LORD SHERBROOKE: A PERSONAL MEMOIR Dear Sir,-I am always glad to have an opportunity of writing or talking about Lord Sherbrooke, who, during more than thirty-five years, was one of my kindest friends. It was not, however, until after his return from Australia that we became well acquainted. In older days, when I was an undergraduate and he was a successful private tutor at Oxford, I knew him but slightly. The first time that I saw him was on the evening of November 26, 1835. The date is fixed on my mind, because I had just been elected to a Balliol Scholarship, an event which, as the Home Secretary, Mr. Asquith, has recently told us, was the greatest joy of his life, and, as I may add, of mine. Immediately after the announcement, I was hurried off to the Union, which at that time was held at Wyatt's Room in the High Street. We were promised a great passage of arms between two heroes of debate, a gentleman-commoner of Magdalen Hall, named Trevor, afterwards a Canon of York, who in later years was well known in the Northern Convocation of the Clergy, and Mr. Lowe, the subject of this memoir. The golden age of the Union was beginning to pass away; those of my generation were living in the silver age. At the time of which I am speaking the Society met in a very mean and unattractive building, which was used in the daytime as an auction-room. It had been in existence about ten years. During that ten years it had a far greater fame than it has ever had subsequently. The voices of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Milnes Gaskell, Archbishop Tait, W. G. Ward, Bishop Wilberforce, Cardinal Manning, Lord Cardwell, and Sir Thomas Acland, had been often heard within its walls. It had then, much more than later, the character of a real House of Commons; there was more earnestness, and greater freshness of interest. Those were the days of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, of the Roman Catholic Relief Bill, of the first Reform Bill, of the new Poor Law, of the Municipal Corporations' Act, of the Emancipation of the Slaves in the West Indies-a political world before the flood, which has passed out of remembrance. Never has there been so strong a party-feeling as was manifested in England between the years 1829 and 1834. The popular excitement penetrated even to the Universities, but with a difference-the majority fixing their eyes regretfully on the old paths,' a very few 'looking out for new ones.' The Union, too, had wars and secessions, divisions and reconcilements of parties; it was once in danger of dissolution. It was not without poets to celebrate its glories, though of the comic and macaronic sort. The tradition of the eloquence of those days descended to our generation, but we acknowledged, as, indeed, we could not help doing, that we were far inferior to our predecessors. There still remained among us two chiefs of the olden time, and they were the champions whom I have just mentioned. I cannot clearly remember what was the subject of debate. I believe that, like many other efforts of human oratory, it was inspired by a personal controversy. Canon Trevor was supposed, in some way or other, to have compromised the dignity of the Union by his communications with an American Bishop, which he had contrived to get inserted on the notice-boards of the Colleges. This impertinence Bob Lowe, as we used familiarly to call him, undertook to chastise. There was also an old score which he had to settle, for his opponent had, a year or two before, accused Lowe's friend and schoolfellow, Lord Cardwell, of fabricating the accounts of the Union, a charge which, with difficulty, he was induced to retract. A friend, who remembers the occasion of which I am speaking, compares the questions and answers which passed between Mr. Lowe and his opponent to shots fired from a revolver. There was laughter and cheering on both sides at the manner in which the hits were given or received. Lowe was the interrogator, Trevor the respondent. The latter, who was the more finished speaker of the two, defended himself warily, and with a dignified reserve, against his adversary. No one else took much part in the debate. It was felt by the audience to be a drawn battle, in which the two combatants were wellmatched, and neither had much advantage over the other. The only other occasion on which I saw Mr. Lowe between the years 1835 and 1842, was in the Common Room at Balliol, where he astonished us by the precision and variety of his talk. He had been reading Napier's Peninsular War, and was greatly impressed, not by the military glories which are recorded in that brilliant history, but by the horrors which he found there. The three great sieges of the Peninsula were distinguished by him as having each a peculiar character: one was marked by robbery and pillage; another by lust; a third by cruelty. I refer to this occasion because, after an interval of half a century, the words and the persons present (none of whom are now living) come back vividly to my recollection. Mr. Lowe was at that time about twenty-seven years of age, and he left on the mind's eye the same impression of vigour and power which he made in later life. Literature was always one of his favourite topics of conversation; the habit of discussing books which he had recently read was very characteristic of him. He loved to talk about great writers, especially about the Greek and Roman classics; yet he was also very ready and versatile, pouring out things gay as well as grave, and passing rapidly from one to the other. He would turn from Herodotus and Thucydides to a recent French novel, or an article in a magazine. I have heard him trans late a remark made at a dinner-party into a Tacitean sentence, as, on another occasion, he took the sting out of a ribald epigram by converting it into Latin, and Greek verse. Like Mr. Canning he delighted in such jeux d'esprit, which he would recite to his friends. The discomfiture of the Match Tax he converted, out of the abundance of his wit,' into a nursery rhyme (If Lucy can't sell 'em,' &c.), which at least showed that he was not put out of temper by his defeat. In a more mischievous strain, but not without good reason, he complained of the Revisers of the New Testament (who substituted 'the evil one' for the old translation 'evil'), 'that they had let the Devil into the Lord's Prayer.' He is said to have made a most diverting speech at the 'millenary' of the foundation of University College by King Alfred. The fact,' as Lord Eldon tells us, 'has been sometimes doubted;' but it ought not to be doubted by any member of the college. When it was objected to this famous myth that the lands of the college were not even within his dominions, Mr. Lowe replied that 'it was more in accordance with the experience of history that Alfred should have given what did not belong to him than what did; following the example of the Romans who, after the battle of Cannæ, formally presented to one of their citizens a piece of land which was in the hands of the enemy.' Once, when we were staying together at a country house in Scotland, he said, at breakfast, of a passage in Plato which he was quoting, How good that is!' The words were uttered in a peculiar tone, like a person smacking his lips over some rare wine. The passage referred to (Protag. 327 D, E) was that in which Protagoras, comparing civilised men with barbarians, makes the reflection that an Athenian whose lot was cast among savages would long to revisit the rascality of his part of the world.' In one of his Budget speeches in the House of Commons, he was not very well heard, and a cry arose, Turn round, turn round!' He retorted, quick as lightning, " Honourable members want me to act the part of a well known character in the Pilgrim's Progress-Mr. Facing-bothWays.' While an undergraduate, Lowe had already a considerable academic fame; he was at University College, and afterwards became a Fellow of Magdalen. He was remembered by his contemporaries to have been a formidable person in an argument, and to have pulled in the boat. Fifty years afterwards, when on a visit to Oxford, he insisted on trying his hand in one of the ticklish outriggers which, long after his time, had come into fashion on the Oxford river. The experiment was successful, and he did not discover that a boatman had followed to watch over his safety. He was always a good horseman, and quite late in life had learned to ride upon a bicycle. Once he took me into the stable at Caterham to show me, not his horses, but his bicycles. He was fond of talking about his college days, but had not equally pleasant recollections of school. His early years were a dreary time to him, and probably cast a shadow over his whole life. It is sad to think how, sometimes, the restless, half-inspired boy has been misunderstood by his parents or friends; and afterwards, when he has grown up to be an eminent man, from this unknown cause working in him, he has been misunderstood' still. The consciousness of some personal defect may have sunk too deeply into the mind at a time when reason was not strong enough to fight against such impressions. The child, too, has sorrows for which no one is to blame, and which are known only to himself. Lord Sherbrooke used to give ludicrous descriptions of the sufferings which he and other boys had endured at Winchester; in the narration of them I have heard him set the table in a roar. Whether these tales were strictly true, or merely the afterthoughts of an over-sensitive nature about an old-fashioned place of education, I cannot tell. Certainly the youth of our day have a much better time at a public school than their forefathers had. He had already made up his mind, while still an under |