than once, acted on the hint contained in Gifford's letter to Frere, cited above; even though his Quarterly compositions have not become as classical as the "Loves of the Triangles," or other contributions to the Anti-Jacobin, and the rhymed dispatches, e.g., to the English ambassador at the Hague, wherewith he enlivened the routine of official work. Lord Salisbury is neither the first premier nor the first foreign secretary whom an historic magazine has counted among its staff; he is certainly the earliest instance of the head of a government, who at an earlier epoch was among the most assiduous and effective of daily journalists in the era of a cheap press. Mr. Disraeli's connection with a weekly paper named the Representative, was long believed to have been a fact until, by Dr. Smiles, in his narrative of the House of Murray, it was shown circumstantially to be a fiction. Lord Palmerston inspired many articles on foreign affairs in the Morning Post, but only in a vicarious sense can he be spoken of as having written them. Mr. John Bright went nearer to the work of a daily newspaper in his relations with the old Morning Star. Mr. John Morley, at a much later date, edited that broadsheet, as well as a still surviving evening print. But though Mr. Bright in his time made and unmade ministries, though Mr. Morley has been essential to a Cabinet, the former never was, the latter has not yet become, primarily responsible for the government of an empire.

Many of those now actively at work on the London press can, over an interval of three or four decades, look back upon the youthful figure of the then Lord Robert Cecil walking down Fleet Street to interview his editor on the topic for treatment by his pen. Not a few statesmen within the memory of the present generation have affected ignorance of that portion of our social and industrial polity which lies east of Temple Bar, even up to the day

1 These are the well-known lines addressed to Lord Bagot, and beginning: "In matters of commerce, the fault of the Dutch."

when, combining responsibility with power, they have addressed their fellow-countrymen at the Guildhall banquets. The statesman who is now Marquis of Salisbury has always signally profited by his period of strenuous acquaintance with the working world of unfashionable London. These are the notorious facts of his personal history which, with others, have conspired to make the present head of the house of Cecil an object of such interest to all classes of Englishmen. The Elizabethan founder of his family piqued himself on keeping his finger on the pulse of the national life. The same destiny which gave to Cecil's latter-day descendant a father high, like the first Cecil, in his sovereign's confidence, ordained that the conditions of Robert Cecil's existence, should almost from boyhood, familiarize him with the work-a-day life of the English middle classes. Distant though it is, many could be found who have not yet forgotten the sagacity and shrewdness once displayed by the premier of the future in his efforts to organize for the public good, and to save from the attacks of professional "wreckers," the private efforts of industrial enterprise. Under the shadows which seemed to fall upon his earliest years, the countrymen of the erewhile Lord Robert Cecil have, in sympathy, passed. The combination of practical common sense with devotion to chivalrous ideals; the sound judgment and clear head, equally available, as might be wanted, for the routine of a great railway or the affairs of a world-wide empire; the cheerful toleration with which personal prejudices have been encountered and removed; the fidelity in action to the old Periclean maxim of so dealing with an opponent as not to disqualify him from hereafter proving an ally; these are some of the varied attributes which have gradually won the popular appreciation for, or deepened the general interest in, the statesman who now "holds the key of power." Mr. Gladstone, notwithstanding the business antecedents of his family, and the fervor of that commercial confidence which

he has in the past enjoyed, has not reflected in his own career so many aspects of the nineteenth-century life of England as the premier whose "patrician arrogance" consists in his presuming to have inherited a marquisate.

It has not yet been imputed to Lord Salisbury as a sin that he received his education at the same school, at the same university, and at the same. House as Mr. Gladstone himself. These are the only periods of Lord Salisbury's career to which the epithets of "patrician," "feudal," or "exclusive" can be applied. By degrees the English public has come to understand these truths, and to distinguish between the imaginary Salisbury as caricatured by party prejudice or private antipathy, and the real Salisbury as identified by the successive episodes of his career, or by the personal impression he has left upon the public chronicle of the age. Seldom has there been run a course every stage of which is marked so conspicuously by the note of modernity. In this respect the Cecil of Queen Victoria has been, and is, a man of his day, in the same sense as that distinction belonged to the Cecil of Queen Elizabeth. If, when his undergraduateship was over, Lord Robert Cecil was not absolutely the first to illustrate the latter-day interpretation of the old-world phrase, "the grand tour," the antipodean dominions of England can have received but few future premiers as their guests when Lord Robert Cecil first visited Australasia. There was, therefore, a certain propriety in the fact that the young nobleman who began life by exploring the latest acquisitions of the queen should continue it by service on the newest or "fourth estate of the realm."

Later events were to place Lord Salisbury on the one hand, and the fourteenth, or fifteenth, Earl of Derby on the other, in relations of mutual opposition. The intellectual habits of Lord Salisbury have long resembled less those of that Earl of Derby who was once his Cabinet chief than the representative of the same peerage who was so long his colleague. A sim

was

ilarly scientific cast of mind has characterized Derby XV. and Salisbury III. "The brilliant chief irregularly great” (Derby XIV.) amused himself, and delighted the public, by "doing" the Homeric poems into blank verse, only less sonorous than the original hexameters. No such literary recreations are known to have beguiled either of the two foreign secretaries, the fifteenth Derby or his successor the reigning Salisbury. The fifteenth of the Knowsley Earls never seen to more advantage than in his application of scientific canons to political phenomena. He would highly have commended the resource which in more recent days his erewhile associate has found in the laboratory. To many there will seem something like a prophetic parable in the circumstance that Lord Robert Cecil's maiden speech in the House of Commons, April 7th, 1854, so enthusiastically praised by Mr. Gladstone, was in opposition to Lord John Russell's Oxford University Bill, based, as that measure was, on the Commission of 1852. Between this incident and the policy which, five-and-twenty years later, identified Lord Salisbury with an investigation into academic revenues, and a transformation of their employment considerably in advance of the previous measure, there is no real inconsistency. During the passage from early youth to manly maturity, Robert Cecil had realized dangers threatening his university, more serious, as it seemed to him, than those arising from the diversion of ancient endowments to modern ends. The most serious and beneficent minds of the age were, as it appeared to him, occupied with the conditions and the properties shown in the visible order of nature. At Oxford vast opportunities were wasted, great energies were weakened or abused, by the petulant polemics of party strife, or by the enervating issues of a rococo dilettantism. The new Oxford legislation which divided fellowships into two categories, and which has been identified popularly with the endowment of research, was the bold and patriotic attempt of

This independence of party shibboleths was the key-note struck by Lord Robert Cecil, at St. Stephen's, about the period of his resistance to Lord John Russell's Oxford reforms. After his maiden speech on this subject, the most notable of his earlier parliamentary efforts was his criticism of the Vienna negotiations during the Crimean War epoch, on a motion of Mr. Disraeli's, and still more his condemnation of the clause which fifteen years later proved to be untenable, and which denied to Russia free access to the sea. In the same sense the speaker had already written, not only in the Quarterly Review, but in the weekly and daily organs, his past connection with which belongs to the history of journalism. Within a year or two of the attention fixed by his article on foreign affairs, his speeches on the same topics began to be parliamentary events. These have often, since they were first delivered, reminded his intelligent critics not less of his statesmanlike foresight in these comparatively early days, than of his native indisposition mechanically to execute the mandate of party chiefs.

Thus, in 1856, he at first refused to support, as Mr. Disraeli had united with the Radicals in supporting, Mr. Roebuck's vote of censure on the government of 1855, for the mismanage ment of the Crimean War, and met the censure vote with the previous question. Again, in opposition to many of his political friends, Lord Robert Cecil, in the rearrangements of the Balkan Peninsula, advocated the same principles in the treatment of Moldavia and Wallachia, which twenty years later he was to have an opportunity of practically applying with regard to Bulgaria.

In no particular has Lord Salisbury reflected more faithfully the honest habitudes and the reasonable prejudices of his countrymen than in his studied avoidance of cant. English men may deserve all the compliments paid by Lord Beaconsfield to their emo

which they prize sentiment is that it shall not degenerate into sentimentalism. As a writer for a journal, the object of whose promoters was to apply a purely intellectual standard to all questions of the day, Lord Robert Cecil contracted a style of writing, which, as in the case of Sir William Harcourt, Mr. John Morley, and the late Professor Freeman, has colored his oral diction as well, and which is vaguely described as cynical. Cynicism, as a synonym for the utterance of inconvenient truths on necessary occasions, is certainly not an un-English attribute. The cynicism that, as in the case of the man now under consideration, has proved compatible with practical solicitude for his humbler fellows long before philanthropy was a sentimental vogue, is not likely to disqualify him for English confidence. The combination of detachment from outworn superstitions, or of indifference to effete shibboleths of party, with loyalty to the traditional principles of the Tory connection which has distinguished the Lord Salisbury whom the present generation knows, explains in his earliest and best days the attraction of Lord Randolph Churchill to Lord Salisbury as his political chief. One consistent idea can be traced through the whole of Randolph Churchill's often brilliant, if sometimes incalculable, course. It was the same notion, that from the time of his contribution to the "Oxford Essays," 1856, on parliamentary reform,' Robert Cecil held, to the effect that party government as once conceived of, and to some extent existing, in England, is in process of yielding to government by fusion and to opposition by groups. The unprejudiced union for the sake of a national idea, of patriotic politicians on both sides, was the object never lost sight of by Churchill. That it is the goal whither events are gradually bringing us, was Robert Cecil's underlying conviction, when he wrote his Oxford essay, to say nothing of a good many 1 This point is clearly apprehended and instructively elaborated by Mr. Traill.