of work.
joyed no
capacity.

legislative industry. That he had chances | difficulty, when he was seeking to fortify which other men had not, may be true. the front bench by every means at his But that is nothing to the present purpose. command. Lord Palmerston was never an The men who had not the chances succeeded idle man. On the contrary, he was fond in making an equally profound impression But up to that time he had enon the public mind, and have established as opportunity of demonstrating his firm a hold upon the admiration of future And it must have been from reages. Take Fox. Is it in virtue of his elo- ports as to what manner of man he was that quence that his name is imperishable? Men Mr. Perceval derived his conclusions. And scarcely, if at all, second to him as orators now, what was Lord Palmerston's career? are now known only to the students of How did he justify that confidence which Parliamentary history. Is it in virtue of the whole nation eventually reposed in him; his reckless prodigality, and the intrepid which no errors of judgment nor mistakes extravagance which created such social sen- in manner could disturb, and which has sations? Neither the one nor the other perhaps never been equalled since the days explains the quality of his reputation. The of the two Pitts? Was it by the wisdom vivid idiosyncrasy of the man explains it of his measures? Was it by a long life all. Take again Pitt's favourite pupil, Mr. devoted to the removal of abuses, the mitiCanning. He is only known as Mr. Can- gation of oppressive laws, the relief of a ning. A certain number of persons, no neglected population, and the improvement doubt, have a vague idea of his having of his countrymen in general? Such quescalled a new world into existence. But tions can only raise a smile in connection only a few know what the expression means; with the name of Palmerston. Was it the and of those few scarce a third admire him stainless honour and disinterested devotion for using it. He is likewise understood at of Lord Rockingham? was it the scornful one period of his life "to have sent a magnanimity of Pitt, that won for him the British fleet to the Tagus." But that with homage of a nation? Of the political mothe nation at large is a mere phrase. There rality of Lord Palmerston the best that are no distinct measures which are spoken can be said is, that it was not below the of directly as his own. We have no Can-average. His magnanimity was about ning Emancipation Act, or Canning Union upon a par with it. It was not, therefore, Act, or Canning Ecclesiastical Commission, by force of either his moral virtues or his or Canning Parliamentary Reform Bill. legislative ability that he won the high His fame was won, not by his offspring, place among English statesmen which he but by himself. Subtracting from him ev- occupied at his death, and which, in our erything that clusters round him in the judgment at least, he will long continue shape of actual deeds, we have the individ- to occupy. It was pre-eminently, in his ual left distinct from and independent of case, by the force of character alone that them all. Now some men have no kernel. he rose without an effort over the heads They are, so to speak, all shell. Some of statesmen who had long been his official ministers have no self. They are all superiors. When the nation was perplexed measures. And a mistake to which people it fell into the arms of the man at the present day are peculiarly prone, is showed this predominating quality. We to estimate the former by the latter. Do yield to no one in appreciation of the any of the great men we have mentioned late Lord Derby, and had he, in addition deserve to have it said of them that their to his many other brilliant gifts, possessed reputation was won too cheaply? We this one essential quality, he would have don't suppose that any one of them was a been the most renowned politician of his man of such remarkable application as time. But force of character is exactly Lord Clarendon. But consider their in- what he had not. He was unequal to the fluence over other people. Is not this the occasion. And the man who had it, infetruest sign of greatness? rior as he was in many other important The last man upon our list is almost a qualifications, stepped into the place withperfect illustration of our theory. What out a struggle. And how did he keep it could have induced a Prime Minister of when he had got it? It has been the England to offer an important cabinet fashion to compliment Lord Palmerston on office, requiring great knowledge of busi- his extraordinary astuteness, his knowledge ness, to a young man of three-and-twenty, of the House, and his skill in the managewho had neither wealth, rank, nor family connections to support him? Yet such was the offer made by Mr. Perceval to Lord Palmerston at a moment of considerable

who

ment of parties. We don't mean to say that these compliments were wholly undeserved. But they have been carried a great deal too far. These qualities did not

save him from committing gross blunders, from giving great offence to members of his own party, and from provoking against himself three hostile coalitions. The foreign policy of his Cabinet is a byword. Its domestic policy was a blank. The budgets of Mr. Gladstone were the sole sign of vitality which this popular administration exhibited. On what, then, did it rest? On that one all-sufficient foundation which we have been throughout insisting on the foundation on which repose the reputations of Walpole, Chatham, Fox, and Canning the character of the individual.

Of his diplo

what he owed his success. matic talents the nation has heard but little. The personal superiority of Canning which obliged him to be Prime Minister is what strikes one more in looking back on his career, than all his dispatches to the monarchs. And as for Lord Palmerston, it may almost be said that the full bloom of his popularity only came when he left the Foreign Office. It was during the ten years that succeeded the fall of the coalition, that the reputation of Lord Palmerston took its final shape and magnitude. He had been greatly admired previously, but he had not It will be replied, of course, that all been equally trusted. His energy was these men were celebrated foreign minis- thought to border on officiousness, his vivaters, that a province comparatively with- city on futility. If we were all proud of drawn from the public gaze was the theatre him," some of us were certainly suspicious of their greatness, and that in their des- of him. But when he settled, so to speak, patches and correspondence we must look and formed a cabinet of his own, he speedfor their political achievements, their re-ily became the object of unbounded confiform bills, their free-trade bills, their dence. The reputation of Lord Palmerston emancipation acts. Walpole, however, en- as Premier, was not only greater in degree, joys no particular distinction as a foreign but different in kind from, his reputation as minister, and even if he did it would be foreign minister. And it is the former reponly putting our original proposition in an-utation that will live, instinct with a meanother shape. For what was it gave their ing of its own. The last ten years of his whole influence to the documents in ques- life, during which he did nothing, will weigh tion ? Was it a profound acquaintance more with posterity than the whole three with continental affairs, personal knowledge score and ten during a great part of which of all the leading statesmen in Europe, ex- he was so active. ceptional sagacity in foreseeing the course of events? If we look for the men who possessed these qualifications we shall not find them in the front rank of statesmen. Lord Chesterfield, Lord Shelburn, Lord Castlereagh, might boast of them. But not Walpole, not Chatham, not Canning, not to anything like the same extent, Lord Palmerston. Their influence has still to be traced back to the same spring, their character, which infused a meaning into all they wrote, incommunicable by mere intellectual cleverness, or practical experience, or even inflexible resolution. Without character the first wants weight, the second spirit, and the third nobility. Their power was the simple triumph of the abnormis sapientia, the congenital moral superiority, which marks the great man as distinct from the merely able one. But now we come to a still more important consideration. Not only were the statesmen we have mentioned something more than foreign ministers, but their administration of foreign affairs was not, with one exception, their chief passport to fame. We must not confound a war minister with a foreign minister. Chatham's reputation rests, as far as it rests upon any active part which he played in the government of the country, on his successful conduct of a great war, and we have seen to

Let us now look to another class of statesmen, whose reputation depends more on what they did than on what they were. Lord Grey is the Reform Bill. That is what he is. To the popular mind he is nothing more. He carried one of the greatest measures of modern times. He powerfully contributed to others of hardly less importance. And yet where is he? If you mention Lord Grey to a commercial traveller, the man immediately thinks of Gatton and Old Sarum, and the bloated aristocrat who threatened to return his black footman to the House of Commons. If you mentioned Mr. Canning or Mr. Fox he would say, 'Ah, wonderful men, sir, wonderful men !" He would remember them for themselves. Take, again, a name that we are sure no Englishman would wish to mention without sincere respect, Sir Robert Peel. His reputation belongs to the same genus as Lord Grey's. Peel is the Bank Act, the Emancipation Act, the Ecclesiastical Commission, the Income Tax, Maynooth, and Free Trade, an accumulation of measures under which the individual is lost. Nobody, certainly, except perhaps his personal friends, remembers in him that distinct individuality which clothes the memory of the other great statesmen we have mentioned. The man is forgotten in his works. We are not now

arguing the justice or the injustice of posterity. We simply assert what we believe to be the fact. And we must not be understood to mean that force of character and legislative industry are incompatible with each other. We have brilliant exceptions which prove the contrary. All we say is that the second does not prove the first, and that it is the first and not the second which is the surest recommendation to posterity; where character and measures go together, the measures of course will bear the impress of the character. But there is nothing racy of the individual in anything that Peel did, unless perhaps it was his manner of doing it. He will certainly fill a smaller space in history than Mr. Canning, though he did so much more. And we should say a smaller space than Mr. Gladstone, though Mr. Gladstone is sometimes called his pupil.

converse proposition is true. The quiet,
unobtrusive services of a man like Lord
Clarendon may have wrought far more good
than the personal force of a Chatham or a
Palmerston. The long course of corrective
legislation which, beginning soon after the
peace, was transmitted through the hands
of Grey, Russell, and Peel into those which
are still carrying it forward, may entitle its
successive managers to a larger share of
posthumous gratitude than is rightly due to
Walpole or Canning. That is not the ques-
tion. The question is, Has more consider-
ation been given to men of this latter stamp
than is their due, taking human nature as
it is? Has their reputation been won too
cheaply? Our answer is, No. The force
of personal character exercises so powerful
an influence over all with whom it comes in
contact that, like the dint of a cannon-ball,
the marks of it survive for centuries.
may be barren; it may be destructive; or
it may be eminently fruitful and healthy.
But it cannot be forgotten. Quanturı instar
in ipso est. To complain of this is to com-
plain that we are constituted as we are.
We are formed to admire greatness in this
shape; and to think it greater than in other
shapes. And no doubt the chief reason is,
that the man who has no force of character
does not understand what it is that subdues
him in the presence of one who has. And

It

tion are, of course, deeper and more per-
manent than those which are made on the
understanding. The Emperor Nicholas
said that Sir Robert Peel would be the Wal-
pole of the nineteenth century.
The re-

Having mentioned Mr. Gladstone, we may be allowed, perhaps, to mention others still living, the contrast between whom is an excellent confirmation of our theory-Earl Russell and Mr. Disraeli. Which of these two will hereafter be thought the greater man? They represent the claims of practical utility and personal character even better than Palmerston and Peel. Mr. Disraeli, indeed, has left his name on one great measure of transcendent political importance, which is more than Lord Palmer-impressions which are made on the imaginaston has done and he may yet leave his name on more. His final position, therefore, cannot as yet be ascertained, any more than Mr. Gladstone's. But if his political career were to close at this moment, it is certainly rather on the superlative in-mark showed more knowledge of the two fluence of his character, than on measures epochs than it did of the two men. No of practical utility that his posthumous rep- doubt in 1840, as in 1720, the English utation would depend. May we not say of people were prepared to welcome a statesLord Russell that with him it would be ex-inan who, after a long period of political actly the reverse? Will not his reputation be the same in kind as Sir Robert Peel's, though possibly superior in degree? He will be remembered as the consistent advocate and successful designer of numerous invaluable reforms, and likewise as a man not devoid of individual character. But the last is not marked enough to raise him into the higher rank, which we have assigned to statesmen, as we think, of a different calibre. And we may here perhaps remind our readers that we have been speaking throughout of fame rather than of merit. The most famous men have not always been the most serviceable, either to their friends or to their country; and the

excitement, should give them repose and prosperity. And had Peel possessed Walpole's character he might have played a similar part, and have abolished the corn laws, without breaking up his party. But he had not. He had no faith in his own personal influence. And this was fatal to him. He may deserve more pure approbation for the act of self-sacrifice which he consummated, than he would have done had he, by dint of personal ascendency, drawn the country gentlemen after him, even as Orpheus drew the oaks. But it does not show the same degree of power. And it is that which mortals worship.

Andrew went no farther than the foot of slowness, Mrs. Templeton's light but not the little garden and sat down on the wall unkindly, condescending speeches (for she in a familiar half boyish attitude to think too was the proud mother of a successful over what had befallen him, and to make son) and the still airier flights, for the purup his mind what he should do. But the pose of interesting and amusing the clever first thing Andrew did was to look about louts, on the part of the young ladies. him and to take in half inadvertently but There had been no fault to find with the with a kind of morbid vividness every well-minister's wife and daughters in their passknown feature of the scene. The chief fea-ing intercourse with the dominie's sons, ture was their shabby, narrow, two-storeyed honse, the two stereotyped windows below and the two above on each side of the door answering to the kitchen and the parlour, the room which Andrew shared with David, and his father and mother's room with its window unwontedly shaded long before sundown. A few yards apart from the unadorned dwelling was the even barer and more soiled and battered school-room.

unless that Mrs. Templeton might have been too suave, and the Misses Templeton too affable. The girls in their pretty fearlessness, graciousness, and gracefulness were dazzling to the youthful hermits, and the manse drawing-room a kind of half-pleasing purgatory to the shy, proud brothers.

Over the whole of these near objects, with their swift, deadly-lively suggestions, as well as over the dimmer, vaguer, more remote features of the landscape, the scarcely broken stubble and turnip fields, merging into the shoreless waves of the moor, "casting up," as yet, no purple flush on its sombre surface, there brooded an unrelieved pale, misty autumn sky. It was one of those skies in which there is neither clear light nor darkness, below which gossamers with their clinging haze wrap and veil every branch and leaf.

Andrew gazed about him mechanically, till there rose before him in a flash, with a pang of comparison, the stately pile upon pile of noble college and hall, such as they had appeared when he and David paid them a passing, charmed visit to enter their names on the lists of students. Fleeting as had been Andrew Auchinleck's experience of Oxford - the Christ-church meadows, the Isis, the cloisters of St. John's, the towers of Merton, the dome of the Radcliffe, the galleries of the Bodleian Library, returned to him as if he had seen them but yesterday. With these there came keen expectations of learned leisure, improving companionship, rivalries and rewards, which would open to the aspirants courses not unworthy of such training, clothing them with the simple dignity and fine freemasonry of gentlemen.

Across the road appeared the comparatively sheltered and ornate manse and kirk, which had drifted apart in the social scale during a century and more from their old allies the school and schoolmaster's house. There flourished the dazzling drawingroom, in which Andrew and David Auchinleck had been entertained as exemplary lads who did the parish credit, by the minister, a slim man, with a face bearing a resemblance to that of a skull. The minister's wife, Mrs. Templeton, retained the wellpreserved remains of a fair-haired, blue-eyed beauty, and was scrupulously in the fashion. The minister's youngest son, Cosmo Templeton, was like his father, with more flesh on his face as yet. He had been sent away and educated at an English private school, and had been successful in getting a Government appointment. The minister's daughters were like their mother, but with less pretensions to beauty than she had possessed. They were the single specimens of elegant girlhood that had come into close contact with the Auchinleck lads, for their old playfellow Cecy Rymer, in her faded patched frocks and highly unfashionable straw hats, would not bear that definition. The whole dramatis persona of the manse passed before Andrew as he sat there. He heard once more Mr. Templeton's mangled quotations from Homer and Virgil, got up for the benefit of Andrew and David, at which the two scholarly young prigs had laughed sardonically in their sleeves. He received anew Cosmo's off-hand, exultant account of his satisfactory examination, which had impressed Andrew and David with the cool conviction that they could have met and surmounted it with ease any day. All the same it had been a fact that As Andrew sat there pondering on the they could not meet and answer, without gardeu wall, David returned from his supreme mortification at their clownish stroll.

If either Andrew or David Auchinleck resigned Oxford for the present and took Auldacres parish school instead, neither of them had any hope of recalling their decision and reaching the university at a more distant date. It could not be. It would be impossible for the brothers to recover the lapsed bursaries and grants which would have enabled them at present to keep their terms.