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thought and expression more readily than men. His manner, accordingly, to women was charming, chivalrous, and gentle, without a touch of patronage or flattery. From his earliest days he had had the advantage of associating with unusually able and well-read women, and it did not occur to him to treat them as other than intellectual equals.

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Love-stories always interested him profoundly, in fiction as in real life. The Bride of Lammermoor and St. Ronan's Well were, perhaps, his favourites among the Waverley Novels,' and he admired Gerfaut as a specimen of the best French roman d'amour. My uncle has been called cynical, but a more faithful believer in true love never penned a sonnet or treasured a lock of hair.

Matthew Arnold's poem, Tristan and Iseult, pleased him much, especially the dialogue between the Queen and the dying Knight beginning

Ah! harsh flatterer, let alone my beauty;

I, like thee, have left my youth afar.

Perhaps this may be the fittest place for my uncle's own unpublished verses, which he gave me about the year 1866, and which, I venture to think, could only have come from a heart full of tender and refined feeling.

You are my friend no more. 'Tis even so.
Why should I cling to shadows, why deceive
My heart by doubting what too well I know,
Or, unbelieving, struggle to believe?

The keen and searching anguish that I feel,
The grief, the disappointment, the distress-
These are realities, like fire or steel,

The rest is silence, nothing, nothingness.

And yet not thus, not wholly thus should end,
Without a word the crushing change to tell,
The kindly intercourse "twixt friend and friend,'
The gentle memories treasured all too well.

I blame not that a few short months have torn
The fragile thread that linked us for a day;
But not in recklessness, but not in scorn,
Should even such as I be cast away.

Too much I have misread you; wit and youth
And beauty touch, but tame not, heart like mine.

But oh! if kindness, nobleness, and truth

Were ever stamped on human brow, 'tis thine.

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Is mine no more, to take or to bestow;

My heart shall be my wronged affections' grave.

And oh ! if ever better thoughts incline

To seek the sympathies which now you spurn,
The grave shall open, and the dead shall rise,
And, true and constant, shall your friend return.
R. L.

Oh for one Hour of Thee!

Oh for one hour of thee! one hour, to trace
Wit, fancy, feeling, mantling in thy face.
Stirred by each thought as ocean by the wind—

The noble image of a noble mind.

To drink those tones so liquid, pure, and soft,
Heard all too seldom, and recalled too oft,
And as the spell o'ercomes me more and more,
To love, fear, reverence, idolise, adore.

·

R. L.

My uncle was fond of choosing illustrative poetry for pictures and photographs, and hit upon some quotations that were very happy. Sitting by Mrs. Goodall, the wife of the painter, one day at dinner, she described Goodall's just-finished picture, Gordon's Last Message,' representing a tired camel and rider, vultures hovering above the bones of dead horses, and creeping things just visible on the desert sand, the first streak of daylight on the far horizon. Mrs. Goodall asked Lord Sherbrooke for a legend to place under the picture, and he at once suggested :

Yes, grief will have way, but the fast-falling tear
Should be mingled with deep execration on those
Who could bask in that warrior's midday career,
And leave him thus lonely and dark at its close.

The Icelandic and Norsk Sagas interested my uncle extremely, from the time that he learnt Icelandic as a young man; and when Dasent's translation of Burnt Njal appeared about 1863, Lord Sherbrooke wrote to me as follows, after reviewing the book in the Times. I quite agree with you that there is something very poetic in Njal. It is more like Homer than anything else. The Icelanders consider Skarphedinn the true type of Icelandic bondi or landowner, just as Hrappr is of the lower caste. There is a grand unity of action throughout, so different from the desultory writing of Pulci, Boyardo, and Ariosto. I don't think there is any translation of Munch, but Danish is very easy indeed; I taught it myself without the least trouble.'

This last remark reminds me that my uncle's weak point through life was his inability to realise that what was play to him was hard work to other people. As Helps says, 'How wise the clever men would be if they could understand the stupid;' and that was a wisdom he never acquired. Himself an intellectual giant, he did not, as one of his friends has said, 'suffer fools gladly,' and consequently made enemies of those who saw that he despised what he thought their want of application.

Of Lord Macaulay, a kindred spirit, he wrote in 1876 :

'I think Macaulay was much to be admired in this, that he mainly read originals, and read them through, instead of wasting time on secondhand and inferior works. You cannot do better than read good translations. Jowett has translated Thucydides very well, I think, and I suppose will soon bring it out. George Trevelyan is clever, and would be cleverer if he was not so determined to be exactly like Macaulay. I think the book, on the whole, does him. credit' (the Life of Lord Macaulay).

It had always seemed to me impossible for my uncle to do himself justice as a statesman holding office, because of the want of eyesight, which, he tells us, prevented him from judging men's countenances, and therefore their characters. One of my many suggestions that he should turn his attention to writing, rather than to practical politics, met with the following reply about this time :-

'I don't think Nature has qualified me either for a literary or Parliamentary career, or, indeed, for any career at all. All my faculties drive me in a direction requiring sight. I am no dreamer, and cannot be the thorough man of action for which Nature meant me. Macaulay was not made for politics, and I was not made for literature.'

This was written in a moment of discouragement, and I hoped that he would reconsider the matter, and in 1880 I urged him, instead of going to the House of Lords, to retire from public life, in the hope that he would translate the Sagas, one of which he had already rendered into English verse, and so leave an imperishable addition to the fame he had won by his speeches on 'Reform.'

It was not to be, however. The old war-horse cares not to leave the ranks, and my uncle employed himself on the committee work of the Upper House, and in preparing the Employers' Liability Bill, in which he took great interest. As long as his old friend, the Duke of Somerset, lived, they sat together, and the Duke kept him instructed as to who was speaking, and almost to the end of my uncle's life he enjoyed listening to a good speech from the Peers' Gallery.

As a trustee of the British Museum he took great interest in Sir Charles Newton's researches in Asia Minor, and loved to look

again and again at the Greek statues and friezes, with an instinctive feeling for art which was very wonderful and acute. How he acquired such taste without eyesight and without special training seems inexplicable.

Though no great theatre-goer, my uncle liked a good play, and I remember going with him twice to see Fechter in Hamlet. His rendering of the part pleased him, and he admired the way in which he spoke the lines, with a slight foreign accent:

The Time is out of joint; O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right!

It has been said that the subject of this memoir depreciated the classical education to which he owed so much; but what he really felt was his own want of physical and scientific knowledge, with which to begin the world, and he deplored the time spent in his day in polishing verses, to the exclusion of English literature and modern languages. When he was between seventy and eighty he read Eschylus in the original Greek, and after the sad days came when he could no longer distinguish the characters, he never tired of hearing Homer read aloud.

He was almost as fond of Scotch melodies as his favourite Scott, and knew a number of them by heart. Music was a great resource to him in his blindness, and he reminded his aunt, Miss Pyndar (who outlives him at the age of ninety-seven), a few months before his death, of the words of an old song he had learnt as a child on her knee.

A great love for animals was always his characteristic, from the time when a boy he wished to set free the golden eagle his father had brought from Scotland as a pet. His horses, dogs, cats, and birds were all spoilt children, and he could not bear any creature to suffer. He wrote once to me from Surrey: 'I went to my town house yesterday, and found great deposits of soot, which were accounted for by a poor pigeon, which had fluttered down the chimney, been unable to get back, and was starved to death. I wish I had been a day or two sooner, as it was only just dead. How miserable it must have been! There is a subject for your muse. Cowper would have made something of it.'

Another time he says he is writing with the cat asleep in the waste-paper basket and the little doves on the table.'

The Horse's Epitaph,' in his Poems of a Life, shows the love and admiration he felt for such creatures.

Boundless in faith and love and gratitude:
Happy the man, if there be any such,

Of whom his epitaph can say as much.

In closing these desultory memories it would be ungrateful to forget my uncle's power of true and constant friendship. Clearsighted and critical as he was, when once his affection was given, it continued unshaken to the end. Through evil report or good report, as he said of himself

Here, at least, is the smile that no cloud can o'ercast,
And the heart and the hand all thine own to the last.

No. 2. BY THE HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE

Direxit brachia contra

Torrentem, nam civis erat, qui libera posset

Verba animi proferre, et famam impendere vero.

JUVENAL (adapted).

Ir was in 1862, two years after I had taken my degree, that my father told me that Mr. Lowe had kindly consented to give me his advice as to the best career for one who, like myself, suffered from an extreme defect of eyesight; and I accordingly called on him. Nothing could exceed the sympathetic interest that he took in my case. Although my ocular defect was wholly different from his, we had had at least one odd experience in common: each of us, alas! had known what it was to blot with his nose what he had written. He informed me that, many years ago, his belief in oculists had been rudely shaken. Suffering from his eyes in his early youth, he consulted an eminent specialist, who foretold that he would lose his sight in seven years, if not earlier. And he went on to say that, as a matter of fact, he could see quite as well when speaking to me as when he had been doomed by the oculist.

My father wished me to practise at the bar, and I asked Mr. Lowe how far my eyesight was likely to be an impediment to my success. He answered that I must at any rate confine

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