idle young gentleman who had delicately toyed with philosophy and diplomacy, was earnest in the cause of popular concerts, and brought to the House of Commons something of Lord Melbourne's air of languid and wellbred indifference.'

'Punch,' as Mr Churchill reminds us, had at that time some puppets on the stage who passed by the names of Postlethwaite and Maudle-a poet and an artist before whom all the ladies of Belgravia were supposed to bow down. In the former Randolph affected to discern the image of his colleague. There was this much truth and no more in the comparison that about this time the society of souls' was born-a company of elect persons about whom Harcourt is reported to have observed that all he knew of them was that they had beautiful bodies, and of whom Lady Oxford in her Autobiography has given some further account. Of this coterie the young devotee of pre-Raphaelite art became the idol. A collection of Burne-Joneses hung in his house; and it would not be inaccurate to add that a galaxy of fair women hung upon his words.

For the character and quality of those words Posterity might do worse than turn to the volume of 'Essays and Addresses' which in its original and shorter form dates from about this time, and is perhaps of all his writings the most personal and revealing. The opening article on the Pleasures of Reading is one of those perfect 'causeries' which may be taken as a recognition, if not a discharge of the author's obligation to Sainte Beuve. The appreciations of Berkeley and Handel that follow discover a larger debt-a debt not merely to these famous figures but to the age that bore them. The exquisite clarity of the philosopher and the grand manner of the musician, pregnant alike as, perhaps, neither metaphysic nor music have been since with religious significance-these were the qualities and those the men that caught his imagination and in the intellectual sense define his period. The ease, the urbanity, the freedom from all that is pedantic, the subtle distinction, the exquisite irony, tend alike to establish his kinship with the 18th century or at least with a world that had its roots there. It is all of a piece,

* Churchill, 'Life of Lord Randolph Churchill.'

even if we discount his affection for Scott as a Scotsman's preference, that he loves so well the Austen novels; that, Stevenson, perhaps, excluded, he seems hardly [to desire to carry fiction farther; that he is alleged to have disposed of the English Beaumarchais, both satire and satirist, with the terse but not the less penetrating observation that Thackeray was not, as the phrase goes, ' in society' when he drew its portrait. Thus it might be no idle paradox to maintain that a personality which has singularly enriched and embellished the society of the Fifth of the Georges drew no small part of its gifts and graces, its sweetness and light, from a period that ended with the reign of the Fourth.

One wonders which of Lord Balfour's urbane epigrams and swift repartees will find their way down to posterity. Lady Oxford has indeed made one of them safe by recording the disaster that befell Frank Harris. "The fact is, Mr. Balfour,' observed that unfortunate, temerarious man, 'all the faults of the age come from Christianity and journalism.' 'Christianity, of course,' came the immortal reply, but why journalism?' Then, again, there is his alleged instruction during the Great War to a diplomatist entrusted with the conduct of British affairs in the capital of an ancient but not very enthusiastic ally. Congratulate the Government to which you are accredited upon the admirable valour of their troops, yet at the same time make it quite clear that that valour fell short of the occasion.' To another and greater manufacturer of squibs and crackers, who took occasion to remark that Dr Johnson had always seemed to him a very ill-educated man, he merely complained that he had not quite caught the adjective. Authentic or not, these Balfouriana at any rate were once current and possess, unless I am mistaken, the required flavour to make plausible their claims and probably their vitality. But to go on and also to go back!

He

He emerged then-this great gentleman of the 18th century-upon the stage of the eighteen-nineties yet with a marked and memorable difference from many of those who have turned their eyes back upon the past. betrayed no fretfulness at the present, no apprehension about the future, no morbid regret for the grace of a day that is gone. Perhaps he was better sheltered than

most men by the circle that surrounded him from the chill wind of change; perhaps, for all his Conservative opinions, a Whig temperament modified that 'pain of new ideas' of which Bagehot has eloquently spoken. At all events he faced novelty with interest and appreciation, was a patron of the art of his time and a student of its sciences. This happy gift of facingboth-ways, this constitutional equipment for the business of transition, was to enable him in due course to take his place in the history of Conservative leadership between Lord Salisbury and Mr Baldwin.

The political pundits of the early 'eighties would, doubtless, have been beyond measure astonished had one told them that this was to be the end. An intellectual orientation and a social constellation such as has been indicated would have seemed to them a singular way of qualifying for the command of the Conservative party. Yet not the Fifth Henry nor the Great Frederick was more rapidly transformed, when it came to the point, than the young man whom Toby M.P.' was pleased to call 'Prince Arthur.' It needed no more than a few months of power to convert the supposedly fragile æsthete into a minister with his life in his hands and those hands firm as iron. A change of government gave him office; a change of places put him in the roughest and most responsible post in the Administration-the post which had cost Forster his reputation and Frederick Cavendish his life and which Hicks-Beach had just found too hard to fill. It must have seemed madness to confer the Irish Secretaryship on one whose delicate health had compelled him to take medical advice before accepting office at all, and whose official experience consisted in no more than the briefest of terms, first as President of the Local Government Board and then as Secretary for Scotland. The world made sure that the appointment would not succeed; but the world proved to be mistaken.

Some strange attraction had already drawn the fortunes of this Lowland Scot into the orbit of the Irish Question. His denunciation in 1882 of the Kilmainham Treaty between Gladstone and Parnell-that so-called 'treaty' of which a commentator has satirically said that upon the basis that no sort of agreement

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existed, Mr Gladstone undertook to introduce an Arrears Bill and the Irish Leader promised to "slow down the Agitation"-had been of sufficient vigour to cause the House of Commons for the first time to take account of him. And again in 1885 he had been charged by Gladstone to carry to Salisbury a memorable, though abortive, offer of co-operation in the settlement of Irish affairs. But not, of course, in such chances as these is the genesis or the genius of his appointment to be found. His qualifications for the post lay in the fact that he was peculiarly equipped, as well by tradition as by temperament, to be the champion of the Irish Unionists. As a Scotsman, he had had the advantages of the Union of Scotland with England constantly present to his eyes and, as one might say, implanted in his bones. As a member of the Church of Scotland, he was more than usually responsive to those claims of religious and racial superiority that the Ulstermen prefer against the Irish of the other provinces. And finally as a philosophic imperialist he was, at least in those days, of opinion that the progress of an organic polity is from a looser to a closer union, and that such decentralisation as existed in Germany and Austria must be regarded as a mark of political imperfection.

Time and circumstance, as every one knows, have played no little havoc with these ideas. A mechanical without a moral union no longer satisfies the conscience of a community-or federation of communities-that has fought under the banner of self-determination. The growth of Parliamentary business has removed all reasonable measures of decentralisation from the region of academic argument to that of practical necessity. And, though to many Englishmen Catholicism (as the term is generally understood outside the Anglican communion) appears foolishness and the Pope a stumblingblock, the association of the Anglo-Saxon and Latin races in the recent conflict with the countrymen of Luther has by a little weakened belief both in the exclusive virtue of Protestant civilisations and in the sound sense of the old jingle about Home Rule and Rome rule. Thus one way and another it has come about that the Irish now govern themselves-not, as it would appear, altogether incompetently, nor altogether to their own

satisfaction, nor yet altogether to the regret of their English neighbours.

But the bold ventures in politics that are possible to a generation which has passed through a furnace of fire, grown callous of crime and violence and emerged with no other desire than to make all things new, were not possible or conceivable in the static world of the eighteennineties, shocked beyond measure by Fenian outrages and Irish Land Leagues. All or almost all the viri pietate graves of the time declared against Home Rule. Gladstone, indeed, hurrying his last labours as his sun began to set, showed vision, but a vision greatly confused. The juxtaposition of his two Home Rule Bills is alone fatal, as any one may see at a glance, to his credit. He adopted opposing principles in turn and exchanged the better for the worse. He began by excluding Irish members from the Parliament at Westminster and ended by putting them into it. The worst that could be said of their absence was that it left Ireland with no more part nor lot than the colonies in the decision of Imperial issues. But their presence was a permanent menace to the fair working of English Parties. Criticism had every excuse for riddling, as in fact it did riddle, these two versions of Home Rule, the one so ill-timed, the other so ill-conceived. The alternative-the only real alternative -was 'twenty years of resolute Government.'

It was as the embodiment of this idea that, in the May of 1887 when he became Irish Secretary, Mr Balfour found the sense of the country ranged behind those native sentiments and convictions of his of which stock has been already taken. The principles of his policy were simple in the extreme. It was calculated to run upon the two wheels of order and reform. The only question was whether, in this particular case, the vehicle they supported must be classified, according to the hopes of its occupants, as a governess-cart or, according to those of its critics, as nothing better than an Irish jaunting-car.

The principle of order was exemplified in a Crimes Act which exceeded all its predecessors in severity by setting no limit of time to that abrogation of the ordinary safeguards of the subject provided by trial by jury. The principle of reform, on the other hand, was apparent in such a scheme for the revision of rents as