the ready, easy, marvellously telling humor; but he had grown more considerate of the feelings of opponents in debate, and he allowed his genuine kindness of heart a freer influence upon his mode of speech. He had grown to prefer, on the whole, his friend, or even his honorable opponent, to his joke. They who only remember Palmerston in his very later years in the House of Commons, and who can only recall to memory that bright, racy humor which never offended, will perhaps find it hard to understand how many enemies he made for himself at an earlier period by the levity and flippancy of his manner. Many grave statesmen thought that the levity and flippancy were far less dangerous, even when employed in irritating his adversaries in the House of Commons, than when exercised in badgering foreign ministers and their governments and sovereigns. Lord Palmerston was unsparing in his lectures to foreign States. He was always admonishing them that they ought to lose no time in at once adopting the principles of government which prevailed in England. He not uncommonly put his admonitions in the tone of one who meant to say: "If you don't take my advice you will be ruined, and your ruin will serve you right for being such fools." While, therefore, he was a Conservative in home politics, and never even professed the slightest personal interest in any projects of political reform in England, he got the credit all over the Continent of being a supporter, promoter, and patron of all manner of revolutionary movements, and a disturber of the relations between subjects and their sovereigns.

Lord Palmerston was not inconsistent in thus being a Conservative at home and something like a revolutionary abroad. He was quite satisfied with the state of things in England. He was convinced that when a people had got a well-limited suffrage and a respectable House of Commons elected by open vote, a House of Lords, and

a constitutional Sovereign, they had got all that, in a political sense, man has to hope for. He was not a far-seeing man, nor a man who much troubled himself about what a certain class of writers and thinkers are fond of calling problems of life." It did not occur to him to think that as a matter of absolute necessity the very reforms we enjoy in one day are only putting us into a mental condition to aspire after and see the occasion for further reforms as the days go on. But he clearly saw that most Continental countries were governed on a system which was not only worn out and decaying, but which was the source of great practical and personal evils to their inhabitants. He desired, therefore, for every country a political system like that of Great Britain, and neither for Great Britain nor for any other country did he desire anything more. He was, accordingly, looked upon by Continental ministers as a patron of revolution, and by English Radicals as the steady enemy of political reform. Both were right from their own point of view. The familiar saying among Continental Conservatives was expressed in the well-known German lines, which affirm that "If the devil had a son, he must be surely Palmerston." On the other hand, the English Radical party regarded him as the most formidable enemy they had. Mr. Cobden deliberately declared him to be the worst minister that had ever governed England. At a later period, when Lord Palmerston invited Cobden to take office under him, Cobden referred to what he had said of Palmerston, and gave this as a reason to show the impossibility of his serving under such a chief. The good-natured statesman only smiled, and observed that another public man who had just joined his Administration had often said things as hard of him in other days. "Yes," answered Cobden, quietly, "but I meant what I said."

Palmerston, therefore, had many enemies among Euro

pean statesmen. It is now certain that the Queen frequently winced under the expressions of ill-feeling which were brought to her ears as affecting England, and, as she supposed, herself, and which she believed to have been drawn on her by the inconsiderate and impulsive conduct of Palmerston. The Prince Consort, on whose advice the Queen very naturally relied, was a man of singularly calm and earnest nature. He liked to form his opinions deliberately and slowly, and disliked expressing any opinion until his mind was well made up. Lord Palmerston, when Secretary of Foreign Affairs, was much in the habit of writing and answering despatches on the spur of the moment, and without consulting either the Queen or his colleagues. Palmerston complained of the long delays which took place on several occasions when, in matters of urgent importance, he waited to submit despatches to the Queen before sending them off. He was of opinion that during the memorable controversy on the Spanish marriages the interests of England were once in danger of being compromised by the delay thus forced upon him. He contended, too, that where the general policy of a State was clearly marked out and well known, it would have been idle to insist that a Foreign Secretary capable of performing the duties of his office should wait to submit for the inspection and approval of the Sovereign and his colleagues every scrap of paper he wrote on before it was allowed to leave England. If such precautions were needful, Lord Palmerston contended, it could only be because the person holding the office of Foreign Secretary was unfit for his post; and he ought, therefore, to be dismissed, and some better qualified man put in his place. Of course there is some obvious justice in this view of the case. It would perhaps have been unreasonable to expect that, at a time when the business of the Foreign Office had suddenly swelled to unprecedented magnitude, the same