many concise and adhesive phrases 
 as Disraeli himself. It is he who invented the 
 words "fancy franchise," who first employed ''the 
 Cave of Adullam " as a metaphor for the refuge 
 of the disafi'ected, and who compared the Adul- 
 lamites themselves to the Scotch terrier of which 
 it was difficult to say what portion formed the head 
 and what the tail. 
 
 His humour has always been of the quiet, cutting, 
 and sarcastic style. He likened Mr. Disraeli to *' the 
 man who was not a Cabinet Minister, but only a 
 mountebank, and who set up a stall and offered the 
 country people pills that were very good against 
 earthquakes." He likened Lord Derby's professions 
 about reform to " the sort of feast that a Spanish host 
 
 M 2 
 
164 P0LITIG8 AND LETTERS. [vi. 
 
 sets before his guest, consisting of a little meat and a 
 great deal of table-cloth." The remark of a peer, 
 when Mr. Bright was once absent from Parliament 
 through illness, that '* Providence, in punishment of 
 the manner in which he had abused his talents, had 
 inflicted upon him a disease of the brain," elicited 
 from him on his return to the House of Commons the 
 retort, ''It may be so, but in any case it will be some 
 consolation to the friends and the family of the noble 
 lord to know that the disease is one which even 
 Providence could not inflict upon him." Nor could 
 anything be better than his criticism of Sir Charles 
 Adderley, now Lord Norton, when that gentleman 
 had made some statement from which Mr. Bright dis- 
 sented : ''I hope he thought he was speaking the 
 truth ; but he is rather a dull man and liable to make 
 blunders." One instance more. During the American 
 war, when the cotton supply failed, it was attempted 
 to keep the mill hands employed with an Indian 
 cotton known as Surat, which was exceedingly difli- 
 cult to work. One Sunday morning a minister of 
 some religious denomination was praying that 
 Heaven would send a plentiful supply of cotton. 
 According to Mr. Bright, a spinner in the congrega- 
 tion cried out, " Yea, Lord, but not Surat." 
 
 As Mr. Bright has lived to witness the completion 
 of all the great political movements to which he ever 
 put his hand, he has lived to witness also a curious 
 revulsion in the sentiment even of the privileged 
 classes about himself. A quarter of a century ago he 
 
VI.] JOBN BRIGHT. 1G5 
 
 was spoken of as the tribune of the people, a latter- * 
 day edition of Jack Cade, a demagogue — though, as 
 we have seen, he was never in reality a demagogue at 
 all. Now, as for years past, he is regarded by his 
 political opponents as a moderator and controller of 
 popular passions, and is esteemed, in comparison with 
 Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Chamberlain, a ^*safe man." 
 It was only the other day that he himself declared he 
 could not lay claim to the title of Eadical, as that 
 word is now understood. Mr. Bright's Liberalism or 
 Kadicalism, by whichever name it may be called, has 
 never failed to reflect the national temper and the 
 political genius of the English people. In other 
 words, it has always been largely tinged by Con- 
 servatism. The reforms for which he has struggled, 
 and whose triumph he has beheld, have been de- 
 manded by him not for reasons of abstract political 
 perfection, but because so long as they were denied 
 a gross moral and political scandal was, in his opinion, 
 perpetuated. 
 
 When, therefore, the oflfence against natural equity 
 — the inalienable rights of man — has been removed, 
 the fire of the political reformer has, in the case of 
 Mr. Bright, subsided. He has absolutely nothing of 
 the revolutionary temperament about him. He has 
 nothing either of the sympathy possessed by some 
 English politicians — but in its origin French rather 
 than English — with vague doctrines of political evo- 
 lution. He has called the Conservatives **the stupid 
 party,'' and, as in a letter addressed to a Birmingham 
 
166 POLITIGS AND LETTERS. [vi. 
 
 meeting, when it was considered likely that the 
 Lords would throw out the Irish Church Bill, has 
 admonished the peers that " by throwing them- 
 selves athwart the national course, they might meet 
 with accidents not pleasant for them to think of." 
 But Mr. W. E. Forster used, three or four years ago, 
 much stronger language than this in speaking of the 
 same assembly. 
 
 His own native good sense has ever kept Mr. 
 Bright from extravagance. In 1872, when certain 
 signs of Eepublican feeling asserted themselves in 
 England, and a correspondent wrote to Bright on the 
 subject, he replied that " as to views on the question 
 of Monarchy or Eepublicanism, I hope and believe 
 it will be a long time before we are asked to give an 
 opinion. Our ancestors decided the matter a good 
 while since, and I would suggest that you and I 
 should leave any further decision to our posterity." 
 Mr. Bright never wrote or said anything more charac- 
 teristic than this. At no period of his career has he 
 failed to show himself in words as well as action the 
 loyal subject of the English crown. To the Sovereign 
 herself he has been and is personally attached, and it 
 is the fact that the beginning of his personal estrange- 
 ment from Mr. Disraeli was not, as has sometimes 
 been supposed, his exposure of the sentiments favour- 
 able to regicide which the Conservative statesman 
 had expressed in his now forgotten " Eevolutionary 
 Epic," but the manner in which Mr. Disraeli upon 
 
VI.] JOHN BBIGET. 167 
 
 more than one occasion introduced the Queen's name 
 into parliamentary debates. '* The right honourable 
 gentleman," he said, when Mr. Gladstone's Irish 
 Church resolutions were being discussed, " talked, the 
 other night, sometimes with pompousness and some- 
 times with servility, of the interviews he had with 
 his Sovereign. I venture to say that a Minister who 
 deceives his Sovereign is as guilty as the conspirator 
 who would dethrone her." 
 
 Another evidence of Mr. Bright's innate Con- 
 servatism may be seen in the difference of opinion 
 formed by Cobden and himself on the Keform Act 
 of 1832. Cobden was never satisfied with that 
 measure because, he said, it did nothing more, as 
 was undoubtedly the case, than enfranchise the 
 middle classes. But with that, for the time, Mr. 
 Bright was content. He was, indeed, less advanced 
 in his views of the political rights of the English 
 people than was Mr. Disraeli himself, who objected 
 to the Whig Reform Bill on precisely the same 
 grounds as Cobden. It may therefore well seem 
 surprising that when, in 1859, Lord Palmerston was 
 engaged in the formation of a Government, he 
 offered Cobden a seat in the Cabinet, but declined 
 to make the same offer to Bright on account of 
 the political violence of the latter. The fact is that 
 just as Lord Durham in 1832, and again some years 
 later, was desirous of going a good deal further in 
 the direction of Radicalism than Bright, so Cobden 
 
168 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vi. 
 
 was always much more advanced and aggressive in 
 his ideas than his colleague. That this did not 
 appear to be the case was due to diversity of 
 temperament. Bright always spoke, and seemed to 
 feel, as strongly as, and more bitterly than, he 
 actually felt. His nature was full of the indig- 
 nation which Juvenal declared was the inspiration of 
 his verse. Although he has been and is popular 
 in society, Mr. Bright has never been famous 
 for urbanity of manner. He has rather taken a 
 pleasure in displaying his angularities and a cer- 
 tain irreconcilability of antagonism, superficial often 
 rather than real, to the convictions and preju- 
 dices of others. Cobden, on the contrary, was 
 full of natural hoiihomie. If he was as earnest 
 as Bright, his earnestness was never so militant, 
 and the opposition he provoked was never so per- 
 sistent. 
 
 For these reasons English society may have be- 
 fore now misunderstood Mr. Bright, but it has 
 long since discovered its error. Indeed, it may 
 be doubted whether, even, when he was in the habit 
 of applying his most passionate and vituperative 
 language to objects and to individuals whom he 
 disapproved, he ever concentrated upon himself the 
 same sentiments of personal bitterness as other 
 living statesmen have elicited. Whatever his faults, 
 and however dangerous have seemed his machinations 
 against the privileged classes, who were once taught 
 
VI.] JOHN BRIGHT. 169 
 
 to see in him their most uncompromising foe, there 
 has never been anything subtle or sinister in his way 
 of dealing with them, of which they could complain. 
 He has dubbed spiritual peers "creatures of mon- 
 strous, nay, even of adulterous birth." He has 
 spoken of *'this regard for the liberties of Europe, 
 this excessive love for the balance of power," as 
 "neither more nor less than a gigantic system of 
 out-door relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain." 
 But as, when Lord Shaftesbury declared "Ecce 
 Homo" to be the vilest book ever vomited from 
 the jaws of hell, he meant nothing more than 
 that he disapproved of its teachings, so it has 
 always been known that Mr. Bright only wished 
 to express, however vehement his anathemas, 
 his dissent from his opponents in an emphatic 
 fashion. 
 
 Thus it is that, not only in the House of Com- 
 mons but in general society, he has always been 
 personally acceptable. ''If you will come down to 
 the House," remarks one of the scions of the nobility 
 to Lothair, in what is nearly Lord Beaconsfield's 
 worst novel, " I will take you into the tea-room and 
 introduce you to Bright." There is a degree of social 
 truth in this casual comment which invests it with a 
 real historical value. At the present moment Mr. 
 Bright is much sought after in London drawing-rooms 
 and dining-rooms, whatever the political views of 
 their proprietors. Nor is there anything new to him 
 
170 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vi. 
 
 in such an experience. All the memoirs recently 
 published, which throw any light upon the social or 
 political history of the last three decades, especially 
 the biography of the late Bishop AVilberforce, contain 
 numerous references to John Bright. Anecdotes are 
 told in every chapter of the good things he said upon 
 certain occasions, of the pleasant little snubs he 
 administered to indiscreet intruders into select com- 
 panies, of the freshness which his remarks ever carried 
 with them, and of his far-reaching interest in a thousand 
 matters that have nothing whatever to do with his 
 political creed. If Mr. Bright w^ere ever to write or 
 to publish his autobiography, it would be found more 
 valuable as a contribution to the social than to — since 
 upon that point he has said in his speeches all there 
 is to say — the political history of the age. Unfortu- 
 nately Mr. Bright is not particularly fond of literary 
 composition. Though he has always prepared his 
 speeches most carefully, he has never written them 
 out at length ; and though he was popularly reputed 
 to contribute leading articles to The Morning Star, 
 which was once the recognised exponent of his views, 
 there exists the best authority for saying that he 
 never penned an editorial in his life. 
 
 The commanding position which Mr. Bright has 
 achieved in England is, it may be said in conclusion, 
 due, next to his genius, to the fact that he is an 
 eminently faithful representative of the English cha- 
 racter. If he has seemed to some of us in these latter 
 
VI.] JOHN BRIGHT. 171 
 
 days to have grown too autobiographical in his 
 speeches, too prone to dwell at inordinate length upon 
 the triumphs he has won, it must never be forgotten 
 that he devoted to the labour which secured these not 
 merely enormous energy, courage, and patience, but 
 intellectual gifts and literary power of a sort that had 
 never before been expended upon similar or analogous 
 objects. It is no exaggeration to say that the mar- 
 vellously delicate graces of his always robust rhetoric 
 have proved instrumental in investing with a spiritual 
 charm the hard and rugged features of nineteenth- 
 century Eadicalism. 
 
 John Bright is a speaker w^hom in some respects 
 it is difficul^^ to compare wdth any of his contempo- 
 raries. He has not passed through the ordinary 
 scholastic and academic curriculum of English poli- 
 ticians. His mind, unlike that of Mr. Gladstone, of 
 Canning, Pitt, Fox, and a host of others, was free 
 from all associations of classical literature. He has 
 studied English, and English alone. The diction of 
 the English Bible and Milton has become part of his 
 intellectual texture — colours his diction like the 
 varying yet dominant hue in shot silk. He is the 
 first English orator who has shown his countrymen 
 what may be accomplished with the unaided resources 
 of the Anglo-Saxon tongue, and in after ages there 
 can be little doubt that his achievements will be 
 cited as illustrating the finest possibilities of our lan- 
 guage. A man who has done all this ; who in addition 
 
172 POLITICS AND LBTTBRS. [vi. 
 
 has witnessed the assured triumph of the great public 
 causes which he has advocated ; who, sated with 
 victory, has in a manner detached himself from the 
 strife of parties, is able to enjoy in his own lifetime 
 a foretaste of the fame which must to others, not less 
 gifted perhaps than John Bright, be a vision or a 
 hope. 
 
VII. 
 
 A CHILD'S AUTOBIOGEAPHY. 
 
 A DULL, bleak level of depressing dreary monotony, 
 yet not altogether ungladdened by fitful and too 
 transient bursts of sunshine, not entirely unbroken 
 by brief incidents of petty joy — that is the retrospect 
 which meets the eye as it glances leisurely down the 
 lengthened vista of the past years. The child, indeed, 
 knew, like his elders, occasional intervals of positive 
 happiness and gladness. But the prevailing colour 
 worn by the period of his infancy was a sombre 
 chilling gray ; his reminiscences of the epoch are 
 those of one of the dull, dead, soundless days of 
 autumn. Yet it was not to intentional cruelty and 
 deliberate wrong that he was subjected. There was 
 no consciousness of oppression or harshness on the 
 part of those who were responsible for the gloom amid 
 which his existence began. They in their turn had 
 perhaps known the same dark, overclouded time ; and 
 thus the memory of the parent became the experience 
 of the child. 
 
 Such things are as traditions in families. In some. 
 
174 POLITICS AND LETTERS, [vii. 
 
 from generation to generation, it is esteemed a part of 
 the domestic religion that where the infancy of the 
 father has been subjected to severely repressive 
 influences, that of the son shall be confined within 
 the same sad atmosphere. Subjection, coercion, the 
 checking of all those harmless impulses whose wise 
 indulgence makes childish happiness, are a law of the 
 house. As the sire was not allowed to laugh too 
 loudly, or to say too much in the presence of his 
 elders, so the son is prohibited, under penalties, from 
 the too public display of all those emotions of hope 
 and fear and mirth of which childhood largely con- 
 sists. In other cases the ancestral law of the house 
 is one of infantile happiness. Here you will see 
 portraits of daughters smiling at their mothers' knees, 
 of chubby-faced boys whose eyes sparkle and brim 
 over with the quintessence of pure delight. It is the 
 cachet of the race that the son shall find an elder 
 brother in the father, and the daughter an elder sister 
 in the mother. All our moral and all our political 
 ideas come, we are told, from the development of the 
 family. Difi'erent families, it may be said with at 
 least equal truth, are the types and reflections of 
 difi'erent political systems. You have the democratic 
 theory illustrated beneath the domestic roof-tree, as 
 well as the monarchical; and you may as readily 
 expect to find the fresh elastic liberty of a republic 
 under the sway of an iron despotism, as happy child- 
 hood in those homes where coercion is the hereditary 
 
VII.] A CHILD'S AUTOBIOOEAPHY. 175 
 
 The child now spoken of perceives, as he looks 
 back upon that desolate and forlorn era, that he was 
 brought up in such a way and upon such principles as 
 to acquire the ever-growing, ever-strengthening con- 
 viction that life was a necessary evil. It was as if 
 the lullaby whispered in his ear at the very earliest 
 stages of his existence had been the favourite refrain 
 of a Greek tragic chorus : ** Best of all things is it not 
 to be born ; and next best, when one has been born, 
 to quit the stage of life as swiftly as possible." The 
 gradual unfolding of events, the successive growth of 
 circumstance, caused this melancholy aphorism to 
 become a kind of fixed idea in the child's mind. The 
 whisper of mortality was ever audible to him, was 
 ever destroying, with its still small voice, his peace of 
 spirit. He was taught to note the fall of the leaf, 
 and not its budding growth. He was bidden to ^x 
 his attention rather upon the decay of autumn than 
 the hopeful lessons of spring. The summer suns might 
 be bright, and the summer skies one wide overarch- 
 ing vault of unfathomable cloudless blue ; but there 
 were clouds which were sure to rise, and pitiless 
 rains were ever being drawn up from the seas into 
 heaven. 
 
 Thus it was that imperceptibly the entire life of 
 the child became overhung by the shadow of some 
 coming eclipse. A vague presentiment of calamity, of 
 total darkness that might at any moment descend 
 upon the earth and cover all, a chronic state of mute, 
 mournful, passive acquiescence in a grim and tyran- 
 
176 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vii. 
 
 nical dispensation, were the outcome of the influences 
 by which he was surrounded. The future never sug- 
 gested itself as an infinite succession of glad possi- 
 bilities. It seemed rather to shape itself to the 
 childish and most fearful imagination as a narrow 
 sunless path, never once turning to right or left ; 
 stretching on, on, on, for weary mile after weary mile, 
 till it became lost in blinded mists and rain, beyond 
 which were fiery terrors and the torture-house of 
 implacable Fate. 
 
 Some relief to this ordeal, which was really one of 
 agony and prostration of spirit, the heavily-passing 
 days brought with them ; but it was the relief, not 
 which came from the essential condition of the child's 
 home, but either from events external in origin to his 
 home, or else from the child's own inner resources. 
 It was vain to expect that an infant taught to take 
 this view of the universe, and to recognise in the 
 Divine Providence a mode of difi'using misery, which, 
 under pain of endless punishment, mankind were 
 compelled to accept as happiness, and hypocritically 
 to speak of as such ; taught to recognise in his 
 earthly parents the symbols of a relentless power who 
 observed all and punished all — it was vain to expect 
 that such a one should pour the record of his secret 
 suiferings into father's or mother's ear. It is love 
 which encourages confidence ; and the only love 
 which a child understands is that whose expression is 
 tenderness. 
 
 To impress upon the child's mind the doctrine of 
 
VII.] A CHILD'S AUTOBIOGBAPEY. 177 
 
 the Calvinistic God, to declare that the Being of 
 whom the child is told thus to conceive is one of 
 infinite mercy and all-abounding love, is to use 
 language which is sure to terrify him, but which he 
 cannot understand. Further, to impress upon him 
 that father or mother is, in a minor degree, what the 
 Supreme Euler of the world is on a scale of measure- 
 less magnitude, is to raise between parent and 
 oflfspring a cold, impassable barrier. Under such 
 circumstances, the idea of home, as home ought to be, 
 cannot be realised. Home may be a place where 
 meals are eaten, where unhappiness departs at night- 
 time in the blessed oblivion of sleep, where lessons 
 are learned and unending sermons are preached. But 
 it is only on the escape from home, the partial or 
 complete throwing off of home associations, that an 
 approach to happiness can be found. 
 
 So was it with this child. It was a relief to him 
 to speed away from that joyless roof, from the eternal 
 round of spiritual precepts and ghostly monitions, 
 into the fresh life of Nature. He dared even at times 
 to face the certainty of parental chastisement, and, as 
 he was taught, of the fiercest manifestation of Divine 
 displeasure ; and lying hid in the long summer grass, 
 or sheltered by the umbrageous shrubs, which favoured 
 his iniquitous design, he gave the party of church- 
 goers the slip. It was a dearly-purchased gratifi- 
 cation ; for the act meant close confinement for 
 twenty-four hours w^hen caught, and the necessity of 
 learning by heart three extra collects, epistles, and 
 
 ' N 
 
178 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vii. 
 
 gospels — a sufficiently severe penalty for an anti- 
 Sabbatarian infant of seven. Yet even this was 
 something to break the dreary, chilling round. 
 
 The child on these occasions seldom had play- 
 mates. But solitude with Nature was better than 
 society at home. At least, as he wandered through 
 the fields, basking in the June sunshine, he could 
 hear the lark carolling high in heaven ; could listen to 
 the buzz of multitudinous insects in the hot air ; 
 could watch the shadows chase each other over the 
 distant hills ; could see the trout darting to and fro 
 in the clear flowing stream. It was something to 
 feel that, for a few minutes at least, he was beyond 
 the reach of lessons, and sermons, and prayers, and 
 parental homilies ; and that he was certain of a 
 short interval of leisure and pleasure before a stern 
 voice would tell him to commit to heart so many 
 verses of the Hundredth Psalm, so many hymns, or 
 such and such passages from Cowper's ''Task." At 
 such moment the child had two chief wishes — to pass 
 away altogether ; to become an insentient thing ; or 
 if not, and better than that, to become transformed 
 into some creature, who might revel at will in the 
 warm breezes of summer ; shelter himself as he best 
 might from the winter colds, and hear never a word 
 again of lessons, and religion, and parents, and 
 heaven. Then, too, there were the long, lonely 
 rambles on the shingle of the sea-shore ; the tranquil 
 enjoyment of the music of the rippling waves as they 
 touched the pebbly ridge, and then shrank back as if 
 
VII.] A CHILD'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 179 
 
 they had done a rash thing ; and the occasional ex- 
 citement of the spectacle of the mackerel-fishing — a. 
 dark speck suddenly appearing in the offing, the sure 
 sign of the presence of a shoal ; the speck growing 
 larger and larger, the sudden descent of fishers from 
 the cliff to the beach, the launching of the boats, the 
 hauling out of the nets ; then the slow tugging in of 
 the long coils of seine, till at last, amid speechless 
 excitement, its deep bosom touched the shore ; and 
 there, before the admiring multitude, were masses of 
 live fish, leaping and tumbling about, and sparkling 
 with silver and emerald. 
 
 There were bands of unregenerate fishers in these 
 parts, who declined to be bound by Sabbath ordi- 
 nances. Church they eschewed ; and all the Sunday 
 long would stand silent, but seldom pipeless, leaning 
 against rails or posts, on the low cliff confronting the 
 sea. Then, when the shout was raised that the 
 mackerel had come, they would rush down, regardless 
 of the sanctity of the day, and hurry off in their boats 
 to sea. These men were the secret heroes of the 
 child's mind. He indeed at first expected to witness 
 the fiery vengeance of Heaven suddenly descend upon 
 them. It was a mystery to him that the waves, 
 whose Sabbath sanctity w^as thus outraged, did not 
 swallow up the impious fishers. When he perceived 
 that none of these things came upon them, he recog- 
 nised in them, not so much sacrilegious wretches, as 
 the champions of the principle of human liberty. It 
 was the earliest instance of organised revolt against 
 
180 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vii. 
 
 church-going authority which the juvenile observer 
 , had ever beheld ; and he was gratified to know that 
 such a revolt might be successfully conducted. It 
 gave him hope. 
 
 There were more exciting pleasures than these 
 which he was sometimes permitted to know. In this 
 age of infinitely extended locomotion — when the 
 arrival of a visitor by the train is no more matter of 
 surprise than a shower of rain on an April day — there 
 may be a difficulty in remembering — or in imagining, 
 if the facts of memory do not exist — the emotions 
 caused by the arrival of the stranger who travelled 
 by road. To the child, situated and trained as the 
 one of whom I am now speaking, these events were 
 the revelations of another order of existence. He 
 was supposed to be too much busied about spiritual 
 matters to be forewarned of such trivial occurrences ; 
 and there was always a delightful uncertainty whether, 
 in the course of half- an -hour after the time at which 
 he knew the mail-coach was due at the village, some 
 visitor might not present himself, or whether at 
 any moment some traveller by postchaise might not 
 appear on the scene. Friends now drop in on us 
 suddenly, but their arrival is a commonplace and pro- 
 saic affair. It is doubtful whether even the childish 
 mind would have been impressed by these advents in 
 the same way that he was by those which were 
 heralded by the long rumble of wheels, and the ap- 
 proach of a carriage-and-pair, conducted by a red- 
 faced postilion up the gravel-drive. There was room 
 
VII.] A GHILD'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 181 
 
 for so much interesting conjecture as to whom the 
 equipage might prove to contain ; and, above all 
 things, there was the charm of a presence fresh from 
 the outer world. For, to the child, the visitor was a 
 messenger from another universe. He conversed 
 about every subject, and brought tidings about mtinj 
 things. Strange that he could say so much, and yet 
 say nothing about religion or duty ; that he could 
 even talk to the child for half-an-hour together, or 
 take him out for a long walk, without once asking 
 him who lived in the heaven and what became of the 
 unconverted sinner ; whether he committed his Bible 
 verses accurately to memory, and how often he said 
 his prayers. Not less surprising did it seem that 
 even his parents should discuss with the new-comer 
 other themes than were connected with their souls' 
 salvation — that they, too, to judge from their words, 
 were aware of the existence of a world which had not 
 the sanction of the Gospel according to Calvin ; that 
 they had even been in this world, and that they 
 could talk of it and its doings with interest, and 
 occasionally with merriment. 
 
 That was one of the earliest circumstances w^hich 
 produced a profound impression on the child's mind. 
 Could it be that his parents had one voice and face 
 for him, and another for their friends ? If so, how 
 far was he to trust and believe them ? The seeds of 
 hatred of the discipline of infancy had long since been 
 sown ; there now began to suggest themselves grave 
 questionings as to the sincerity of that discipline. 
 
182 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vii. 
 
 Contact with the real facts of existence, and ex- 
 perience of the world, in however limited a shape, 
 were now beginning to be felt, and there commenced 
 a long and quick succession of anxious self-question- 
 ings. One of these visitors once insisted, not merely 
 on bathing in the sea, but in rowing in a boat, on the 
 Sabbath. Here was a plain act of defiance of the 
 most solemn laws of Heaven, which surely called for 
 some emphatic exercise of Divine interposition. It 
 was true that the irreverent fishers already mentioned 
 had committed much the same crime and had been 
 unpunished. This was explained to the child partly 
 by the circumstance that they did not know better ; 
 secondly, by the assurance that they would be 
 punished all the more severely hereafter. It was a 
 very different thing when a guest who was staying 
 under the parental roof audaciously infringed a 
 celestial ordinance, and was not only not immediately 
 annihilated, but on his return home was greeted with 
 the expression of a hope that he had enjoyed himself. 
 Other forces than these were at work in the 
 expansion and instruction of the child's mind. Of 
 the great festivals of the year he had never been per- 
 mitted to know anything but their most rigidly un- 
 bending religious significance. Easter was a season 
 of exceptionally frequent church-going, and painfully 
 numerous collects, epistles, and gospels. Christmas 
 was associated, indeed, with holly, mistletoe, even 
 with plum-pudding, turkey, and mince-pies ; but 
 there was still severely operative the inexorable law 
 
VII.] A CHILD'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 183 
 
 of attendance at Divine worship, and there was no ces- 
 sation in the round of scriptural lessons to be learned. 
 But the child was already tasting of the fruit of the 
 tree of the knowledge of good and evil ; and he had 
 learned from books that there was another Christmas 
 at once less harmful and more mirthful than the 
 Christmas of the Puritanical household. He came in 
 this manner to know of the Christmastides of Dickens, 
 of the pastimes on the ice after morning service, of 
 Christmas games and smiling firesides. He extended 
 his studies of this good genius of fiction. He gradu- 
 ally formed a conception of a world in which the 
 path of duty was not necessarily the path of suff'ering 
 and tears. He was, by degrees, creating an existence 
 for himself in which a kind imagination enabled him 
 to find an opportune relief. 
 
 The dual life, which sooner or later we most 
 of us lead, had begun for him, spite of his tender 
 years. There was, on the one hand, the austere 
 external life, full of terrorS; impregnated with phari- 
 saism and hypocrisy ; there was, on the other hand, 
 the inner life, the outcome partly of a joyous 
 literature working on a childish imagination, partly 
 of the stray experiences of happiness projected into 
 the months as they passed away, which alone ren- 
 dered the burden of living supportable. As time 
 wore on, the attempt was made to despoil him 
 of even that glad and innocent possession which 
 was the solace of his sombre hours. He was con- 
 sidered to be old enough to recognise the mercies 
 
184 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vii. 
 
 of Providence in Nature ; and he was not permitted 
 to take his walks by the cliff or in the woods without 
 hearing homilies on the glories of creation, and being- 
 called upon to quote scriptural texts illustrative of 
 them. Soon Science added her horrors to those 
 of Theology. The primrose by the river's brim 
 was no longer sufifered to be to him simply the 
 yellow primrose, and nothing more. It was a factor 
 in a vegetable system. He had been delivered from 
 the persecuting Puritanism of his earlier days to 
 friends, relatives, and preceptors with a taste for 
 botany. He was now admonished to see, not only 
 God in Nature, but Linnaeus. He was compelled 
 to spend hours grubbing in hedgerows for roots 
 and plants, in order that he might listen afterwards 
 to a lecture on their economy. 
 
 Nor did his troubles end here. It was discovered 
 that as he was deplorably wanting in the elements 
 of botanical taste, and indeed with as little apti- 
 tude for natural science generally as for dogmatic 
 theology, so he was a poor, nervous, irritable, 
 sensitive urchin. The time was now approaching 
 when he would have to leave home for school. It 
 was necessary that he should have some preliminary 
 experience of what that stern ordeal would prove. 
 So he was delivered over to the tormentors in the 
 shape of cousins, as playmates, of maturer years 
 than his own. Boys, he was told, had no business 
 to be sensitive, irritable, or nervous. Their Heavenly 
 Father had never intended them to be so, and if 
 
VII.] A OHTLD'S AUTOBIOGEAPIIY. 185 
 
 they would not cease being so of their own accord, 
 they must be laughed, and if necessary beaten, out 
 of it. It was the will of Providence that he 
 should unlearn these silly ways, and the instruments 
 whom Providence had selected were these impish 
 relatives. 
 
 The child was now fairly scared. Above him 
 there was an angry Deity ; around him and on 
 every side of him were frowning elders or younger 
 companions, the refinements of whose cruelty seemed 
 to have about it something that was diabolical. 
 The boy's existence was one of prolonged and 
 unendurable misery. He was like a hunted creature. 
 He could not follow the instruction of his teachers ; 
 he cowered before the glance of those who were 
 pleasantly called his playfellows. He knew no 
 happiness save when he was asleep ; and when he 
 said his prayers he supplicated Heaven to remove 
 him from his childish, but most real, woes. He 
 began to pine, and to look ill ; his parents shook 
 their heads, and informed him that he was pos- 
 sessed by a devil. Yet there was no conscious 
 barbarity in these excellent people. They were 
 both God-fearing, and they never wearied of Bible 
 and sermon. The truth is they lacked imagination. 
 It never occurred to them to ask what the effect 
 of this hideously unnatural, detestably coercive 
 regime was calculated to be. They had, as they 
 conceived, the certain warrant of Scripture for it, 
 and that was, or ought to be, enough. They were 
 
186 POLITICS AND LETTERS, [vii. 
 
 not even intentionally unkind ; but the inhumanising 
 superstition of their faith placed sympathy with 
 the hopes, fears, and thoughts of a child out of the 
 question. 
 
 In time there came something like deliverance. 
 The child was decided to be of ripe age for a 
 boardiog-school, and thither he was sent. He 
 wept no tears on his departure, and his dry eyes 
 were said to be the sign of an incorrigibly hardened 
 heart. He had not been a week away from home 
 before he found that he was in a new world, and that 
 he was himself a new creature. The life of the 
 place was a reality, and not a sham. He felt that 
 the advice given him had some relation to the 
 actualities by which he was surrounded. There 
 were a freedom and an elasticity in the existence 
 which he had never yet known. It was something 
 not to be told that he was already in Satan's 
 hands, and to be menaced with sulphureous terrors 
 because his memory gave way beneath an unna- 
 tural strain. It was something to be in the 
 company of boys, who, if sometimes combatant, 
 were not, for the most part, persecutors. In a 
 word, school was the salvation of the child's cha- 
 racter. And as it was with him whose experiences 
 are here recited, so has it doubtless been with 
 many others. It is well that one should be able 
 to speak of these things in the past tense. It is 
 well that one should be able to think that the 
 
VII.] A CHILD'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 187 
 
 darkness of the worst form of superstition, and the 
 thousand inhumanities which these involve, are 
 seldom to be found in the training of the children 
 of to-day. 
 
 Happily, even at the period above referred to, 
 there were forthcoming, in the majority of instances, 
 the experiences of school to correct the baneful and 
 mistaken teachings of home ; and those who, under 
 such a home system, have grown up to be honourable, 
 bold, good men — and not cravens, hypocrites, and 
 pharisees — have done so, not as a result of, but in 
 spite of, such a system. But who shall say how 
 many a character has been incurably dwarfed and 
 irreparably spoiled by the ill-starred regimen ? It is 
 the parents, and not the schoolmasters, who should 
 shape, and who are primarily responsible for shaping, 
 the disposition of the son ; and that they can only 
 do, and can only have done, as they frame their 
 teachings by direct reference to the conditions of life 
 which will confront him liereafter. The object of the 
 education of childhood is to equip the child in the 
 manner best calculated to help him to acquit himself 
 honourably, and it may be successfully, in the world 
 into which he is born. It is not necessary on this 
 account to exclude the religious element, without 
 which experience shows that all early education is 
 radically imperfect. But it is necessary so to regu- 
 late this that the moral and intellectual fibre shall not 
 be debased and weakened ; and it is also necessary for 
 
188 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vii. 
 
 parents to cultivate those relations of equal friendship 
 with their children which may cause the latter to 
 listen with real affection to the teachings of experi- 
 ence, and may provide some kind of guarantee that 
 the wholesome monitions of age will not be given in 
 vain. 
 
VIII. 
 
 MR. HAYWAED. 
 
 The morning newspapers of the 7th of February, 
 1885, contained the account of a funeral ceremony 
 held the previous day in St. James's Church, Picca- 
 dilly, which must have caused many readers no little 
 surprise. The name of the man round whose bier the 
 mourners were gathered was probably unknown to tlie 
 large proportion of the provincial public, and would 
 liave been strange to a far larger, had not The Time.'i 
 of the preceding Monday devoted two columns of big 
 type to his life, and summed up his character and 
 career in a leading article. But the company collected 
 to pay the last token of respect and regard to his 
 memory within the church, from which the din of the 
 most bustling of West End thoroughfares is audible, 
 comprised men distinguished in various walks of life, 
 known and honoured by all their countrymen. The 
 Prime Minister placed a wreath of snowdrops, fresh 
 from the woods of Hawarden, upon the pall. Near 
 him stood one or two of his colleagues in the Cabinet ; 
 stood two or three ex-Cabinet Ministers ; stood also 
 
190 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [viii. 
 
 men famous in diplomacy, in law, as well as in states- 
 manship and letters — the ornaments and represen- 
 tatives of what is called society. It is impossible to 
 conceive of a more typical gathering, and Mr. Hay- 
 ward could have desired no more significant tribute 
 to the position he had achieved long ago, and the 
 kind of ascendency he had held. Those to whom his 
 patronymic either conveyed no idea at all, or little 
 else than a dim impression of some powerful reviewer 
 whose writings they could not well indicate, must 
 have been at a loss to account for the attention paid 
 to him by men who are already part of English 
 history. I propose briefly, and, as it cannot but be, 
 most inadequately, to give some explanation of this 
 phenomenon ; hereafter I trust there may be published 
 in the pages of The Fortnightly Review, a more 
 finished and worthy study of Hayward's life and 
 labours. 
 
 Nothing can be more misleading than many of the 
 estimates of Mr. Hay ward which have already appeared 
 in print. He has been represented as a professional 
 diner-out, a raconteur, a trifler, a cynic, a mere wielder 
 of flippant persiflage. If he had been only one of 
 these persons, or if he had been all of them combined, 
 he would have failed to acquire the influence and dis- 
 tinction which belonged to him. English society, 
 whatever its follies and frivolities, is essentially 
 serious. The wits and wags, the farceurs and light 
 comedians of the dinner-table, make a transient repu- 
 tation, but they never reach the place which, willingly 
 
VIII.] 3£B. HAYWARD. ' 191 
 
 or unwillingly, was accorded to Hay ward. He had 
 his angularities ; he had his faults ; but the estimate 
 in which he was held and the authority which he had 
 won were, on the whole, not more creditable to him- 
 self than to the society from which he derived his 
 power. If he had been less passionate in his love of 
 truth, less eager in his pursuit of it, less intrepid in 
 his championship of friends and in his denunciation 
 of foes, he would never have come to eminence and 
 even autocracy. 
 
 Endowed wdth a legal and thoroughly logical 
 mind, with accurate and abundant knowledge, with 
 prodigious energy, with a rare power of argumen- 
 tative speech of the kind one may call overbearing, 
 he still will not be remembered as a great lawyer. 
 He produced no independent work of large dimen- 
 sions, and he w^as not, in the sense in which that 
 expression might be applied to some of his contem- 
 poraries, a great writer. His essays, indeed, which 
 fill five or six stout volumes, may be described as a 
 thesaurus of miscellaneous information, not more 
 curious for its comprehensiveness than admirable for 
 its accuracy and precision. It is no exaggeration to 
 say that any person who had assimilated a tenth part 
 of the knowledge contained in Hay ward's occasional 
 pieces would be unusually well informed. The 
 literary merit of these compositions is considerable ; 
 but it was as little in his capacity of litterateur as of 
 lawyer, anecdotist, and critic, that Hayward took the 
 most powerful and brilliant portion of the English 
 
192 ' P0LITIG8 AND LETTERS. [viii. 
 
 public by storm, and, once having captured it, held it 
 in fee. The qualities which were the instruments 
 and guarantees of his success were his thorough 
 genuineness, his intensity, his abhorrence of false- 
 hood and sham, of trickery and imposture, his daunt- 
 less and fiery determination to arrive in every case at 
 facts, to prevent others being misled by phrases, and, 
 in the words of Figaro, to ''whip hypocrisy." Attri- 
 butes of this kind generate a moral atmosphere. 
 They may often offend, but they never fail to 
 attract. 
 
 When Johnson asked Boswell his impressions 
 of the conversation over night, the faithful satellite 
 replied to his master, " Well, sir, you gorged and 
 trampled on a good many people.'' These words 
 exactly describe Hayward's attitude to every species 
 of falsehood, inaccuracy, or cant. One can under- 
 stand how a young lady, on being told that Hay ward 
 was the sort of man who would do vehement justice 
 to her if she were wrongly assailed, but would bring 
 any slip she might make into prominent relief, 
 had the naivete to say, " What a horrid man ! " And 
 it was in the nature of things impossible for such a 
 fierce hunter after truth to be extensively popular. 
 People observing from without his distinguished posi- 
 tion in society sat down at their desks and deliberately 
 ascribed his elevation to a cause the reverse of the 
 truth. Samuel Warren attempted to assail him in 
 "Ten Thousand a Year" as Mr. Venom Tuft. Lord 
 Beaconsfield, who often worked hard against him by 
 
Yiii.] 3IB. SAYWAEB, 193 
 
 manipulating the hogshead of abuse which his fol- 
 lowers brought him and distilling it into three drops, 
 was supposed, by many persons, to have lampooned 
 him as Mr. St. Barbe in '* Endymion." The original 
 of that character, it is now known, was Thackeray, 
 whom Lord Beaconsfield disliked for the same kind of 
 reason that he disliked Hayward. As he resented 
 Thackeray's burlesque of his literary style in '^ Cod- 
 lingsby," so he resented Hay ward's exposure of his 
 plagiarism from Thiers' funeral panegyric on St. Cyr. 
 Hayward had convicted him of a twofold rhetorical 
 dishonesty : first, his appropriation of Thiers' masterly 
 composition, ideas, words, and all ; secondly, his ap- 
 propriation of the language in which it was first 
 placed before the English public by The Morning 
 Chronicle, 
 
 But, independently of this incident, there was a 
 natural antipathy between the two men which could 
 not have failed to breed a reciprocity of dislike. To 
 Hayward, Disraeli's character seemed essentially false ; 
 and the very reasons which made him, during the 
 latter years of his life, so warm an admirer of Mr. 
 Gladstone, prevented his ever being a sympathetic 
 critic of Mr. Gladstone's great opponent. The reason 
 of Hay ward's unpopularity during the earlier stage of 
 his career were, on the part of those who knew him, 
 impetuous aggressiveness ; and on the part of those 
 who did not, a mistaken estimate of him. No man 
 ever less merited the surname bestowed upon him by 
 Warren ; no man was ever less of a parasite, a toady, 
 
194 POLITICS AND LETTEBS. [vm. 
 
 or a tuft. He performed no acts of unworthy or 
 interested homage. Where others won by blandish- 
 ments, he succeeded with frowns and reprimands. If 
 the number of those who entertained towards him 
 any warm sentiment of friendship or affection was 
 small, it was larger than falls to the lot of most of us, 
 and few men have ever received on their death-bed 
 such marks of patient and tender devotion from those 
 outside the pale of their own kindred. 
 
 Hayward, indeed, had outlived his unpopularity. 
 He ceased to be unpopular when he became privi- 
 leged. The vast legion of his acquaintances did not 
 measure him by the standard which is usually applied 
 as a gauge of social amenity. He occupied a position 
 of his own, apart from others, and he was not ex- 
 pected to conform to any conventional canons. If 
 these traits in his character had not been accom- 
 panied by sterling and rare merits, society would not 
 have tolerated and have smiled upon him. In addi- 
 tion to his truthfulness and thoroughness, he was 
 absolutely loyal to his friends, not only doing justice 
 to them in his talk, but, when necessary, and often when 
 unnecessary, doing fierce battle in their behalf. He 
 was, moreover, of great practical assistance on more 
 than one occasion to some of those friends when they 
 were entrusted with the administration of the nation's 
 affairs. He was never the depository of State secrets, 
 for it was his way when anything had been told him 
 which interested him to talk about it everywhere. 
 Hayward's relations to statesmen and to Governments 
 
viii.J MB, HAYWABB. 195 
 
 will be correctly indicated, if it is said that before 
 passing into action irrevocably, Ministers found it 
 occasionally convenient to try the strength of their 
 case before him. When a Liberal Cabinet was pre- 
 paring to deliberate on any measure, some of its 
 members instinctively liked, ])efore confronting the 
 public, to *'talk it over with Hay ward." This 
 *' private trial," as racing men might call it, w^as of 
 infinite service to Ministers adventuring on new 
 ground ; for they learned what could be effectively 
 said both against their project and for it. If once 
 brought to approve the design. Hay ward never failed 
 to become its strong partisan. 
 
 It may be convenient here briefly to glance at such 
 stages and aspects of Hayward's life as are necessary 
 for a correct understanding of the place he filled, and 
 his connection with the politics and politicians of his 
 time. He came of a good Wiltshire stock, descend- 
 ing from the Hay wards of Hillcott, a family owning 
 landed estates which, along with high moral cha- 
 racters, entitled them to the envied privilege of 
 entering church before all the other parishioners. 
 Hayward was indebted for his baptismal name to an 
 uncle who lived at Taunton, with whom his nephew 
 frequently stayed, and who was much shocked when, 
 on calling on Hayward in his chambers in the Temple, 
 he found him in the company, not of a future Lord 
 Chancellor, but of one whom, in an angry letter 
 still extant, he called an adventurer — the future 
 Napoleon III. In point of property his family 
 
 o 2 
 
196 POLITICS AND LETTEBS. [viii. 
 
 encountered vicissitudes, sometimes in the downward, 
 sometimes in the happy direction. He was educated 
 at Blundell's school at Tiverton, then a West-country 
 Winchester. The discipline was harsh, the diet 
 meagre, and his family believed that the lad's health 
 was permanently injured by the rough life and the 
 scanty fare. 
 
 On leaving school he went to a private tutor, and 
 learned German. He was articled to a solicitor at 
 Ilchester, who had little business, but an excellent 
 library of the orthodox English classics, on whicli 
 Hayward feasted at leisure, and acquired much of the 
 varied and profound knowledge of English literature 
 that appears on every page of his writings. Before 
 he was twenty he began to keep his terms in the 
 Temple. His means were at this period exceedingly 
 slender. His chief pleasure, and, as it proved, a most 
 valuable portion of his education, was to attend the 
 debates of the House of Commons, admission to 
 which was then to a large extent gained by favour of 
 the door-keepers, who were entitled to charge half-a- 
 crown, and to whom consequently many of Hayward's 
 spare half-crowns went. While he was yet a law 
 student he joined the London Debating Society. 
 This event had a great influence on his life, and 
 constituted a turning point in his career. Eoebucli 
 was the leader on the Liberal side. Hayward quickly 
 stepped into the place of Conservative chief; and, 
 among all the ardent young members of the society, 
 there were none who pursued the pith of the argu- 
 
VIII. 
 
 ME, HAYWABD. 197 
 
 ment with more closeness than the Blundell scholar. 
 On being called to the Bar, and finding practice slow 
 in coming, he established The Law Magazine, which 
 was devoted largely to the philosophy of jurispru- 
 dence, and which brought him into connection with 
 George Cornewall Lewis and John Austin, as well as 
 some of the chief German authorities of the period on 
 legal science. In 1832 Hay ward paid a visit to 
 Germany. He did not meet when there, as has been 
 incorrectly said, Goethe, but he made the acquaint- 
 ance of Savigny the jurist and the father of the 
 subsequent Prussian Minister. He was thrown into 
 the society of Tieck, and frequented the salon of the 
 Countess Hahn-Hahn, whose acquaintance and friend- 
 ship he retained during several years, and with whom 
 he maintained a correspondence even after she had 
 retired into a convent at Mayence. 
 
 Few Englishmen, indeed, have had a larger 
 personal acquaintance on the Continent. Few knew 
 the character of France and Germany better, or had 
 a juster appreciation and a deeper insight into the 
 spirit of their literature. Hayward's visits to Paris 
 were frequent ; and to the end of his life he seldom 
 crossed the Channel less than once a year. He was on 
 intimate terms with Thiers, Broglie, Dumas, and 
 many others. He introduced more than one French 
 writer for the first time into England. One of his 
 most interesting essays is devoted to Madame Mohl, 
 at whose house he was a frequent guest. When 
 Thiers, in his futile quest for an alliance, visited this 
 
198 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [viii. 
 
 country just before the investment of Paris in 1870, 
 the first person whom he saw on his arrival was 
 Hay ward. He sounded his old friend as to the possi- 
 bility of the English Government giving France its 
 support. Hayward at once said the idea was hope- 
 less. Thiers then began to argue his case, and to 
 show that in the interests of the balance of power it 
 was the duty of England to support his country- 
 ''My friend," broke in Hayward abruptly, ''put all 
 that stuff out of your head. We care for none of 
 these things." 
 
 The achievement in literature which firmly laid 
 the foundation of his literary reputation, as the 
 London Debating Society had done of his political 
 and oratorical reputation, was his translation of 
 " Faust." Society now commenced to welcome him ; 
 and when, in the year following the Eeform Bill, a 
 hundred members were added to the Carlton Club, he 
 was included in the list. At the same time he was 
 elected by the committee of the Athenasum, under 
 the operation of Eule 2, providing for the admission 
 of men distinguished in literature or science. Nor 
 was he by any means a briefless barrister. Though a 
 junior, he was entrusted with the lead in the great 
 Lyme Pathway case, which he conducted with extra- 
 ordinary energy, carrying everything before him, and 
 bringing his local knowledge, as well as his legal 
 acumen and forensic power, to bear upon his adver- 
 saries with an effect that achieved complete victory 
 at every stage. Taking silk in 1845, he seemed "to 
 
VIII.] ME. HAYWABD. 199 
 
 have the ball at his feet ; " but at that very moment 
 he abandoned all thought of *' the ball " in order to 
 fight out a battle. He had years before quarrelled 
 with Eoebuck, who now excluded Hayward from the 
 Benchers of the Temple, entrance to whose body was 
 an honour that would have come to him in the 
 natural course of things, on his promotion to the 
 dignity of a Queen's Counsel. Hayward engaged in 
 the business of redressing this wrong with character- 
 istic vehemence. He brought the matter before the 
 judges, and so far succeeded that they recommended 
 the Benchers to revoke the decision. The recom- 
 mendation was not acted upon, and Hayward, in the 
 din of his fight with the Benchers, lost or rather 
 abandoned the opportunity of acquiring a considerable 
 legal practice. 
 
 But an eventful, and, as it afterwards proved to 
 be, an auspicious epoch was at hand for him. He 
 entered into the political controversies of 1846 with 
 immense spirit, and, throwing over the Protectionists, 
 worked night and day for Peel and his followers. 
 This schism between the Protectionists and the newly- 
 converted Free-Traders caused angry dissensions 
 in the Carlton Club, and, together with his Peelite 
 friends, Hayward ceased to frequent it. The Morning 
 Chronicle was next started, Mr. Sidney Herbert putting 
 then and afterwards into the paper £120,000, while 
 the Duke of Newcastle contributed £20,000. In con- 
 junction with his friend George Smythe, afterwards 
 Lord Strangford, Hayward took a very active part as 
 
200 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [viii. 
 
 a leader writer, and one of his achievements in this 
 capacity was to finish an article in the House of 
 Lords with his pencil on his knees while Lord Derby 
 was delivering his famous speech on the Navigation 
 Laws, answering the chief arguments of the speaker. 
 In 1852 the first Derby Government was formed, and 
 Hay w^ard addressed a letter to Lord Lansdowne asking 
 him whether there would, in his opinion, be anything 
 dishonourable in a union between the Peelites and 
 the Whigs. 
 
 The reply, which exists among Hay ward's papers, 
 came speedily — to the efiect that, so far from Lord 
 Lansdowne' s seeing anything dishonourable in such 
 an arrangement, he considered it a political duty. 
 Hayward's Temple chambers now^ became the scene of 
 events of great political interest. The formation of a 
 Coalition Government was preceded by a dinner in 
 them, at which Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Sidney Herbert, 
 the Duke of Newcastle, and Sir James Graham were 
 among the guests. Hay ward himself would probably 
 have gone into the House of Commons but for his 
 disagreement with popular feeling on the question of 
 Maynooth. As it w^as, the Government did not ignore 
 their obligations, and they resolved to secure him 
 permanent employment under the Crown. Before 
 this, it should be said, Hayward had had some expe- 
 rience of the public service. Shortly after he was 
 called to the Bar he had been appointed a revising 
 barrister in the West of England, and at a later 
 date he had been dispatched to L^eland as one of the 
 
viii.] MR. EAYWABD. 201 
 
 Commissioners for the reacljustmeut of the municipal 
 boundaries of Dublin. He brought back with him to 
 England a host of good stories from the other side of 
 Sfc. George's Channel. In 1852 it was arranged that 
 Hay ward should have a place, and Lord Aberdeen 
 actually wrote a letter promising him one. The press 
 condemned his contemplated promotion and scented a 
 job. The courage of Ministers waned, Hay ward never 
 obtained the merited reward of his services, and the 
 late Mr. Fleming was appointed in his stead. His 
 conduct throughout the whole of this incident was 
 admirable. He showed great magnanimity. He in- 
 sisted on no claim, he bore no grudge, nor did he 
 solicit place at any later period. Independence in such 
 matters as these w^as one of the notes of his character. 
 A single anecdote will suffice to show the quality 
 of the political influence exercised by Hay ward, and the 
 degree of political authority he occasionally exercised. 
 In 1864 Palmerston and Kussell were both bent on 
 going to war with Denmark. The newspapers aj^- 
 plauded their resolution. It gradually became known 
 that some of their colleagues in the Cabinet dissented 
 from this view, and that it was thoroughly unpopular 
 with the rank and file of the Liberal party. When 
 the tide of popular feeling was decisively setting 
 against the war policy, inside and outside the House 
 of Commons, Hay ward called- at Cambridge House. 
 After some conversation with Lady Palmerston, to 
 whom he represented the realities of the position, 
 Lord Palmerston entered, fresh from a Cabinet, look- 
 
202 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [viii. 
 
 ing unusually tired, and Hayward left. He had 
 scarcely descended tlie stairs when Palmerston came 
 out of the room, and, leaning over the banisters, ex- 
 claimed : " Hayward, Hayward, come back ! " The 
 summons was obeyed, and the Minister at once asked 
 what all this meant ? Palmerston was nettled, and 
 with some impatience proceeded to demonstrate the 
 unreasonableness of the antagonism to his own and 
 RusselFs policy. Hayward, in his turn, was put upon 
 his mettle, justified his opinion by explaining the 
 structure of the political groups which were formiDg 
 against the war, said: '*Ask Brand," and roundly 
 told him that unless he executed a change of front 
 he would be out in a week. Palmerston rejoined : 
 " I ought to have been told of all this." On the fol- 
 lowing Monday, Palmerston went down to the House 
 of Commons and announced the right-about-face. 
 
 It will not be denied that the man who exercised 
 such an authority as this with those high in power, 
 merits the epithet remarkable. One of the secrets of 
 Hayward's influence, as with Lord Palmerston, so 
 with Mr. Gladstone, and many more of the public 
 men whom he knew, was his singularly practical 
 mind. Fond of speculation as he might be, Hayward 
 was never dreamy or conjectural in his political judg- 
 ments. He talked on these matters with authority, 
 and not as the scribes ; as a Cabinet Minister, and 
 not as a publicist. Whenever his advice was asked 
 or his opinion declared, he exhibited a sense of re- 
 sponsibility entirely foreign to the political quidnunc. 
 
VIII.] ME. EAYWAED. 203 
 
 He did not say what he would wish to be done, but 
 what in his view could be done and must be done at 
 once. He dealt with an existing situation, and showed 
 at every point the statesman-like instinct which 
 prompted him to avoid barren inquiry into what 
 might have been prevented in the past. He was a 
 man of letters, but he was pre-eminently a man of 
 affairs. In every business, great and small, which he 
 undertook, he was supremely trustworthy. Lady 
 Palmerston and Lady Waldegrave were of those who 
 used habitually to consult him about the composition 
 of their parties, and they both of them paid him the 
 same compliment in very nearly the same words. 
 " You have never brought me an unattractive woman 
 or an undistinguished man," and, unless I mistake, 
 another great lady, now happily living, has awarded 
 him the same grateful praise. 
 
 Naturally, a counsellor who was as deeply in the 
 confidence of these arbitresses of fashion was not 
 unfrequently the object of gentle importunities at 
 the hands of his fair friends. '^ Beauty parties " 
 existed even in the days when there were no pro- 
 fessional beauties, and Hayward received hints now 
 and again that invitation cards would be welcome 
 in particular directions ; but the hint was never 
 acted upon unless he considered that the aspirant 
 guest came up to the prescribed standard of good 
 looks and good company. Hayward s relations to 
 women will constitute a very interesting chapter in 
 his history. He won the favour of many ladies 
 
204 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [viir. 
 
 of consideration during his earliest years' experience 
 of London society. He was the confidant and. 
 counsellor of other ladies than Viscountess Palmer- 
 ston and the Countess Waldegravc as his life drew 
 to a close. There is nothing which is not graceful, 
 of which both he and they might not have been 
 proud, in his friendship with those ladies whose good 
 looks have familiarised the whole public with their 
 photographs. They recognised in him a man of 
 consummate knowledge and experience, and of no 
 little kindliness. His advice was always trusted 
 by them because it was always disinterested, and 
 so it came to pass that when he was laid to 
 his rest, beauty as well as power followed him 
 to the grave. There is no reason why the 
 fact should not be here recorded that when 
 Mrs. Langtry made her private debut, the late 
 Mr. Ghenery expressed his relief at discovering 
 that Mr. Hayward possessed a ticket for the per- 
 formance, and was willing to write a notice of it. 
 The critique might not have been a masterpiece, 
 but it struck the keynote which the press of two 
 countries at once took up. 
 
 AVhatever Hayward undertook to do he did 
 exhaustively. He was ever on the crest of the 
 social wave. No matter what might be the most 
 prominent feature in the social life of the moment, 
 he seized upon it, developed it, studied it, made it 
 his own. In this way he brought his great and 
 carefully trained intellectual powers to bear upon 
 
viii.] MB. HAYWABD. 205 
 
 the smallest subjects. Let us suppose that some 
 Ministerial crisis or some little, yet it may be, 
 deeply instructive social" incident is the topic dis- 
 cussed in a drawing-room. Hayward enters, and 
 instinctively people say, '' Here is Hayward, now we 
 shall know the exact truth." He soon show^s that ho 
 knows more of the subject than any of the gossips. 
 He is not content with retailing the current comments 
 of the hour or of expressing a few disjointed ideas on 
 the topic. He delivers not an opinion but a judg- 
 ment, and a judgment of a kind from which there is 
 no appeal. Hayward has spoken ; causa finita est. 
 In society this was uniformly his way. Hayward 
 bore down everything before him, and the polite 
 world, finding that it could not resist him, that its 
 protests against his vehemence were ineffectual, ended 
 by doing him homage. He dragooned the society in 
 which he moved, just as he commanded the waiters 
 at the only club of which he was a member. He 
 occupied the same portion of the dining-room at the 
 Athenaeum as tradition assigns to Theodore Hook, 
 and it is not upon record that the instructions he 
 issued upon any special occasion as to the dis- 
 position of places and tables at dinner were evei 
 disregarded. 
 
 Seldom has there been such a combination of 
 manly intellectual strength with feminine activity. 
 It is no paradox to say that though Hayward was 
 a confirmed bachelor, he was a born housekeeper. 
 The qualities which made him a social king would 
 
206 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [vm. 
 
 have enabled him to organise and control the house- 
 hold afifairs of any establishment, big or small. 
 Guests and waiters, masters and servants, mistresses 
 and maids, instinctively gave way to him. They 
 were conscious of the presence of the dominant man, 
 and if they occasionally reflected that his despotism 
 was somewhat galling, they could no more resist him 
 than they could the law of gravitation. Hayward 
 has been described as an habitual diner-out. It 
 would be more correct to say that he was a fastidious, 
 and therefore a comparatively infrequent, diner-out. 
 He chose the houses that he visited with great care, 
 and not merely with a view to the cuisine, but to the 
 company. Occasionally he went to houses where 
 there was little on the part of the hosts to attract 
 him, because he knew he would meet amusing people 
 at the table. 
 
 I have already said that great as were Hay ward's 
 powers, and extraordinary as were his resources of 
 anecdote, his social position was not won by his 
 faculties in this direction. Indeed his skill and 
 felicity as a raconteur were perhaps somewhat 
 overrated. His admirable love of brevity caused his 
 narratives to be wanting in embellishment and local 
 colour, and as a sayer of good things and a narrator of 
 interesting historiettes he had several superiors. He 
 never, for instance, attained the happy art that 
 nature has conferred upon Sir Henry Drummond 
 Wolff in the description of incidents to which 
 society is never weary of listening. He never 
 
Yiii.] MB. HAYWABD, 207 
 
 acquired, as Sir Henry Wolff has always possessed, 
 the capacity of accompanying the narrative of occur- 
 rences with a vein of meditative comment so ingenious 
 and apt that it recalls the peculiar conversational 
 felicity of Lord Melbourne. On the other hand, 
 his conversation was invariably apposite and cogent, 
 and those who listened to it across a dinner-table 
 rose with the knowledge that they had heard 
 everything it was possible to say, said in the best 
 of all possible ways, upon the events of the hour. 
 For these purposes Hayward of course required an 
 appropriate audience. He could tolerate the presence 
 of no rival, and if such an one, who was usually his 
 inferior, asserted himself, he generally relapsed into 
 silence. Above all things he disliked the loud man ; 
 and this was probably the reason why he could never 
 arrange a social modus vivendi with one of the best 
 and kindest friends I have ever been privileged to 
 possess, the late Anthony Trollope. 
 
 In the same way, though having the truest regard 
 and liking for Bernal Osborne, he never succeeded in 
 overcoming his objection to Osborne's habit of talking 
 across the dinner- table and silencing the rest of the 
 guests. Between Bernal Osborne and himself there 
 was indeed an utter want of intellectual affinity. 
 Although a large purveyor of humorous and witty 
 narratives, Hayward was neither a humorist nor a 
 wit. He was, as has been said already, possessed of 
 an overmastering, intellectual love of truth, and he 
 regarded the badinage and cynicism, the quips and 
 
208 POLITICS AND LETTERS, [mil 
 
 facetiae of talkers like Osborne as impediments in the 
 way of his favourite inquiry, and as calculated to 
 distract conversation from its legitimate path. It 
 must not, however, be supposed that Hay ward's talk 
 was invariably didactic and austere. On the con- 
 trary, he considered that an occasional laxity of tone, 
 or, as he might have expressed it, a gi^ata protervitas, 
 was one of the conversational notes of the high-born 
 gentleman, and he would have found little difficulty 
 in defending the assertion that, as Bacon had declared 
 there is no perfect beauty which hath not some 
 strangeness in its proportions, so no talk can be per- 
 fectly high-bred which is without a certain soiijpqon of 
 licence. Hayward's mind was essentially that of the 
 litterateur, and, as such, it was unsympathetic with 
 the scientific mind. He was, moreover, so passion- 
 ately fond of ascertaining truth and verified certainty, 
 that he could not simulate fondness for subjects or 
 inquiries which did not admit of demonstration. He 
 might have said of himself as Lord Derby did, that 
 he was born and educated in a pre-scientific era. He 
 had little knowledge and less appreciation of the 
 Darwinian doctrine. He had not mastered the philo- 
 sophy of evolution, and he disliked it. "About," to 
 quote the exact language he used to a friend during 
 his last illness, '^ a future state, we can know nothing, 
 but there is something great." These words, as they 
 appear in type, bear little meaning ; their significance 
 was derived from the tone in which they were uttered. 
 In another conversation with one of his best and most 
 
VIII.] ME. HAYWAUD. 209 
 
 illustrious friends, he said he had no fear of death, 
 denied that he was a sceptic, and spoke with loving 
 and tender reverence of the Lord's Prayer — though 
 ''he had talked sceptically," in which, he said, he 
 found the most natural and frequent vent for his 
 feelings. 
 
 As with Hayward his social occupations were part 
 of the serious business of his life, so his literary busi- 
 ness, whatever for the time it might happen to be, 
 was manifest in the field of his social occupations. 
 No person who met Hayward in society could fail to 
 know what occupied him at the moment in his study. 
 When he had exhausted a subject with his pen on 
 paper, he would press it home to his audience of 
 private friends with, if the metaphor be permissible, 
 the bayonet point. No sooner had any article of his 
 appeared than, especially if it happened to be of a 
 controversial kind, he proceeded, to use his own 
 phrase, to follow it up. His persistence was as 
 intrepid as it was astounding. He gave his acquaint- 
 ance no rest until they had not merely read what he 
 had written, but assimilated it. He catechised the 
 company in which he was at home upon it as a 
 lecturer may catechise undergraduates with a view of 
 discovering whether they have followed and under- 
 stood his discourse. 
 
 This method, not unnaturally, frequently led him 
 into animated discussions. He was intolerant of con- 
 tradiction, and often went to invective against those 
 who presumed to differ from him. But if he ventured 
 
210 P0LTTI08 AND LETTEBS. [viii. 
 
 more upon the licence which society accorded him 
 than others might have done, and in doing so occa- 
 sionally transgressed the limit of politeness, he was 
 generally ready with the amende, and, once satisfied 
 that he had been unjust or discourteous, he seldom 
 failed to make an adequate apology. Nor was he 
 unforgiving of casual wrongs. A friend once re- 
 marked, when he was in one of his most critical 
 humours, that his translation of ''Faust" was ex- 
 ceedingly — only a stronger adverb, or rather not an 
 adverb at all, but a past participle, was employed — 
 bad. He was very indignant at the moment, but he 
 was soon conciliated, and he may well have found 
 substantial satisfaction in the circumstance, generously 
 communicated to him by the aggressor, that Carlyle, 
 who was the chief theme of the conversation in ques- 
 tion, declared of the nineteen translations of *' Faust " 
 extant, Hayward's was the best. 
 
 For some years past Hayward never exceeded and 
 never fell short of four articles a year in The Quarterly 
 Review. These were always looked forward to with 
 the keenest expectation, and their author never failed 
 to herald their advent in society. The income which 
 he made from his pen was disproportionately, and, in 
 comparison with the time he devoted to it, even ludi- 
 crously small. Most of his mornings were given to 
 writing, and his way of work was this : Having col- 
 lected all the books which told upon his subject, he 
 would devour whatever was essential in their contents, 
 and would then ascertain who were the persons living 
 
VIII.] MR. EATWABJ). 211 
 
 most likely to give him original and authentic infor- 
 mation. He then worried his subject as a dog worries 
 a bone, and when his mind was filled with all the 
 necessary knowledge, he would concentrate every fact 
 relevant to his theme into a focus, and display in his 
 treatment of it an omniscience, combined with a 
 lightness of touch, seldom, if ever, equalled in 
 periodical literature. He did not produce the stately 
 essay of Macaulay or Lockhart, but instead he gave 
 the public a literary macSdoine, in which the hand of 
 the artist was apparent throughout. Such, then, in 
 brief, was Abraham Hay ward, the man and the 
 writer. In society, in letters, and in politics, he has 
 left a place vacant which will never be filled. His 
 writings are already part of English literature. His 
 rare personal qualities are sufficiently attested by the 
 extraordinary devotion and afi'ection which waited 
 upon his last hours, and by the brilliant represen- 
 tative character of the mourners who met round his 
 bier in St. James's Church, Piccadilly. 
 
 I have been favoured with this interesting reminiscence by one 
 vrho knew Mr. Hay ward well : '' Naturally, like all men who have 
 the courage of their opinions, Mr. Hayward possessed enemies, 
 and I have heard it asserted by some of these that he never forgot 
 a slight, even when the offender belonged to the weaker sex. 
 From Hayward himself I received once some sort of confirmation 
 of this. Years ago I was re-introduced to him, for he had known 
 me when a child, one morning in the Park, by a lady who was a 
 friend of us both. He seated himself by my side, and we talked, 
 at first, about old times. By-and-by, in answer to some remark 
 of mine, ' That reminds me,' said he, ' of the celebrated story of 
 " Hymen." ' But I could not at that moment take any interest 
 in * Hymen.' I had had an object in coming into the Park, which 
 
 p 2 
 
212 POLITIGS AND LETTERS. [viii. 
 
 seemed to me, then, to be all-important. I was giving one of my 
 first dinner-parties that very evening, to consist, so I had intended, 
 of some twelve or fourteen congenial guests, and Fate was trying 
 hard, as Fate generally does try, upon such occasions, to arrange 
 that it should become a dinner of thirteen. I had come into the 
 Park to look for a 'nuniero quatorze.' Before the story was 
 finished I broke away, and darted across the gravel walk to the 
 railing which divided it from the ride. I had seen my 'mimero 
 quatorze ' upon a prancing steed, and to secure him was but the 
 work of a moment. In that moment, however, Mr. Hayward had 
 departed. He had risen abruptly, just after paying the chairman, 
 my friend informed me, with a frown on his brow. ' He will 
 never forgive you,' she said tragically, ' as long as you live ! — you 
 who wish to succeed in literature, have stupidly off'ended the 
 severest critic of your time ! ' I was terrified, but made up my 
 mind that when I next saw Mr. Hayward I would endeavour to 
 atone. As it happened, however, owing to a combination of cir- 
 cumstances, it was nearly four years before I had an opportunity 
 of doing so. Only quite lately I confessed to him what I had 
 done — my supposed offence, my remorse and terror, my atonement. 
 ' Would you really have been so hard and relentless 1 ' I inquired ; 
 ' and unless I had asked you for the end of that story should I 
 never have been forgiven V 'I should have forgiven you, I dare 
 say/ he answered, 'but perhaps I might have forgotten you too.' 
 And he then read me a lecture upon the satisfaction which a man 
 well-stricken in years may derive from perceiving that younger 
 men — and more especially younger women — are anxious to avoid 
 wounding their susceptibilities. It was this almost feminine sen- 
 sitiveness, I think, which made him ever anxious to do a kind act 
 or to say a kind word to a friend. He knew, from personal expe- 
 rience, the eff'ect that only a word can produce, and I have known 
 him to go out in bad weather and when every moment was 
 precious, on purpose to tell some one something which he knew 
 would give them pleasure to hear. 
 
 "Violet Fane." 
 
IX. 
 
 SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN.^ 
 
 It is not because they resemble each other either 
 in literary merit or in historical importance that 
 Lord Malmesbury's *' Memoirs" and Mr. Greville's 
 "Journals" may conveniently be placed side by 
 side on the present occasion. It is indeed difficult 
 to conceive of two books dealing with facts and 
 circumstances of essentially the same kind more 
 conspicuously dissimilar both in substance and in 
 style. Lord Malmesbury's narrative becomes more 
 full just where Mr. Greville's narrative altogether 
 breaks off, and is continued from that period down 
 to our own day. With the tone of Lord Malmes- 
 bury's *' Memoirs," there is no fault to find. He 
 says what he has to say in the spirit of a con- 
 siderate and amiable gentleman. He is as free 
 from malice as he is from wit ; and never dissatisfied 
 
 * " The Greville Memoirs (second part) : being a Journal of 
 the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852." By the late 
 Charles Cavendish F. Greville, Esq., Clerk of the Council. (3 
 vols. Longmans.) " Memoirs of an Ex-Minister." By the Earl 
 of Malmesbury. (2 vols. Longmans.) 
 
214 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [ix. 
 
 with himself, he is invariably tolerant of the rest 
 of the world. On the other hand his pages are 
 frequently dull, and, as a rule, they do not atone 
 for their lack of vivacity by the value or novelty 
 of the information they supply. Although Lord 
 Malmesbury has been a member of three Cabinets, 
 his conclusions, whether on men or society, are rarely 
 very striking or profound. It is true that it used 
 to be said of him, and not by his political opponents 
 alone, that he was never less in place than when 
 in place. But one might have imagined that his 
 long and habitual association with some, at any rate 
 of his former colleagues, would have had a visible 
 effect in endowing him with a fair amount of the 
 second-hand wisdom which women in particular often 
 acquire from the men they are thrown with, and 
 which in their case passes well enough for wisdom 
 itself. 
 
 In one respect, however, it must in justice be 
 allowed that Lord Malmesbury displays a certain 
 amount of humour. He pretends to take himself 
 in earnest as a statesman. It is possible, no doubt, 
 that this may be merely a delusion on his part ; 
 but some of his readers will prefer to accept it as 
 a joke. Lord Malmesbury attributes his appoint- 
 ment as Foreign Secretary to the influence of the 
 stars, and in the days when people believed in 
 judicial astrology this, no doubt, would have been 
 received as a sufficient explanation of something 
 otherwise unaccountable. But the story once current 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 215 
 
 of this extraordinary event is that when the late 
 Lord Derby was in process of forming his first 
 Administration he accidentally met Lord Malmesbury 
 in the street, and asking him half in earnest and 
 half in jest, to whom he thought the department of 
 Foreign Affairs would best be entrusted, received 
 the unexpected and embarrassing reply that he 
 himself would take it. In the face of Lord Malmes- 
 bury's own very different account of the matter, 
 the truth of the anecdote cannot be insisted upon. 
 It is, however, a problem of no great moment, and 
 will not affect Lord Malmesbury s reputation with 
 those "gentle historians" at least who, according 
 to Burke, ''judge of every man's capacity for office 
 by the offices he has filled, and the more offices 
 the more ability." 
 
 Before Lord Derby had invited Lord Malmes- 
 bury to become Foreign Secretary — -a circumstance 
 which Lord Malmesbury himself can be pardoned 
 for not mentioning — he had applied to Lord Strat- 
 ford de Kedcliffe, who refused. It is not too much 
 to say that Lord Malmesbury would never have 
 been able to carry on the affairs of the Foreign 
 Office even as he did, but for the circumstance 
 that he enjoyed the invaluable assistance and 
 instruction of Lord Cowley. Many inconvenient 
 questions were not put to the Foreign Secretary 
 in the House of Lords because of the inquirer's 
 regard for our ambassador at Paris ; many more were 
 successfully answered by the Foreign Secretary, 
 
216 POLITICS AND LETTERS. . [ix. 
 
 because Lord Cowley had previously communicated 
 with him on the subject. 
 
 Still, on turning to Mr. Greville's ''Journals," 
 after wading through Lord Malmesbury's *' Memoirs," 
 it may be asked why it was not so ordered that 
 Lord Malmesbury should have been Clerk of the 
 Council and Mr. Greville successively Secretary of 
 State and Lord Privy Seal. In the respectable 
 routine of the Council Office, Lord Malmesbury, 
 but for his rank and wealth, would have been 
 furnished with a sphere of action exactly fitted for 
 the exercise of his talents, while in the Cabinet 
 Mr. Greville might have found an appropriate field 
 for the practical development of his great and 
 varied intellectual gifts. It is not too much to 
 say that the publication of the earlier portion of 
 Mr. Greville's " Journals " created in the public 
 mind, if not an entirely false, at all events a 
 distorted and insufficient, conception of his real 
 character and powers. 
 
 When this instalment appeared ten or eleven 
 years ago, it took the world by surprise. People 
 were then unaccustomed to see the gossip and 
 scandals of *' society" in print. Nothing of the 
 same sort had been presented to their notice since 
 Horace Walpole and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall. At 
 the latest it was the contemporaries of their grand- 
 fathers and grandmothers who were the subjects of 
 the anecdotes with which they were familiar. Mr. 
 Greville introduced them to the inner life of per- 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 217 
 
 sonages whom many of them had known themselves, 
 and of whom almost all had heard from others who 
 had known them. What was in effect a new dish 
 was offered to his readers, and the vast majority 
 fed upon it so greedily that they forgot the addi- 
 tional elements of the repast with which he supplied 
 them. It was his gossip and scandal which they 
 remembered, while by all but a select few the more 
 solid and in every way more valuable parts of his 
 work were either only slightly noticed or totally 
 ignored. 
 
 In the course of the last decade circumstances 
 have tended very much to moderate the popular 
 craving for gossip and scandal. In the interval 
 which has elapsed since the publication of the 
 first and second instalments of Mr. Greville's 
 "Journals," the opinion has gained ground and 
 strength that he was something more and some- 
 thing better than an accomplished and entertaining 
 jidneur. No doubt he was pre-eminently a man 
 of news and conversation, as he was also a man of 
 pleasure and of sport. But it is equally certain 
 that he was as keen and shrewd an observer of 
 public as he was of private life, that he was as 
 good a judge of mankind as he was of horseflesh, 
 and that notwithstanding the society .in which he 
 largely lived there were in him depths of seriousness 
 and sagacity, of the existence of which, while he was 
 yet with them, even his intimate friends may have 
 been unaware. Ilis frequent lamentations over his 
 
218 POLITICS AND LETTERS, [ix. 
 
 wasted time and neglected opportunities appear to 
 be something far more pathetic than the complaints 
 of peevishness or ennui. 
 
 It cannot be questioned that Mr. Greville was 
 in every respect an abler man than his cousin, 
 Lord George Bentinck. His judgment was sounder, 
 his knowledge was wider and deeper, his connec- 
 tions were equally influential, and his attachment 
 to the Turf was not more immoderate and notorious. 
 Yet it is certain that if Lord George Bentinck had 
 lived he would have been Prime Minister, while 
 the position of Clerk to the Council was that to 
 which, by the interest of his family, Mr. Greville 
 was relegated in early life, and beyond which his 
 ambition was never permitted to aspire. If a 
 political career had been opened to him, the world 
 would not have long been in doubt as to whether 
 Westminster or May fair was the stage on which 
 he was best qualified to shine. It is difficult to 
 imagine anything more fitted to cramp the energies 
 and dwarf the intellect of a young man than an 
 easy and lucrative official post. What would Lord 
 Beaconsfield, or Lord Melbourne, or Lord Derby 
 have been if by any chance he could have been 
 made Clerk of the Council at two or three and 
 twenty ? Assuredly the first would not have been 
 less of a saunterer, the second would not have been 
 less of an idler, and the third would not have been 
 less of a turfite than Mr. Greville. But of these 
 three Prime Ministers who can doubt that the 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 219 
 
 writings of Lord Beaconsfield alone would have 
 equalled his in excellence, acuteness, and vigour? 
 
 In one sense, however, Mr. Greville could not 
 have been more fortunately and appropriately 
 situated than he actually was. It was from the 
 combined advantages of his birth and his official 
 occupation that he derived the means of compiling 
 the record of his own times on which his fame is 
 founded not less surely and lastingly than that of 
 Pepys or Boswell. As a man of society he was 
 enabled to know all the men and women of his 
 day whom anybody could care to know or to know 
 about. As the Clerk of the Privy Council, although 
 he was precluded from making history himself, he 
 was brought into contact with everybody who was 
 engaged in making history around him. While 
 he was still a young man, the people of the Court 
 and the people of fashion received the larger share 
 of his attention. When he became older and wiser, 
 they were gradually superseded in his regard by the 
 people of affairs. In this respect his "Journal" 
 under the reign of Queen Victoria contrasts very 
 favourably with his " Journal " under the reigns 
 of George IV. and William IV. It is far less of a 
 chroniqiie scandaleiise and far more of a memoire 
 pour servir a Vhistoire. In his earlier volumes his 
 political criticisms were always forcible and to the 
 point ; but they were not unfrequently hasty and 
 inconsiderate. 
 
 In the present volumes Mr. Greville has been 
 
 \ 
 
220 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [ix. 
 
 more careful in forming and more cautious in ex- 
 pressing his opinions of contemporary politicians 
 and statesmen. He has consequently had less 
 occasion to modify by means of notes suggested 
 by subsequent experience the often unmerited 
 severity of his original text. But it must be 
 allowed that the general tendency of his mind 
 was to disparage rather than to appreciate the 
 claims of rising talent and unrecognised superiority. 
 The few allusions which he makes to Lord 
 Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone, although both 
 had been or were Cabinet Ministers when he refers 
 to them, indicate no suspicion that they would 
 ever attain to the eminence they were destined 
 to achieve. Both of them were in the eyes 
 of Mr. Greville, as they were in those of 
 his contemporaries generally, quite inconsiderable 
 personages. Whenever Dizzy — political nicknames 
 are usually ominous of success, for they are at 
 least an evidence of notoriety — is mentioned, it 
 is in words which echo the current derision and 
 suspicion of the day. It never seems to have 
 occurred to Mr. Greville that a man who had not 
 been at once crushed by the enormous weight of 
 ridicule and obloquy heaped on him, but who, 
 though assailed on all sides with hatred or 
 contempt, contrived to fill year by year a larger 
 and larger space in the notice of the public was 
 certain sooner or later to make a great position for 
 himself. 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 221 
 
 The leading statesmen of the period covered by 
 Mr. Greville's ''Journal" from 1837 to 1852 were six 
 in number. Three of them died while it was being 
 written, and three survived the date at which it 
 comes to an end. All of them were Prime Ministers. 
 One of them, the Duke of Wellington, seven years 
 before 1837; four of them — Lord Melbourne, Sir 
 Kobert Peel, Lord Eussell, and Lord Derby — 
 between 1837 and 1852 ; and another of them. 
 Lord Palmerston, three years after 1852.' With 
 each Mr. Greville was personally acquainted, and 
 with two at least he was on terms of intimacy. 
 
 The Duke of Wellington was a disciple of the 
 " stern and unbending " school of Toryism which was 
 finally extinguished by the three great surrenders of 
 Catholic Emancipation, Parliamentary Eeform, and 
 Free Trade. It was not the Toryism of Pitt, who 
 was the advocate of Catholic Emancipation, who had 
 conceded the principle of Parliamentary Eeform, 
 and who was too sound an economist to make it at all 
 likely that he would have been opposed to Free 
 Trade. It was the Toryism of Liverpool and 
 Castlereagh. It consisted of the twofold convic- 
 tion : first, that the Constitution in Church and 
 State exactly as it then existed was the perfection 
 of public reason ; and secondly, that the Treaty 
 of Vienna had effected a final and unalterable 
 settlement of the European system. To the 
 articles of this narrow creed Wellington adhered 
 as firmly, and as unreservedly, as if they had 
 
222 POLITIGS AND LETTERS. [ix. 
 
 been articles of religion or of war. It appeared to 
 him to be ''his duty'' to believe in them, and 
 '' his duty " to maintain them. The wishes of the 
 people, whether at home or abroad, who happened 
 to be affected by them, entered at one time as little 
 into his consideration as the wishes of the rank and 
 file of his armies when he was planning his campaigns. 
 It did not seem to him that the first were any better 
 judges of the measures taken for their welfare than the 
 second would have been of the measures taken for 
 their safety. In his view policy, like strategy, was 
 the business of those who command and not of those 
 who are bound to obey. He was not ignorant of the 
 state of popular feeling either in this country or on 
 the Continent. But it did not occur to him that 
 popular feeling was a thing to which, under ordinary 
 circumstances, it was necessary to pay the slightest 
 attention. No doubt the Duke's political temper 
 was in large measure due to his military training 
 and experience. Lord Beaconsfield, in a well-known 
 passage in " Coningsby," attributes it almost entirely 
 to them. In this conclusion Mr. Greville coincides. 
 But it should not be forgotten that Wellington was 
 an Irishman, and by birth and sympathy an Irishman 
 of the dominant minority. Moreover his earliest 
 political employment had been as secretary to the 
 Lord Lieutenant, in some, at any rate, of the darkest 
 days of Protestant ascendency. 
 
 His military habits naturally gave colour to his 
 character. From the tone in which it was once 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN; 223 
 
 customary to speak of him, one might imagine that 
 his campaigns had affected his mind in much the 
 same way that the siege of Namur had influenced 
 Uncle Toby's, or that he was a sort of General 
 Bombe, with a brace of pistols instead of a snuffbox 
 in his pocket, ever and anon refreshing himself with 
 the smell of powder on their discharge. It used to be 
 asserted that his military genius had been developed 
 at the expense of all his other intellectual powers. 
 Even his colleagues are represented as conducting 
 themselves towards him as if they were constantly 
 running the risk of a trial by court-martial. But, 
 after all, the Duke's character does not appear to 
 have been influenced by his profession in any greater 
 degree than that of most Lord Chancellors and most 
 Archbishops is by their career as lawyers or clergy- 
 men. He was, as Mr. Greville says, by nature 
 '' hard ; " he had " no tenderness in his disposition," 
 he was not ''an amiable man." With such defects, 
 whether he had been or had not been a soldier, he 
 could never have secured the affection, as distin- 
 guished from the respect, of his followers ; and if he 
 had entertained the most advanced opinions, he would 
 still have been almost as far as he actually was from 
 fulfilling the idea of a popular leader. It is, however, 
 a mistake to suppose that he was so self-willed as to 
 be. incapable of listening to reason, and seeing when 
 events had become too strong for him. When, on the 
 retirement of Lord Liverpool, he refused to join the 
 Canning Administration, there is no ground for 
 
224 POLITIGS AND LETTERS [ix. 
 
 supposing that he was actuated by personal hostility 
 to Canning, or that he was insincere in his opposition 
 to Catholic Emancipation. 
 
 He has been frequently accused indeed of an un- 
 worthy jealousy of Canning, and of having repudiated 
 his advances because he wanted the premiership him- 
 self. There is some excuse for believing that this 
 is partly true. But even if the Duke had held that 
 he, rather than Canning, should have been entrusted 
 with the formation of the Administration, there would 
 have been nothing discreditable or extraordinary in 
 the belief. They severally represented the two 
 sections of the late Government and the Tory party, 
 the one determined to resist, and the other ready to 
 concede, the Catholic Claims. Canning was the most 
 accomplished statesman of the day, and had in so 
 many words asserted his right to the premiership by 
 inheritance as the political heir of Pitt. Wellington 
 was equally the most distinguished subject in the 
 Empire. As Mr. Greville says, he was everywhere 
 treated almost as a royal personage. He held undis- 
 puted sway in the House of Lords, and at that time 
 the House of Lords controlled the House of Commons. 
 There would thus have been nothing wonderful if he 
 had entertained the opinion that if he was to be a 
 Minister at all he ought to be the Prime Minister. But, 
 as his later conduct proves, he was not moved by such 
 considerations. Wellington, to quote Mr. Greville's 
 words, "was utterly devoid of personal and selfish 
 ambition, and there never was a man whose greatness 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 225 
 
 was so thrust upon him." Nor can the fact that on 
 the death of Canning, in the course of a few months, 
 he became Prime Minister and carried Emancipation, 
 affect any estimate of his conduct on the retire- 
 ment of Lord Liverpool. It was his own famous 
 maxim, that in *•' all circumstances the duty of 
 a wise man is to choose the lesser of any two 
 difficulties which beset him." When he came 
 into office, the Clare Election had occurred, and it 
 had not occurred when he refused to co-operate 
 with Canning. Of the two difficulties which 
 stared him in the face, Emancipation or civil war, 
 he chose the lesser. He did not relieve the Catholics 
 from any sympathy with them, or because he 
 had changed his opinion on the justice and policy 
 of relieving them, but to prevent the appalling 
 alternative of rebellion in Ireland, of which there 
 had not, in his view, been any immediate prospect 
 when he acted with the anti- Catholic division 
 of Lord Liverpool's late colleagues. In so doing, 
 he virtually broke up his party and secured the 
 speedy discomfiture of his Government. Kesist- 
 ance to parliamentary reform, the Corn Laws, and 
 the extension of the currency was useless for 
 the purpose of calming the fears or quelling the 
 anger of the strict Tories who had been aroused 
 by the cry of " The Church in Danger." 
 
 When, therefore, the quarrel with Huskisson 
 ensued and the Canningites were also alienated, 
 an end was put to Wellington's first and last 
 
 Q 
 
226 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [ix. 
 
 premiership. But, to the time of his death, he 
 always commanded an authority scarcely inferior 
 to that of the responsible head of the Government. 
 It is remarkable to observe from the entries in 
 Mr. Greville's "Journal," that as early as 1839, 
 Wellington's mental as well as his bodily condition 
 appeared to be alarming to those who were in 
 habitual association with hira. The " last stage " 
 of Marlborough and Swift seemed to them to be 
 fast approaching, and the famous couplet is referred 
 to -by Mr. Greville himself and by Lyndhurst, twice 
 in the course of a few pages. In the next year, 
 Mr. Greville describes the Duke as "a broken 
 man," and mentions a seizure which he had in 
 the House of Lords, whence he was carried home 
 speechless to Apsley House. At the very time, 
 however, that Mr. Greville was noting these 
 melancholy symptoms, the Duke was in corre- 
 spondence with the King of Prussia, by vv^hom 
 he had been asked to take the command of the 
 forces of the German Confederation in the event 
 of a war with France, and to whom he replied, 
 that with the Queen's permission he was quite 
 ready to do so, since he *'felt as able as ever 
 and as willing to command the King's army 
 against France." It was, too, eight years after 
 this that Wellington planned the masterly defence 
 of London against the Chartists, a piece of strategy 
 which was not by any means unworthy of his 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 227 
 
 most vigorous days. On the whole, the world 
 will concur in Mr. Greville's final estimate of the 
 Duke of Wellington, that he was not merely a 
 very great man, but that he was the only great 
 man in the true sense of the terms who was 
 living at the period of his death. 
 
 With Sir Eobert Peel Mr. Greville describes 
 his acquaintance as '' slight and superficial.'' But 
 on more than one occasion he appears to have 
 been in confidential, if not direct, communication 
 with him. In the negotiations of 1839 which 
 preceded Peel's attempt to form an Administration 
 and his discomfiture on the "Bed-chamber question," 
 he acted as the informal intermediary between 
 the Government and the Opposition. But he 
 expresses his satisfaction that, on this occasion, 
 he saw Graham instead of Peel himself, *'by 
 whom," he says, "I should have been met with 
 a cold austerity of manner which would have dis- 
 concerted me, and I should have most certainly 
 quitted him mortified and disappointed, without 
 having efi'ected any good." " Confound the fellow," 
 he writes a little later, "what a cold feeler and 
 cautious stepper he is ! " But he seems to have 
 considered Lord John Russell, on whose behalf he 
 was more particularly acting, almost equally 
 disagreeable. ''Strange," he adds, ''that two leaders 
 should make themselves so personally obnoxious 
 as they do by their manners and behaviour. Never- 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [ix. 
 
 tlieless, John Kussell, though frigid and forbidding 
 to strangers, is a more amiable man with his 
 friends ; but the other has no friends." 
 
 In after years he refers to Peel again as 
 *'so cold, so reserved, and his ways so little 
 winning and attractive, that he cannot attach 
 people to him personally." But in summing 
 up his characteristics after his death, Mr. Greville 
 says that " he was easy of access, courteous, and 
 patient ; " moreover, that " those who approached 
 him generally left him gratified by his affability." 
 The consensus of testimony from all quarters, 
 however, is complete that there was in Peel's 
 manner an absence of warmth and charm which 
 was not only repellent, but in a certain sense 
 humiliating to those who came into contact with 
 him. Sir James Hudson, who was William IV. 's 
 secretary, and who posted night and day to Rome 
 to summon Peel to England in 1834, used to relate, 
 as an example of this, that Peel did not even ask 
 him to have lunch with him when he arrived, 
 after the fatigues of his long and hurried journey. 
 
 How far the virulent animosity of Peel's former 
 supporters may have been attributable to his want 
 of politeness and what they stigmatised as his want 
 of principle, is a problem which it would be difficult 
 to solve. But it may be taken for granted that 
 the ablest leader in the Protectionist revolt would 
 have moderated the rancour of his attacks if he 
 had not been treated with what appeared to be 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 2:9 
 
 studied discourtesy by Peel, and if he could have 
 hoped that Peel would have ever been induced 
 to regard him as an eligible candidate for office. 
 As it is, Lord Beaconsfield's Corn Law speeches 
 have not done less in many quarters to create the 
 current impression of Peel's character, than the 
 cartoons of Punch to create the popular notion of 
 Brougham's countenance. Both were extremely open 
 to caricature, and both have been caricatured with 
 great effect. 
 
 It was Peel's misfortune as a political chief, 
 that he had too much common sense and too 
 much information to be at any time a thorough- 
 going partisan. It was by the accident of birth 
 more than anything else that he was originally 
 connected with the Tories. Mr. Grevillc tells a 
 story of the manner in which the first Sir Robert 
 Peel secured the Irish Secretaryship for his son, 
 viz., by threatening Lord Liverpool with his seces- 
 sion to the Whigs if he was not provided with 
 high office at once. The ailecdote is probably 
 not true, but there is nothing impossible about it. 
 With his " cool head and temperament " Peel could 
 never have been an extreme politician. He always 
 perceived the difference between abstract principle 
 and practical expediency. His political opinions 
 were not articles of faith, but conclusions of reason. 
 He saw that on all questions there was much to be 
 said on both sides, and that it depended on sur- 
 rounding circumstances whether one side or the 
 
230 F0LITIG8 AND LETTERS. [ix. 
 
 other had the best of the argument. He knew, to 
 use his own words, that *^ what at one time is con- 
 sistent with sound policy, may be at another com- 
 pletely impolitic," and it was his fate on many 
 memorable occasions to illustrate the proposition by 
 his own example. While he enjoyed the full con- 
 fidence of those who acted with him, he first 
 opposed, and then supported, the Catholic Claims 
 and the reform of the Currency Laws. It is, as 
 we now know, a mere chance that he did not repeat 
 the process in regard to parliamentary reform. As 
 early as 1820 he asked, in a remarkable letter to 
 Mr. Croker, " Can we resist — I mean not next 
 session or the session after that — but can we resist 
 for seven years reform in Parliament ? " And 
 answering in the negative, he continues, evidently 
 with approval of the prospect he presents, to say 
 that ''if reform cannot be resisted, is it not more 
 probable that Whigs and Tories will unite and 
 carry through moderate reform than remain opposed 
 to each other ? " 
 
 But even if this had been added to his numerous 
 tergiversations, his grand apostasy would still have 
 been the repeal of the Corn Laws. Here he touched 
 not only the sentiments, but the pockets of the 
 country gentlemen, and even Mr. Greville, who was 
 himself a Free-Trader, affirms that if he had belonged 
 to Peel's party he should have felt *' the same indig- 
 nation and disgust " that they all did. It may 
 well seem strange that the contemporaries of Peel, 
 
IX ] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 231 
 
 and Mr. Greville among them, should have forgotten 
 that long before the crisis came he had declared 
 his adherence to the principle of Free Trade, and 
 had treated the Corn Laws as an exception to its 
 application, of which the expediency depended on 
 circumstances. In his memorable speech on the 
 Tariff of 1842, he affirmed that '^ on the general prin- 
 ciples of Free Trade there is now no great difference 
 of opinion," and that ''all agree in the broad rule 
 that we should purchase in the cheapest market and 
 sell in the dearest." The League had made the 
 prolonged existence of the Corn Laws in their 
 integrity impossible in the years between 1842 and 
 1845, and the question was between the sliding 
 scale of the Government, the fixed duty of the 
 Whigs, and the total abolition of the Repealers. 
 The Irish Famine determined the course of Peel ; 
 or, according to the Duke of Wellington, as quoted 
 by Mr. Greville, ** rotten potatoes did it all : they 
 put Peel in his damned fright." But in addition 
 to *' rotten potatoes," there came the ''Edinburgh 
 Letter" of Lord John Russell, with its denunciation 
 of the Corn Laws as " the blight of commerce, the 
 bane of agriculture, the source of bitter divisions 
 among classes, the cause of penury, fever, mortality, 
 and crime among the people." 
 
 After this manifesto, the maintenance of the 
 sliding scale or the adoption of a fixed duty 
 became equally impracticable. What could Peel 
 do under the circumstances more or better 
 
232 F0LITIG8 AND LETTERS. [ix. 
 
 than he did do ? He summoned a Cabinet Council, 
 the result of whose deliberations was that he resigned. 
 Lord John Kussell was sent for, and failed to form 
 an Administration. Peel, therefore, had no alterna- 
 tive but to resume office. He came back again 
 with all his colleagues except Lord Stanley, whose 
 place as Colonial Secretary was taken by Mr. 
 Gladstone, and the Corn Laws were repealed. After 
 Peel's death, the Duke of Wellington declared in 
 the House of Lords that one of his most marked 
 characteristics was the love of truth, and that 
 during his long connection with him he had never 
 known him to deviate from the strictest veracity. 
 Such praise from such a quarter leads Mr. Greville 
 to suspect that '* resentment and disappointment 
 may have caused an unfair interpretation to be put 
 upon his motives." 
 
 But with the great bulk of the people the motives 
 of Peel were never in doubt. On the Catholic ques- 
 tion the Tories made him the scapegoat of Wellington, 
 because they were afraid openly to attack the Duke 
 himself. But that did not interfere with the implicit 
 reliance which they afterwards placed in him, more 
 especially when, owing mainly to him, the Con- 
 servative reaction of 1841 secured for them a long 
 tenure of power. On the question of Free Trade 
 he was made, not the scapegoat, but the stepping- 
 stone of Lord Beaconsfield. It was only by tram- 
 pling Peel under foot that Mr. Disraeli could hope to 
 fiscend to the Treasury Bench. But with the middle 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 233 
 
 class, both upper and lower, the most intelligent as 
 well as the most wealthy section of the community, 
 he never forfeited his popularity, and their opinion 
 of him was raised by his independence and disin- 
 terestedness. He was emphatically one of themselves, 
 and presented to their minds the embodiment of all 
 their best and most distinctive qualities. He was a 
 man of solid understanding, without a trace of 
 extravagance in either his views or his actions. He 
 was a financier to whose prudence and resource they 
 could look with the most implicit confidence. He 
 was, as Mr. Greville says he considered himself, " the 
 Minister of the nation, whose mission it was to 
 redress the balance which mistaken measures or 
 partial legislation had deranged, and to combine 
 the interests of all classes in one homogeneous 
 system, by which the prosperity and happiness of 
 the whole commonwealth would be promoted." His 
 life was singularly decorous, and, in spite of his great 
 wealth, his habits were simple and unostentatious. 
 All this endeared him to the respectable classes, and 
 gave him a unique place in their esteem. 
 
 It would be difficult to discover a more striking 
 contrast to Sir Eobert Peel in many of these par- 
 ticulars than Lord Melbourne. Both had strong 
 common sense. But the common sense of Melbourne 
 bore a close resemblance to the cynical shrewdness 
 of the man of the world, and was backed by a fund 
 of humour of which Peel was entirely destitute. 
 Peel was a pattern of orthodox and domestic pro- 
 
9M FOLITICS AND LETTERS. [ix. 
 
 priety. Melbourne, although his theological reading 
 was wide, had no settled convictions, and was always 
 getting into notoriety about his own wife or the wife 
 of somebody else. Peel was by nature a politician, 
 a master of details and precedents, and never more 
 at home than in the House of Commons, on which, 
 when he spoke, as Lord Beaconsfield has testified, 
 **he played as if it were an old fiddle." Melbourne 
 really detested politics, could bring himself only 
 with difficulty to the examination of even great and 
 important questions, and as. a speaker in the House 
 of Commons was a complete failure. Peel's stiffness 
 and want of cordiality seriously injured his prospects 
 in public life. Melbourne's charm of manner, his 
 urbanity and kindness, were the main things which 
 prevented his public life from being a series of 
 disasters. Peel was a bourgeois Tory, Melbourne 
 was an aristocratic Whig, and while the one, under 
 the guidance of his judgment, was always tending 
 towards Liberalism, the other was in all his instincts, 
 prejudices, and sympathies a Conservative through- 
 out his career. It is true that he was included in 
 the small band of politicians to whom the name of 
 Liberal was first applied. He deserted Grey and 
 Althorp as Palmerston deserted Wellington and Peel, 
 and enrolled himself under the leadership of Canning. 
 Mr. Greville says he hated parliamentary reform, 
 although, as Home Secretary of the Grey Administra- 
 tion, he supported it; while of the repeal of the 
 Corn Laws his view was expressed to the Queen, 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 235 
 
 when he was sitting next to her at dinner at Windsor, 
 with his usual vigour in the words, ''Ma'am, it is 
 a damned dishonest act." 
 
 It was his well-known divergence from the prin- 
 ciples of Grey which led to his appointment as his 
 successor in the premiership by William IV. in 1834. 
 The King thought that so bad a Whig was the next 
 best thing to a Tory, for which he exchanged him 
 in six months, when Peel supplanted him — for even 
 a shorter period. But it w^as then said of him that 
 he understood William IV. more perfectly than any- 
 body else, and it was in his ability to understand 
 people and to adapt himself to them that his strength 
 lay. The esteem and aflfection with which the Queen 
 is known to have regarded him are frequently 
 illustrated in the anecdotes which Mr. Greville has 
 preserved. But Melbourne's thoughtfulness on Her 
 Majesty's account, and his generosity towards an 
 opponent whom he fervently disliked, are perhaps 
 most pleasingly exemplified in the advice which he 
 transmitted to Peel through Mr. Greville concerning 
 the mode of transacting business with Her Majesty 
 when he retired from ofiice in 1841. He was, in 
 fact, not a statesman, but a courtier. His Adminis- 
 tration was one of the worst and most incompetent 
 ever known. It nearly involved us in a war with 
 France, and its Budgets disclosed an uninterrupted 
 succession of deficits. Its Cabinet Councils were often 
 the scene of disputes and recriminations between its 
 members, and when matters proceeded more peace- 
 
236 POLITICS AND LETTERS, [ix. 
 
 fully the Prime Minister went to sleep. Had it 
 not been for Melbourne's tact and good-humour it 
 would have broken up long before it was turned 
 out. But he was not always equal to the occasion, 
 and Mr. Greville gives a painful description of the 
 ''indecision, weakness, and pusillanimity" which 
 marked some of his efforts to pacify his colleagues 
 and prevent an open rupture between them. 
 
 In the Melbourne Administration which came to 
 an end, to the satisfaction of everybody, in 1841, 
 Lord John Eussell and Lord Palmerston were 
 Secretaries of State, one originally for the Home, 
 and afterwards for the Colonial Department, and the 
 other for Foreign Affairs. As politicians, both were 
 immensely superior to the Prime Minister. Both 
 possessed infinitely more force of character and 
 knowledge of affairs. Moreover, both had deli- 
 berately chosen politics as the serious occupation of 
 tlieir lives, while he was always more or less of a 
 statesman malgre ltd. Russell was sedate, and without 
 any trace of humour or imagination. His courage 
 and his confidence in himself were almost without 
 parallel, and throughout his public career he fully 
 justified Sydney Smith's well-known jest, levelled 
 at him in his youth. His political opinions came 
 to him by inheritance. He had never had the 
 slightest trouble in forming them. He accepted 
 them, however, not with mere acquiescence, but 
 with the strongest faith in their unassailable truth 
 and wisdom. His principles were the principles of 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 237 
 
 civil and religious liberty. He was above all things 
 a Whig, and a representative of the Whig tradition. 
 He believed implicitly in the infallibility of the 
 whole series of Whig statesmen, from Somers to 
 Fox, and he accepted it as a dispensation of Pro- 
 vidence that the Great Ee volution families should 
 lead the people and govern the country from genera- 
 tion to generation. He entered public life with the 
 same easy certainty of attaining to high office as 
 that with which the son of the head of a commercial 
 firm looks forward to a partnership when the 
 term of his novitiate is over. He had not to 
 make his own position ; it was already made for him, 
 and his success was merely a question of time and 
 opportunity. He was in no sense brilliant, and it 
 was not necessary that he should display brilliancy. 
 Whatever abilities he possessed were sure to be 
 readily and gladly acknowledged by his party. He 
 had not to fight his way to the front rank, or pusli 
 aside obstructive and pertinacious veterans who im-. 
 peded his progress. In the course of nature he must 
 arrive there, and no need existed for him to be im- 
 patient or obtrusive. Nothing was heard of him by 
 the outside world for sixteen or seventeen years after 
 he had become a member of the House of Commons. 
 But he had established his footing there in a calm and 
 unpretentious way. 
 
 As yet he was not a leader, or even a candidate 
 for leadership. It was never suggested that he 
 should enter into competition for it with Tierney, or 
 
238 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [ix. 
 
 Brougham, or Althorp. But the chief of his party at 
 last found an opening for him, and he was put forward 
 to move the repeal of the Test and Corporation Act. 
 That measure was practically already a dead letter in 
 the Statute Book, and it was expunged from it with 
 only a show of opposition from the Government of 
 WelliDgton and Peel. But from that time forward 
 the name of Eussell became a household word among 
 the large and influential congregations of Dissent. A 
 year or two afterwards he was selected as one of the 
 small committee by whom the Reform Bill was pre- 
 pared, and, as Paymaster of the Forces, in the Grey 
 Administration, he moved the first reading. But the 
 conduct of the measure through its subsequent stages 
 was undertaken by Althorp. Russell's gifts as a 
 speaker were considerable. But he was not a great 
 orator like Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Bright, or a first- 
 rate debater like Mr. Canning or Sir James Graham. 
 Occasionally, however, he rose to eloquence, and pro- 
 duced an immense effect on the audience he happened 
 to be addressing. 
 
 But see our statesmen when the steam is on, 
 
 And languid Johnny glows to glorious John ; 
 
 When Hampden's thought, by Falkland's muses dress'd, 
 
 Lights the pale cheek and swells the generous breast ; 
 
 When the pent heat expands the quickening soul, 
 
 And foremost in the race the wheels of genius roll. 
 
 His vocabulary was not very copious, and this in 
 some measure gave force to his diction. He did not 
 use words which impart the nicer shades of dis- 
 
IX ] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 230 
 
 tinctioD, and hence his speeches were commonly tell- 
 ing, because they were full of strong expressions. 
 
 The most instructive and, to all who take up the 
 volume except for frivolous amusement, the most 
 interesting portion of Mr. Greville's "Journals" is 
 that which describes the triumph of Palmerston, and, 
 indeed, were this work to be distributed into parts 
 after the fashion of eighteenth-century epics, much of 
 it might be entitled ''The Triumph of Palmerston." 
 So inexplicable, so miraculous does it seem to Greville, 
 as it seemed to many of Palmerston's contemporaries, 
 that one might almost expect to find the intervention 
 of some god or goddess on his behalf. And, indeed, 
 there is good reason why Mr. Greville and others 
 should have felt this astonishment. Palmerston was 
 generally hated by his colleagues in the Cabinet, w^as 
 seldom in a majority of more than one, while on the 
 Continent he was regarded by every European State 
 as little less than the embodiment of the principle of 
 evil. Yet he was uniformly victorious. How, and why ? 
 These questions are not answered by Mr. Greville. 
 It may be said that Palmerston knew better than 
 many of his friends and foes did his own mind, and 
 that he devoted himself to realising it. It would, 
 however, be more correct to say that he went his own 
 way, he allowed nothing to interfere with him, he 
 was never nonplussed, he never stopped to argue with 
 those who desired to thwart or censure him, whether 
 Prime Minister or Sovereign. He coolly pocketed all 
 criticism and reprobation, and went on as if nothing 
 
240 F0LITIG8 AND LETTERS. [ix. 
 
 had happened. But is this the only explanation of 
 his extraordinary success ? I think not. 
 
 Palmerston had, at the most critical period of his 
 career, in 1840, the year in which he achieved his 
 most dazzling victories over his colleagues, one instru- 
 ment which, to a Minister, and especially a Foreign 
 Minister, is of nearly overwhelming efficacy, and by 
 his dexterous use of this instrument he contrived to 
 carry all before him. What was it ? It is no secret 
 that he had in the late Lord Bailing — then Sir Henry 
 Bulwer and Secretary of Legation at Paris — a fast 
 friend. Lord Dalling was a diplomatist who believed in 
 the value of knowledge acquired from every quarter and 
 by every means. Wherever men, and especially women, 
 congregated, he made it his business to gather infor- 
 mation as to the doings and intentions of foreign 
 Cabinets and statesmen. In this way he contrived to 
 know much of what the French and other Cabinets 
 determined before their sitting had been formally 
 held. This knowledge he communicated to Palmerston, 
 ond the consequence w^as that Palmerston speedily 
 became invincible in the Councils of Whitehall. He 
 knew everything ; he w^as never taken aback ; he could 
 not be imposed upon ; and when any portion of his 
 own policy was criticised, he brought to bear upon his 
 critics such an entire armoury of facts and figures that 
 they were compelled to admit that he had acted and 
 spoken with good reason. To put it therefore in a sen- 
 tence, the secret of Palmerston's invincibility was not 
 merely the fact that he was a man who went his ow^n 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 241 
 
 way, but the further fact that he had the benefit of Sir 
 Henry Bulwer's full, minute, and inspiring information. 
 
 It was immediately after the passage of the Keform 
 Act that Russell was admitted to the Cabinet, and 
 that the long and embittered rivalry between him 
 and Palmerston commenced. The death of Canning 
 had left Palmerston without a political chief, and he 
 was on the look-out for a new political connection. 
 He had been in office for nearly twenty years under 
 successive Tory Administrations, from that of the 
 Duke of Portland to that of Lord Liverpool. But he 
 saw that the Whigs were in the ascendant, and having 
 already separated himself from Wellington and Peel, 
 he ofi'ered his services to Lord Grey. His wish was 
 to lead in the Commons ; a project which, if dt had 
 been realised, would have . materially affected the 
 prospects of Russell. It was arranged, therefore, that 
 Althorp should take the lead of the House. But 
 Palmerston was made Secretary for Foreign Afiairs, 
 and was in Lord Grey's Cabinet when Russell entered 
 it. Palmerston resembled Russell in his courage and 
 self-confidence. Nor was he inferior to him in his 
 undeviating regard for his own interests. 
 
 But here the likeness between them ends. Pal- 
 merston's jaunty and degage air was proverbial from 
 his youth to his extreme old age. He always ap- 
 peared to be in excellent spirits, and did and said 
 the most disagreeable things with an unruffled tem- 
 per, and in all lightness of heart. He was not 
 connected by the ties of at any rate near kindred 
 
242 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [ix. 
 
 with any of the great political houses among either 
 the Tories or the Whigs. His Irish peerage gave him 
 the great advantage of a recognised station which 
 enabled him, though not without a struggle, to secure 
 a hold upon *' society," and in those days " society " 
 meant, to those who were in it, politics, if they 
 had any capacity and inclination for them. He was 
 not rich, but he was extremely good-looking and 
 pleasing in his manners. His long and intimate 
 friendship — which ultimately resulted in marriage — ■ 
 with Lady Cowper, the sister of Lord Melbourne, and 
 one of the three or four grandes dames of the period, 
 was of the highest use in the furtherance of his 
 political fortunes. He had much quickness, but little 
 prudence or discretion. His industry was great, his 
 information wide and varied, and his wit and humour 
 abundant and ready in every emergency for either 
 attack or defence. His head, rather than his heart, 
 however, was the source of the many-sided sympathies 
 with which he was credited. 
 
 Beneath the superficial honhomie which fascinated 
 everybody who approached him, there lurked a large 
 reserve of craft and calculation. His joviality and 
 apparent want of restraint covered and disguised an 
 intellio^ence ever on the watch for his own advance- 
 ment and the discomfiture of his adversaries. His 
 sagacity was not deep and far-reaching. He acted far 
 oftener from impulse than from deliberation. He was 
 guided, to use M. Thiers' phrase, " par le caractere, non 
 par la raison." Except in foreign afi'airs, where he was 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 243 
 
 meddlesome to an unequalled degree, laisser alter 
 was the maxim which he observed both in public and 
 private. The bills of his tradesmen were not less 
 unheeded by him than the growing requirements of 
 the people. Although he would have had no diffi- 
 culty in paying the former at once, their payment 
 was invariably deferred until the sterner processes of 
 the law were called into action. He was deeply 
 interested in politics, but he was as free from political 
 convictions as Melbourne. Although he concealed his 
 treachery with greater art, he was as treacherous as 
 Russell. His treachery and Russell's treachery indeed 
 manifested themselves under different forms and in 
 different ways. Until he had established his supre- 
 macy in his party, he was perpetually coquetting 
 with his opponents. It was never quite certain 
 whether he was going to " nobble " the Tories or 
 " square " the Radicals. 
 
 Russell could never have pretended to be anything 
 else than a Whig. It is true that in his later years he 
 was compelled to concede much to the more advanced 
 section of his followers. But he had no sympathy with 
 either the Philosophical Radicals like Moles worth and 
 Grote, or the Manchester Radicals like Milner-Gibson, 
 Cobden, and Bright. Although he was forced by cir- 
 cumstances to renounce it, his famous declaration 
 of " finality " expressed his permanent and unbiassed 
 view of parliamentary reform. In quite another 
 sense from that in which it was applied at first 
 to the great measure of the Grey Administration he 
 
 R 2 
 
244 POLITICS AND LETTERS, [ix. 
 
 wanted the "Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but 
 the Bill." Still, if he never entertained the slightest 
 notion of deserting his party, his practice of playing 
 for his own hand was perpetually getting it into 
 difficulties and embarrassments. At no time could 
 his colleagues be sure that, as Bear EUice expressed 
 it, "Johnny was not at some of his dirty tricks." 
 He was always springing mines under their feet, and 
 making a bid for popularity without their knowledge 
 and over their heads. They could never go to bed at 
 night with the full assurance that they would not wake 
 in the morning and find themselves confronted in the 
 newspapers by a Stroud Letter, or an Edinburgh 
 Letter, or a Durham Letter. They could never even 
 rest in certainty that Eussell would not denounce 
 them in Parliament as he did denounce them on the 
 conduct of the Crimean War. 
 
 Palmerston did not give them cause to apprehend 
 anything of this kind. But they could not tell from 
 one day to another to what he was going to commit 
 them in the department under his charge. If he 
 consulted them at all, they might just as well have 
 kept their counsel to themselves as have given it to 
 him. He did precisely what he pleased, whether 
 they liked it or not. He had no notion of what 
 subordination or community of responsibility means. 
 But more than this : it was always on the cards that 
 he might leave them in the lurch altogether. One 
 day at Windsor, when a Council was held, Mr. Greville 
 was present, when Lord Melbourne said to Lord 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. U\S 
 
 Clarendon of his own Administration and Foreign 
 Secretary : " It is impossible this Government can 
 go on ; Palmerston in communication with the Tories 
 
 — Palmerston and Ashley " and then he stopped. 
 
 Lord Clarendon replied : '' What ! you think Palmer- 
 ston and the Tories will come together ? " To which 
 Lord Melbourne nodded assent. *^And which," in- 
 quired Lord Clarendon, '* will come to the other ? " 
 " Oh, I don't know," rejoined Lord Melbourne, and 
 chuckled and grunted, laughed, and rubbed his 
 hands. 
 
 It was a similar performance in the opposite direc- 
 tion which, according to Mr. Greville, led to the 
 rupture between Palmerston and Kussell ten years 
 later. On that occasion he was flirting with the 
 Eadicals. They gave him a dinner at the Keform 
 Club — " a sorry afi'air "—says Mr. Greville ; ''a rabble 
 of men, not ten out of two hundred whom I knew by 
 sight." They sent deputations to him from Finsbury 
 and Islington about Kossuth, and he made them a 
 speech — '' a very Radical speech," it is called by Lord 
 Malmesbury. It was not Palmerston's premature 
 approval of the Emperor Napoleon's coup d'etat in 
 conversation with Count Walewski which really pro- 
 voked his dismissal, however angry the Queen and 
 the Prince Consort may have been about it. That 
 Mr. Greville affirms was merely the pretext ; '* the 
 causa causans was, without any doubt, the Islington 
 speech and deputation, and his whole conduct in that 
 afiair." But Russell dare not have turned him out on 
 
246 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [ix. 
 
 grounds which would have drawn him and the Kadicals 
 even more closely together than before. 
 
 . In spite however of the dinner at the Reform Club 
 and the Kossuth deputations, Palmerston was quite 
 ready to open communications with Lord Derby 
 when he was getting his Ministry together in 1852. 
 According to Lord Malmesbury, Palmerston himself 
 made the first advances ; and what a difference it 
 would have made to Lord Derby if the alliance could 
 have been formed ? Everybody will remember the 
 account in " Endymion " of the band of gentlemen, 
 only one of whom, and he in the House of Lords, 
 had ever been in office before, who were called on to 
 form an Administration, and how impossible, for this 
 reason, the task appeared to them. But here in fact, 
 although not in Lord Beaconsfield's fiction, was a 
 gentleman ready to join them, who, despite the chops 
 and changes of the political world, for more than 
 forty years had hardly ever been out of office at all. 
 A gentleman, whose attachment to the Treasury 
 bench was so deep, sincere, and comprehensive, that 
 it included every party in the State whose leaders 
 happened for the time to sit on it, was at hand to 
 instruct them in their duties, if they had only been 
 wise enough to accept his assistance. But the 
 arrangement failed because Palmerston would not, 
 accommodating as he was, have anything to do with 
 Protection, about which Lord Derby never projjosed, 
 and in all likelihood never seriously intended to 
 propose, anything. 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 247 
 
 In less than a year Palmerston was in office once 
 more, and he did not quit it again, except for one 
 year and a hundred and thirteen days in 1858-59* 
 until his ruling passion subsided iii death. Once 
 when he was Prime Minister, and Mr. Hayward was 
 staying with him at Broadlands, Mr. Delane, who was 
 there also, said, ''Would you tell us, Lord Palmerston, 
 the circumstances of your resignation in 1853?" 
 " You need not trouble yourself about the cir- 
 cumstances,'' returned Lord Palmerston, " for I never 
 resigned at all." The editor of The Times, primed 
 with this piece of news, returned to his office, and 
 incorporated it in a leader which appeared the next 
 morning. At the Athenaeum Club in the afternoon 
 Mr. Hayward and Mr. Delane met. The former 
 pointed out in the files of The Times how persistently 
 that journal had asserted that Palmerston had 
 resigned in 1853 on the question of the Black Sea 
 fleet. Mr. Delane put his hands up to his head and 
 exclaimed, ''Good God! What it is to have to do 
 with a daily newspaper." The story of the resigna- 
 tion, as The Times originally gave it, is repeated by 
 Lord Malmesbury, with the addition that Palmerston 
 was out of office for just ten days. 
 
 If Lord Palmerston had become a member of Lord 
 Derby's Administration in 1852, he would have found 
 himself associated in the person of its chief with one 
 of the oldest of his Whig colleagues. Palmerston and 
 Derby, with Melbourne and Kussell, were in office 
 together under Lord Grey in the memorable Keform 
 
248 P0LITI08 AND LETTERS. [ix. 
 
 Government of 1830. The mere enumeration of 
 these four names as those of men banded together 
 for the furtherance of what the Tories of the day 
 dreaded as revolutionary, serves to remind us of the 
 enormous distance we have travelled since then. It 
 is suggestive to observe in Mr. Greville's "Journals," 
 although they refer to a period when all Lord Grey 
 ever desired to do had been done for many years, how 
 quietly he seems to assume that politics are and 
 ought to be essentially an aristocratic business or 
 diversion. In his view the work of government 
 and legislation appears to be the appropriate, and 
 should be the exclusive, occupation of people of 
 rank or fortune, w^ith a few assistants selected by 
 them from among their adherents, whose humbler 
 station or more limited means they are good enough 
 to excuse on account of their superior capacity. 
 
 Perhaps Mr. Greville may have been a little old- 
 fashioned in this as compared even with the majority 
 of his associates. But the spirit which shut the door 
 of the Cabinet in the face of Burke, which branded 
 Canning as an upstart, and which pointed the finger 
 of scorn at Disraeli as an adventurer, lasted much 
 longer than the regime from which it took its origin. 
 When Lord Derby decided to devote a portion of his 
 leisure to political pursuits, this sentiment was far 
 more general and active than wdien Mr. Greville wrote. 
 Everybody would then have agreed that as a rule 
 admitting of few exceptions men should be politicians 
 because they were persons of importance, and not 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN. 249 
 
 persons of importance because they were politicians. 
 As the grandson and heir of a Whig peer of high 
 rank, illustrious lineage, and vast estate, it would 
 have been a reproach to Mr. Stanley if he had not 
 taken his place in the House of Commons. It would 
 have been equally censurable in the leaders of his 
 party if they had not embraced the earliest oppor- 
 tunity of rewarding him with office and the assurance 
 of promotion. He was Irish Secretary and Colonial 
 Secretary with the Whigs, and then Colonial Secretary 
 and thrice Prime Minister with the Tories. It w^as 
 thus his singular privilege to be a member of each of 
 the two Administrations by whom measures of parlia- 
 mentary reform were passed in his lifetime. 
 
 Lord Derby's character appeals to the imagina- 
 tion more forcibly than that of any of the states- 
 men who were opposed to him. He has gathered 
 ai'ound him almost as much of popular romance as 
 Lord Beaconsfield himself. It is not of the same 
 kind, and it does not arise from the same causes; but 
 it is equally unfounded and nearly as absurd. He 
 was so far from being a great statesman that he was 
 not a statesman at all in any true and rational sense 
 of the term. It is difficult to regard him even as a 
 serious politician. He had plenty of political pre- 
 judices, but no political principles. As a leader he 
 was not the chief so much as the figure-head of his 
 party. In or out of office he reigned, but he did not 
 govern. He was the sleeping partner, and gave the 
 credit of his name to the firm of which Lord 
 
250 POLITICS AND LWFTJSBS. [ix. 
 
 Beaconsfield was the manager and business man. He 
 represented no scheme of national policy, but only an 
 exploded fallacy in political economy. He talked 
 about *' stemming the tide of democracy," which 
 ended in his " dishing the Whigs " by outbidding 
 them with the Kadicals. He had neither large views 
 nor wide sympathies. He had an imperious manner 
 and a bad temper. He was an elegant, although not 
 an erudite, scholar. Of knowledge beyond scholar- 
 ship he had none. He belonged, as he himself said, 
 to "the pre-scientific age," and he once undertook to 
 swallow the boiler of the first steamer that should 
 ever get across the Atlantic. All that Lord Malmes- 
 bury can claim for him as a politician is that as Lord 
 Melbourne's Colonial Secretary he had care of the 
 Bill for the Abolition of Slavery, and that as 
 Prime Minister he was prompt in his recognition of 
 Napoleon HL, and passed the Reform Act of 1867. 
 
 It must be admitted, however, that he was an 
 excellent landlord and a model country gentleman. 
 He was also munificent in his charities, and did a great 
 deal of good during the cotton famine in Lancashire. 
 "But," Mr. Greville says, "the notion which is 
 generally entertained of his being so high-minded and 
 chivalrous is a mistake. He is not so in private life 
 — that is, in his transactions on the Turf ; and it is 
 not likely that a man should be one thing in private 
 and another in public life." Just before he became 
 Prime Minister Mr. Greville saw him at Newmarket, 
 amid a crowd of betting men and loose characters of 
 
IX.] SMALL TALK AND STATESMEN, 251 
 
 every description, in uproarious spirits, chaffing, row- 
 ing, and shouting with laughter, and joking. *' His 
 amusement," Mr. Greville explains, *^ was to lay Lord 
 Glasgow a wager that he did not sneeze in a given 
 time, for which he took pinch after pinch of snuff." 
 And yet it is certain that Lord Derby was a man of 
 cultivated tastes, and of much keen wit as well as 
 playful humour. He was, moreover, the most brilliant 
 orator, and in all other respects the most considerable 
 personage of his time, in the House of Lords. But, 
 young or old, he always retained many of the leading- 
 characteristics of boyhood. 
 
 The brilliant chief, irregularly great, 
 Frank, haughty, rash, the Rupert of Debate ; 
 ^or gout, nor toil, his freshness can destroy. 
 And Time still leaves all Eton in the boy. 
 
BERNAL OSBOENE."^ 
 
 More than ten years have passed since the late Mr. 
 Bernal Osborne retired from the Horfse of Commons, 
 and more than two since he died. Neither in the 
 political nor social life of England has there, during 
 this interval, appeared any one to fill the place which 
 his departure left vacant ; and there are those who 
 believe that the want of some such censor as Osborne 
 — so brilliant, so wise, above all so irresistibly domi- 
 nant — is one of the causes of the decline of the House 
 of Commons, carrying with it the decline and fall of 
 statesmanship. Those who long sat with Osborne in 
 the House of Commons may in some measure test for 
 themselves the soundness of such a belief by question- 
 ing their imaginations a little, and asking whether 
 certain things could have been hazarded, if on that 
 favourite seat "next below the gangway, which is the 
 third from the floor, Bernal Osborne were sitting: 
 intent, with his hat inclined over his eyes, and ready 
 to make his spring. 
 
 Be that as it may, he was a memorable, interest- 
 
 * Reprinted from The Fortnightly Review, October, 188i. 
 
X.] BEBNAL 08B0BNK 253 
 
 ing, and unique figure, while there is more of dura- 
 bility in the reputation he has left behind him than 
 in the case of many whose distinction in their gene- 
 ration was of a higher degree. This is due to the 
 striking aspects of an idiosyncrasy which, viewed in 
 the aggregate of its qualities and its ejffecfcs, was with- 
 out a parallel in contemporary life. Other men 
 in other ways were witty and wise, apt at phrase- 
 making and quick at repartee, others shone after 
 their manner in society ; but none united to Osborne's 
 social qualities those exuberant and unconquerable 
 aniuial spirits which ruled his character, which may 
 be even said to have decided his career, and which 
 made their influence felt by all with whom he was 
 brought into contact — with delight by some, with 
 fear and trembling by others. 
 
 The peculiar power of Bernal Osborne cannot be 
 better illustrated than by recalling some of the 
 moments of sudden, delighted excitement once 
 familiar to many who will read these lines. If the 
 collective character of the House of Commons is to be 
 studied as a drama, and its distinctive traits as a 
 living organism, of which its individual members are 
 parts, are to be observed to advantage, the ladies' 
 gallery, or the benches under the clock, are the points 
 from which any one (whether a member or not) can 
 best look at the assembly objectively, and try to 
 divine how it manages to be " wiser than any one in 
 it." If, on the other hand, the real life of the House 
 of Commons is to be studied analytically, one must 
 
254 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [x. 
 
 not forget the side lobbies. Each of these is a 
 chamber immediately contiguous to, and running 
 parallel with, the whole length of the House itself. 
 In these two rooms, strictly appropriated to members, 
 one frequented by the habitual supporters of the 
 Government, the other by the Opposition, there may 
 be seen engaged in the writing of endless letters or 
 talking with another, some languidly, some in deep 
 earnest, many a score of the elective legislators of the 
 realm. Here it is a follower of the Government in 
 eager conversation with a Minister, or — more busi- 
 ness-like still — with the indefatigable Patronage 
 Secretary of the Treasury. Here, by twos and threes, 
 are gentlemen whom the whips distinguish as " mal- 
 contents," conspiring with great animation and 
 cheerfulness against political rivals who are not 
 perhaps three yards distant from them. 
 
 The partitions which divide these rooms from the 
 body of the House are of such a kind that occupants 
 of it, whilst engaged in their correspondence, or con- 
 versing with their friends, always hear the murmurs 
 of the House. One does not mostly distinguish the 
 orator's words, but the interruptions are plainly 
 audible — the cheers, the angry, the scornful inter- 
 jections, the mighty, uproarious laugh, the " Order ! " 
 '' Order ! " " Order ! " from the chair. At one moment 
 the House is calm, and the member seated at the 
 table determines he will finish his letters. Then he 
 hears the sounds of a storm gathering, and resolves in 
 sudden haste to postpone his epistles till to-morrow. 
 
X.] BBBNAL OSBORNE. 255 
 
 He knows when one speech is ended and another 
 beginning, and the knowledge thus gained by the ear 
 is reinforced by men coming out of the House and 
 gliding in singly from moment to moment, or some- 
 times by an influx of members coming suddenly from 
 out of the House because some well-known bore is on 
 his legs. 
 
 But at last some speech ends, and one hears — or 
 rather once did hear — " Dizzy's up," then another, 
 and " Palmerston's up," then another, and '' Gladstone 
 is up." Thereupon men will quietly determine to 
 shorten their literary labours, will composedly collect 
 their papers, and before long go back into the House 
 to hear what the chiefs have to say. But there used 
 to be no such composure as this when the fibre of the 
 well-known voice could be recognised through the 
 partitions, and voices here, there, and everywhere, 
 along both the side lobbies, were crying out : 
 *' Osborne is up." Then men of all sorts and condi- 
 tions would bundle up incomplete documents with a 
 haste that threatened confusion, and rush at once 
 into the manufactory of statute law. The very door- 
 keepers used to cease from being solemnities, and be 
 busy in carrying the infection, saying eagerly, ''Mr. 
 Osborne is up, sir." 
 
 Such was the common experience, and it at once 
 constitutes a tribute to Osborne's powers, and suggests 
 the question — Why ? What was it that always 
 guaranteed him a full House when he spoke ? It is 
 not enough to say that the people's representatives 
 
256 POLITICS AND LETTEB8. [x. 
 
 love a jester, and that they welcomed the relief 
 afforded by Bernal Osborne's persiflage to the severer 
 eloquence of other orators. It is certain that Osborne 
 would not have received so eager and so gratified a 
 hearing if he had not mingled much practical wisdom 
 with his entertainment ; if he had failed to confute, 
 demonstrate, or instruct, as well as to divert ; if his 
 satire and pleasantry had not discharged the intel- 
 lectual functions of dialectic as well as tickled the 
 fancy. The truth is, that in many cases, and 
 especially in debate, a joke is often a happy summary, 
 a trenchant and bright compendium of a series of 
 solemn argumentative processes. It flashes, in an 
 instant, conviction on the hearer's mind ; it causes 
 the truth, which was previously obscured and is now 
 suddenly enlightened, to penetrate into his being. 
 It does briefly what volumes of vapid talk fail to 
 effect. It is the concentration, because it is the 
 enlivening and illumining, of argument. 
 
 When, for instance, in reply to demands that 
 England should " put her foot down " at once in 
 several quarters of the globe, Mr. John Morley tersely 
 submitted that " England is not a centipede," could 
 he have exposed more effectively the Chauvinistic 
 fallacy of the patriots of the platform ? Mr. Bagenal, 
 in his interesting and, whether in respect of literary 
 style, or of just appreciation of a biographer's duties, 
 admirably executed memoir of Bernal Osborne, re- 
 cently printed for private circulation, quotes a passage 
 from one of the most brilliant of living writers, who 
 
X,] BEENAL OSBOBNE. 257 
 
 has insisted that *' the English, not being a logical 
 people, and not having the clue of pure reason to 
 guide them in their search after truth, would be 
 passing their life in a political jury-box, for ever 
 inquiring, were it not for the occasional service of the 
 swift, trenchant argument of ridicule." Mr. Bagenal 
 then proceeds to show with felicitous cogency that by 
 his use of the weapon Bernal Osborne did good, 
 wholesome service to the State, and became for that 
 reason a power in Parliament. 
 
 Mr. Disraeli called him '' the chartered libertine 
 of debate," but the shrewd, sagacious assembly which 
 gave him this licence knew well in its heart of hearts 
 that whether by words of sterling sense, or by 
 humorous allusions, or by political sarcasm, he was 
 clearing the air of debate. So it was that when, for 
 instance, he sprang to his feet after an intolerably 
 dull speech from the Treasury bench, and entreated 
 the House not to be carried away by the eloquence of 
 the right hon. gentleman ; when he protested that 
 the electors in one half of the small boroughs re- 
 gard a vote neither as a right, nor a -trust nor a 
 privilege, but a perquisite ; when he denounced the 
 increase of military expenditure as a game of beggar- 
 my-neighbour ; when he said of Lord Palmerston 
 that " in a Cabinet the united ages of which would 
 puzzle the oldest inhabitant, he was the youngest 
 man — having a turn for extravagance, which is a 
 folly of youth, and never being satisfied without 
 squandering the public money ; " when he said each of 
 
258 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [x. 
 
 these things he was giving pithy and pointed inter- 
 23retation to what all knew to be a truth. What drew 
 men crowding into the House when they heard the 
 cry, ^' Osborne is up ! " was not only a desire to hear 
 Osborne speak, but to witness the effect — to see the 
 House, as Pitt phrased it, '^ under the wand of the 
 magician." 
 
 But great as was Osborne's faculty for wit of the 
 intellectual kind, it attracted perhaps less notice than 
 his over-brimming wealth of animal spirits. Whatever 
 the extremes into which these led him, however dis- 
 agreeable the names by which his freedom from all 
 bashfulness and mauvaise honte might be called by 
 his censors, it must be remembered that they were 
 the accompaniments of unflagging courage, and, on 
 the whole, of extraordinary public spirit and political 
 independence. If Osborne had been made of different 
 material, or if his gift of pleasantry had not been 
 associated with such intrepidity, it is probable that 
 he would never have entered political life. His father 
 indeed had sat during thirty-four years in the House 
 of Commons- at a cost of nearly £70,000. But the 
 son showed no early taste for public affairs, and at 
 Cambridge, not mingling closely with the studious or 
 even the intellectual men, he at once became a prince 
 of society. " Superbly, aggressively handsome," 
 writes one of his best friends, ''with flashing dark 
 eyes, with firm set defiant lips, with a strong ringing 
 voice in speech, which became a fine tenor in song, 
 with an utter absence of all guile, with not even a 
 
X.J BEENAL OSBOBNE. 259 
 
 thought of self-repression, and in short with an 
 absolutely unbounded audacity, he was something 
 almost godlike in the midst of shy, sheepish young 
 men of the common English types. It has been said 
 that at Cambridge he played in private theatri- 
 cals. Yes, he played Captain Absolute in ' The 
 Kivals ; ' but there was no acting in it. He was 
 simply himself — simply Bernal triumphant. It was 
 perfect." 
 
 There is a story, not true to the letter, yet sub- 
 stantially founded on truth, which puts words into 
 the mouth of a chaperon in those brilliant days : 
 " Mr. Bernal danced twice with my Julia, and sang a 
 duet with her, and he was so dreadfully handsome, 
 and had such a bewitching tenor in singing, that I 
 became alarmed lest he should trifle with her affec- 
 tions ; and, determining to interpose, I asked him (in 
 the phrase customary at that time) whether his inten- 
 tions were honourable, and what do you think was 
 his answer ? He answered, * Certainly not I ' and in 
 so ringing a voice that you might have heard him in 
 the next room. My first impulse was to be angry, 
 and to think he might have had the grace to say 
 something more * roundabout ; ' but I was wrong. 
 Would that all men were so honest, so bold, so deter- 
 mined, and so free from guile." He went into the 
 army, and afterwards was attached as an aide-de- 
 camp to Lord Normanby's viceregal court in Ireland. 
 His father had not helped him at all to obtain that 
 appointment ; and with a humour delightful to think 
 
 s 2 
 
260 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [x. 
 
 of at even this distance of time, he used to say : " I 
 got that entirely by my own merit." He acquired 
 distinction and vogue as a brilliant young man of 
 fashion, first in Dublin and afterwards in London. 
 In 1841 he became, more by accident than design, 
 candidate in the Whig interest for High Wycombe. 
 He carried the seat entirely by the spirit and pluck, 
 by the inexhaustible fan and go which he brought to 
 the contest. 
 
 These, indeed, were the qualities which never 
 deserted him throughout a public career of nearly half 
 a century, and which stood him in such extraordinary 
 good stead at the nine opposed elections which he 
 fought. No man ever less nursed a constituency or 
 had such a contempt and incapacity for the process as 
 Osborne. Middlesex, Dover, Liskeard, Nottingham, 
 and Waterford, each in turn accepted him, not be- 
 cause he paid them any careful suit or flattered their 
 local vanity, or subscribed to their local institutions, 
 but because he took them by storm and carried them 
 with a rush. The greater the resistance offered to 
 him the more uncontrollable, the more audacious, and 
 often the more successful he was. It was a radiant, 
 boisterous life, and the ardour, no less than the 
 literary power with which Mr. Bagenal has loyally 
 followed his hero from contest to contest, is delightful 
 to those friends of Osborne's who have been allowed 
 to read pages withheld from the eye of the public. 
 He declined to pledge himself to a party or a 
 Minister ; he set himself against Lord Palmerston 
 
X.] BEENAL OSBORNE. 261 
 
 when his power and popularity were at their zenith ; 
 he required that his election expenses should be kept 
 down to a figure which, in those days, seemed not 
 so much modest as mean ; he trampled on the 
 Protestant susceptibilities of the English public at a 
 time when the " No Popery " cry woke a real echo in 
 the country ; and yet, though he did all these things 
 by turns, and not infrequently many of them together, 
 he was one of the most popular parliamentary candi* 
 dates of his time. 
 
 A bearing so fearless as Osborne's, a contempt so 
 robust for all conventionalities and prejudices, a dic- 
 tion so clear, so incisive, so ready a wit, so powerful, 
 so thrilling a voice, with a delivery always animated 
 and firm, always even triumphant and masterful, 
 compelled the admiration of the multitude. Only a 
 man who had immense physical strength, as well as 
 personal fearlessness and hardihood, could have 
 fought the battle of his second Middlesex election, 
 or could have passed the ordeal described so amu- 
 singly by himself at Waterford. ''I am," he said 
 to a friend shortly after he had been victorious at 
 the latter of these places, "slowly recovering from 
 the success of an Irish election." Most men with 
 half of Osborne's experience would, long before 
 this, have registered a resolve to retire into private 
 life. 
 
 What would have discouraged and deterred others 
 only served to stimulate Osborne. Angry crowds, 
 surging before platforms and accentuating their anger 
 
2G2 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [x. 
 
 Avith missiles hurled at the speaker^s head, the wav- 
 ing of bludgeons, the smashing of windows, the howls 
 of infuriated electors, accusations, calumnies, abuse of 
 every kind were to Osborne part of the fun of the 
 business, into which he entered with a laugh and a 
 jest. Upon one occasion, at Waterford, one of his 
 enemies in the mob below fired a pistol. Osborne was 
 not daunted for an instant. " If," he exclaimed, *' my 
 good friend, you would only have the goodness to go 
 off, like your pistol, I should be for ever indebted to 
 you." Upon the same occasion he would certainly 
 have been lynched if he had not succeeded in getting 
 out of a second-floor window, and so effecting an 
 entrance to a draper's shop, where he passed the 
 night stowed away in a bundle of blankets. The 
 town itself was wrecked. Osborne had shown no 
 sign of flinching throughout. He was equally im- 
 pervious to alarm when plunged in the midst of 
 contests which, less tempestuous and perilous, were 
 sufficiently trying to the nerves at Liskeard and 
 Nottingham. 
 
 His extraordinary animal spirits, therefore, rested 
 upon a strong basis of rare personal courage, and in 
 the audacity of his manner there was nothing which 
 went beyond, or had not its exact counterpart in, the 
 defiant daring of his nature. A temperament and 
 attributes of this sort are sure to command ascend- 
 ance, and to secure recognition. He always used to 
 be neatly, appropriately, and faultlessly dressed, and 
 
X.] BERNAL 08B0BNE. 203 
 
 was not tolerant of those who fell into less careful 
 habits. He had not been in Parliament an hour 
 before he disclosed his characteristic audacity and a 
 disregard so disdainful of all self-repression, that he 
 needs must begin undertaking to enforce the rules of 
 the House ! Descrying a college friend, not then a 
 member, who was occupying, by the Speaker's leave, 
 a seat under the gallery, he came and sat next him, 
 and joyously used his new privilege by putting on his 
 hat, as a member is entitled to do. Presently a 
 gentleman, less trim and spruce, came and took 
 his j)lace close to Osborne, putting on, as the 
 newly-elected member for Wycombe had done, his 
 hat — a hat as remarkable for its shabbiness, as 
 Osborne's was for its brilliancy and military smart- 
 ness. Osborne was so new to Parliament as to be 
 shocked at the sight of this ill-brushed and ill- 
 conditioned article of head-gear, and imagining that 
 so lamentable an offender in the matter of apparel 
 could not be really a Member of Parliament, he 
 actually put him to the test. '' Pray, sir," he said, 
 severely looking at him, ^' are you a member ? " 
 
 Instances of this kind might be indefinitely 
 multiplied from Mr. Bagenal's delightful volume. 
 When Osborne was not attracting the attention 
 of the House of Commons by formally taking 
 part in its debates, he was, as often as not, 
 making his presence felt by his audible asides, 
 and his satirical comments on those who sat near 
 
264 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [x. 
 
 him. He took a particular pleasure in teasing sedate 
 Liberals, and taking a rise out of severely respectable 
 Radicals. The fun he threw into these sallies cannot 
 be conveyed by language, and depended for its original 
 effect upon the time, the place, and the manner of 
 the man, but one may speak of the way in which it 
 told. Those good Kadicals contracted such an awe 
 of Osborne, that in the vain hope of keeping him at a 
 distance, to Osborne's immense delight, they used 
 meekly to call him *' Sir." It was the same in social 
 life. Only one who was indeed ''a chartered liber- 
 tine '' of the drawing-room and dinner-table could 
 have indulged so systematically, and with such impu- 
 nity, his peculiar method of raising a laugh by select- 
 ing a butt who was frequently a person of high 
 position and decorous gravity, and directing at him, 
 for the entertainment of the company, his shafts of 
 satire and chaff. 
 
 How, it may be asked, is the circumstance to be 
 explained — first, that his wildest extravagances were 
 universally tolerated in society ; secondly, that inde- 
 pendently of his wit and its intellectual value, he 
 was a distinct power in the House of Commons ? 
 As regards the former, it is enough to say that his 
 perfectly natural and absolutely spontaneous free- 
 dom came of his southern blood, and was endured, 
 and appreciated, because it presented so marked a 
 contrast to the pervading tone of English life. In 
 England, where the national virtue is a dignified self- 
 
X.] BJSRNAL OSBORNE, 265 
 
 restraint, there is always room for one man of the 
 most opposite sort. Count d'Orsay, who with all 
 his high-breeding and genuine kindliness was, to 
 say the least, bold in society, affords another in- 
 stance of this truth. With reference to the second 
 question, it should not be forgotten that Osborne 
 possessed an immense store of masculine common 
 sense, of sound judgment, and even of accurate 
 prevision. On the ballot, on Ireland — especially 
 on the Irish Church, and the position and dan- 
 gers of landowners — he held opinions that were 
 distinctly in advance of his day. He saw the 
 turn which, on the day after to-morrow, mat- 
 ters were likely to take, the crises which must 
 inevitably arise, and he anticipated many of the 
 troubles which legislation has since attempted to 
 remove. 
 
 This shrewdness and solidity of thought, added 
 to his undoubted sincerity and his tenacious ad- 
 herence to the opinions he had once espoused, even 
 when they were involved in a storm of unpopu- 
 larity, were quite enough, without his endowments 
 and achievements as an orator and a debater, to 
 secure him a position at St. Stephens. As an 
 orator his voice was, as has been said above, fine, 
 rich, and musical, but, above all, penetrating ; his 
 sentences were not only bright, but were well turned ; 
 the literary form in which he spoke was capital, and 
 he was always light in hand* Towards the close of 
 
266 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [x. 
 
 his life he was in the habit of saying that his high 
 animal spirits and loud voice had been his bane. 
 That the voice reacts on the character, and conse- 
 quently on the reputation, is true, but a low voice, 
 as well as a strong one, may tempt its owner to 
 indulge in satirical speech. Eogers used to excuse 
 himself for the ill-natured remarks he was re- 
 proached with making, by murmuring, " I have so 
 low a voice that, if I didn't say bitter things, no one 
 would ever hear me at all." But for Osborne 
 to reproach himself either with his voice or his 
 spirits, was much as if he had reproached him- 
 self with being Bernal Osborne ; certainly none 
 who knew him can be favoured with imagination 
 enough to conceive Bernal Osborne with a voice 
 meek and low, and a temperament submissive and 
 chastened. 
 
 By his power as a speaker he climbed the first 
 and most difficult part of the steep which leads to high 
 political eminence, with a success so decisive as to be 
 .recognised in the most complete of all ways — by the 
 offer of office under the Crown. The office he con- 
 sented to take was (amongst the non-Cabinet offices), 
 a high and important one, the Secretaryship of the 
 Admiralty ; but, the First Lord being also a member 
 of the House of Commons, it followed that Osborne 
 was not in general called upon to answer questions 
 touching the conduct of his department. As a con- 
 sequence his new official position, notwithstanding 
 
x.] BEBNAL OSBORNE. 267 
 
 its dignity, was disadvantageous to Osborne in its 
 influence on his subsequent career. The change 
 necessarily withdrew him in great measure from the 
 debates, while it did not give him that invaluable 
 practice and discipline which would have completed 
 his political training, and which he would have 
 received if he had been charged with the task 
 of representing a department in the House of 
 Commons. 
 
 We may conjecture — no one can do more — that 
 if that duty had been cast upon him, he would 
 have executed it with success ; because his vigour 
 and ability would have easily enabled him to master 
 the business, and the duty of giving authoritative 
 explanations in the House to ill-informed and some- 
 times foolish questioners would have atlbrded him the 
 best possible opportunities of using with due mode- 
 ration his powers of banter and sarcasm. As it 
 was, his official position condemned him in general 
 to silence ; and when at last, after an interval of 
 five or six years, he found himself unleashed by 
 the change of Government, and hastened to use his 
 recovered freedom, he uttered the speech which 
 Disraeli amusingly called the '' shriek of liberty.'' 
 The gibe was the more successful since the time 
 was one when, the Liberal party being in a shattered 
 state, Osborne's piece of invective was a sheer waste 
 of power. 
 
 Osborne never seemed to fail in a speech. He 
 
2oS POLITICS AND LETTERS. [x. 
 
 was a real, honest sharer of those simple old Kadical 
 opinions pleasantly styled " shoemakers' politics," 
 but he never allowed himself to *' preach" on such 
 subjects, nor even, indeed, to touch them without 
 taking care to be witty. He once, indeed, thought 
 that he had failed. The great speech that he made 
 in 1864 against going to war with Germany was 
 in every point of view admirable, and tended to 
 govern events, but it was — rightly, of course — a 
 grave speech, and Osborne missed — missed even 
 with pain — those signs of enjoyment on the part 
 of the House which before had always greeted his 
 efforts. 
 
 But whatever his sterner potentialities, the line 
 that he adopted and the triumphs that he won were 
 those that best suited his taste. He delighted to 
 dwell in a blaze of celebrity and in a very tempest of 
 social and political action. These were his natural 
 elements. He did not lack dignity, but his nature 
 was wholly foreign to calm and repose. At his Irish 
 home at New Town Anner, he is supposed to have 
 studied and meditated much, and he was unquestion- 
 ably a well-read man ; but the incurable fault he 
 must ever have found in all books was that of their 
 being behindhand, and not close up, alongside with 
 him, in the very front and van of life. Certain it is 
 that at New Town Anner he appeared to those who 
 knew him, and whom he entertained with the kindest 
 and most thoughtful hospitality beneath his roof, to 
 
x] BERNAL OSBORNE. 269 
 
 pay much more heed to life, actual life, than to 
 books. 
 
 But one of the many attractions which made him 
 so delightful a host was of an intellectual kind. 
 Speaking always in the most generous spirit, and 
 with an admirable breadth of view, he would touch 
 the questions of Ireland — the Ireland close outside 
 his park gates ; and if he had been the dullest instead 
 of the brightest of men, he could not have spoken 
 more wisely. Certain, too, it is that whatever his 
 literary studies during the parliamentary recess on 
 the other side of St. George's Channel, he had no 
 time for anything of the sort in London. In Pall 
 Mall it would have been as accurate to speak of him 
 as a recluse as a student. No one there ever saw him 
 ''in his ^library," "in his study," in any sort of mas- 
 culine den. He was always astir. His way of living 
 was to be alive. He was too highly gifted intellectually 
 to be averse from contemplative moods ; but he -liked 
 to think aloud, and his thinking was rendered all the 
 more sound by the clear, vigorous diction which 
 expressed it, and the accompaniment might, as 
 musicians would say, of his glorious, soul-stirring 
 voice. 
 
 Bernal Osborne was ever true and steadfast in 
 friendship ; and one of the ways in which he proved 
 his loyalty may be mentioned here. When the shafts 
 of his ridicule and his banter came flying around, 
 there were always a few — some were w^omen and 
 
270 POLITICS AND LETTERS. [x. 
 
 some were men — who seemed each of them to have a 
 charmed life. The trutli is that to him tliey were 
 sacred. Distinguished from mere acquaintances, 
 they were really his friends. He never struck at 
 a friend. 
 
 THE EXD. 
 
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 SKETCHES BY " BOZ," with 36 Illustrations, cloth, 3s. 
 
 UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER, with 26 Illustrations, cloth, 3s. 
 
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 A TALE OF TWO CITIES, with 25 Illustrations, cloth, 3s. 
 
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38 BOOKS PUBLISHED BY. 
 
 A New Edition of 
 
 CHARLES DICKENS'S WORKS. 
 
 Messrs. Chapman & Hali. beg to announce an Edition of Charles 
 Dickens's Works, entitled: — 
 
 THE CABINET EDITION. 
 
 To be completed in 30 vols, small fcap. 8vo, Marble Paper Sides, Cloth 
 Backs, with uncut edges, price Eighteenpence each. 
 
 A Complete Work will be Published every Month and each Volume will 
 contain Eight Illustrations reproduced from the Originals. 
 
 CHRISTMAS BOOKS, One Vol., 
 MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT, Two Vols., 
 DAVID COPPERFIELD, Two Vols., 
 Are now Ready. 
 
 DICKENS'S (CHARLES) WORKS. 
 
 MR. DICKENS'S RKADINGS. 
 
 Fcap. Svo, sewed. 
 
 CHRISTMAS CAROL IN PROSE. 
 
 IS. 
 
 CRICKET ON THE HEARTH, is. 
 CHIMES : A GOBLIN STORY, is. 
 
 STORY OF LITTLE DOMBEY. is. 
 
 POOR TRAVELLER. BOOTS AT 
 THE HOLLY-TREE INN, and 
 MRS. GAMP. IS. 
 
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 The Pocket-Volume Edition of Charles Dickens's Works, 
 In 30 Vols, small fcap. Svo, £,2 5s. 
 
 New and Cheap Issue of 
 
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 NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, with 8 Illustrations, cloth, 2s. 
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CHAPMAN 6- HALL, LIMITED. 39 
 
 List of Books, Drawing Examples, Diagrams, Models, 
 Instruments, etc., 
 
 INCLUDING 
 
 THOSE ISSUED UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE SCIENCE 
 AND ART DEPARTMENT, SOUTH KENSINGTON, FOR THE 
 USE OF SCHOOLS AND ART AND SCIENCE CLASSES. 
 
 CATALOGUE OF MODERN WORKS ON SCIENCE 
 
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 SENSON{W.)— 
 
 PRINCIPLES OF THE SCIENCE OF COLOUR. 
 
 Small 4to, 15s. 
 
 MANUAL OF THE SCIENCE OF COLOUR. Coloured 
 
 Frontispiece and Illustrations. i2mo, 2s. 6d. 
 BRADLEY {THOMAS), 0/ the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich— 
 
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 LINEAR PERSPECTIVE. With Illustrations. Post8vo,7s. 
 PRACTICAL GEOMETRY. Post 8vo, 5s. 
 DEFINITIONS OF GEOMETRY. Third Edition. 24mo, 
 
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40 BOOKS PUBLISHED BY 
 
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CHAPMAN ^ HALL, LIMITED, . 4» 
 
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42 BOOKS PUBLISHED BY 
 
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 MANUAL AND CATECHISM ON COLOUR. Fifth 
 
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 HOB SON [GEORGE)— 
 
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CHAPMAN ^ HALL, LIMITED. 43 
 
 COPIES FOR SHADED DRAWING: — t-- 
 
 COURSE OF DESIGN. By Ch. Bargue (French), 20 Sheets, £2 9s. 
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STUDIES. By J. B. Tripon. 10 Plates, Ix. 
 
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 TWELVE HEADS after Holbein, selected from his Drawings in Her Majesty's 
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 A SMALL DIAGRAM OF COLOUR, mounted, is. 6d.; unmounted, gd. 
 COTMAN'S PENCIL LANDSCAPES (set of 9), mounted, iss. 
 
 SEPIA DRAWINGS (set of 5), mounted, ;^i. 
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 SOLID MODELS, &c. : 
 
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 One Hexagonal Prism. £2. 2s. ■" 
 
 Skeleton Cube in wood, 3s. 6d. 
 18-inch Skeleton Cube in wood, 12s. 
 *Three objects of /i»r;« in Pottery: 
 
 in Jar, ") 
 
 ion Jar, >i8s. 6d. 
 
 Indian Jar 
 Celadoi ' 
 Bottl 
 
 *Five selected Vases in Majolica Ware, £1 iis. 
 *Three selected Vases in Earthenware, 18s. 
 Imperial Deal Frames, glazed, without sunk rings, los. each. 
 ^Davidson's Smaller Solid Models, in Box, ;C2, containing— 
 
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 Cubes. 
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 Octagon Prism. 
 Cylinder. 
 Cone. 
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 Triangular Prism. 
 Pyramid, EquilateraK 
 Pyramid, Isosceles. 
 Square Block. 
 
44 BOOKS PUBLISHED BY 
 
 SOLID MODELS, ^q.— Continued. 
 
 *Davidson's Advanced Drawing Models, £q. — The following is a brief description 
 of the Models : — An Obelisk — composed of 2 Octagonal Slabs, 26 and 20 inches 
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 the body of the obelisk) 3 feet high ; i Pyramid, 6 inches base ; the complete 
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 the semi-sphere, when placed on the cylinder, gives the form and principles of 
 shading a dome, whilst one of the quarters placed on half the cylinder forms a 
 niche. 
 
 •"Davidson's Apparatus for Teaching Practical Geometry (22 models), £<,. 
 
 "'Binn's Models for Illustrating the Elementary Principles of Orthographic Projection as 
 applied to Mechanical Drawing, in box, £,\ los. 
 
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 Cylinder, 13 inches diameter, id inches high ; Hexagon Pyramid, 14 inches 
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 xYx inch square ; Intersecting Circles, 19 inches solid wood 2j^ by ij^ inches. 
 Wire Models : Triangular Prism, 17 inches side, 22 inches high ; Square Prism, 
 14 inches side, 20 inches high ; Hexagonal Prism, 16 inches diameter, 21 inches 
 high ; Cylinder, 14 inches diameter, 21 inches high ; Hexagon Pyramid, 18 inches 
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 Large Compasses, with chalk-holder, 55. 
 
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 * Models, &c., entered as sets, can only be supplied in sets. 
 
CHAPMAN (5r- HALL, LIMITED, 45 
 
 LARGE DIAGRAMS. 
 
 ASTRONOMICAL : 
 
 TWELVE SHEETS. By John Drew, Ph. Dr., F.R.S.A. Sheets, £,^ 8s. ; on 
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 BOTANICAL : 
 
 NINE SHEETS. Illustrating a Practical Method of Teaching Botany. By Professor 
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 CLASS. DIVISION. .SECTION. DIAGRAM. 
 
 I Thalamifloral 
 
 2 & 3 
 4 
 5 
 6 
 
 Dicotyledon .. . . 3 Angiospermous •• jglollffloral 
 / \ Incomplete 
 
 Gymnospermous 
 { Petaloid . . . . f Superior 
 Monocotyledons ..•< (Inferior 
 
 Glumaceous 
 * Models, &c., entered as sets, can only be supplied in sets. 
 
 BUILDING CONSTRUCTION: 
 
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 DIAGRAM OF BRITISH STRATA. By H. W. Bristow, F.R.S., F.G.S. 
 
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 xMECHANICAL : 
 
 DIAGRAMS OF THE MECHANICAL POWERS, AND THEIR APPLI- 
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46 CHAPMAN <£- HALL, LIMITED. 
 
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 1. THE SKELETON AND LIGAMENTS. 
 
 2. THE MUSCLES, JOINTS, AND ANIMAL MECHANICS. 
 
 3. THE VISCERA IN POSITION.— THE STRUCTURE OF THE LUNGS. 
 
 4. THE ORGANS OF CIRCULATION. 
 
 5. THE LYMPHATICS OR ABSORBENTS. 
 
 6. THE ORGANS OF DIGESTION. 
 
 7. THE BRAIN AND NERVES.-THE ORGANS OF THE VOICE. 
 
 8&9. THE ORGANS OF THE SENSES. 
 
 10 & II. THE MICROSCOPIC STRUCTURE OF THE TEXTURES AND 
 ORGANS. 
 
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 I, 2, 3. THE SKELETON, Front, Back, and Side View. 
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 ZOOLOGICAL : 
 
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 PHYSIOLOGY AND ANATOMY OF THE HONEY BEE. 
 
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i .4, I i » , J. 
 
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 [fn ApriU 
 
 BY S. LAING. 
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48 
 
 CHAPMAN &= HALL, LIMITED. 
 
 THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW. 
 
 Edited by T. H. S. ESGOTT, 
 
 *qrHE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW is published on the ist of 
 ^ every month, and a Volume is completed every Six Months. 
 
 The following are among the Contributors : — 
 
 SIR RUTHERFORD ALCOCK. 
 
 MATHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 PROFESSOR BAIN. 
 
 •SIR SAMUEL BAKER. 
 
 PROFESSOR BEESLY. 
 
 PAUL BERT. 
 
 BARON GEORGETON BUNSEN. 
 
 DR. BRIDGES. 
 
 HON. GEORGE C. BRODRICK. 
 
 JAMES BRYCE, M.P. 
 
 THOMAS BURT, M.P. 
 
 SIR GEORGE CAMPBELL, M.P. 
 
 THE EARL OF CARNARVON. 
 
 EMILIO CASTELAR. 
 
 RT. HON. J. CHAMBERLAIN, M.P 
 
 PROFESSOR SIDNEY COLVIN. 
 
 MONTAGUE COOKSON, Q.C. 
 
 L. H. COURTNEY, M.P. 
 
 G. H. DARWIN. 
 
 ■SIR GEORGE W. DASENT. 
 
 PROFESSOR A. V. DICEY. 
 
 RIGHT HON. H. F.\WCETT, M.P. 
 
 EDWARD A. FREEMAN. 
 
 SIR BARTLE FRERE, Bart. 
 
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 MRS. GARRET-ANDERSON, 
 
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 M. E. GRANT DUFF, M.P. 
 
 THOMAS HARE. 
 
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 LORD HOUGHTON. 
 
 PROFESSOR HUXLEY. 
 
 PROFESSOR R. C. JEBB. 
 
 PROFESSOR JEVONS. 
 
 ANDREW LANG. 
 
 EMILE DE LAVELEYE. 
 
 /i 
 
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 THE EARL LYTTON. 
 
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 PROFESSOR JOHN NICHOL. 
 
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 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 
 
 LORD SHERBROOKE. 
 
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 LESLIE STEPHEN. 
 
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 THE REV. EDWARD F. TALBOT 
 
 (Warden of Keble College). 
 SIR RICHARD TEMPLE, Bart. 
 W. T. THORNTON 
 HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACH E 
 H. D. TRAILL. 
 ANTHONY TROLLOPE. 
 PROFESSOR TYNDALL. 
 A. J. WILSON. 
 THE EDITOR. 
 
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