"He may be driven into going as he is." suggested the Admiral.

Macmillan's Magazine.

The two volumes of letters which Lady Betty Balfour has put together from the private correspondence of her father, the late Lord Lytton, cannot fail to appeal to a large body of readers. The letters themselves are full of interest; they deal, in a masterly and brilliant way, with a vast variety of topics; and they are set before the reader with an admirable skill and an unerring sympathy. Lady Betty Balfour has succeeded not only in the difficult task of selecting and arranging a mass of material whose very richness was embarrassing; she has invested the whole with a living unity, and breathed into it a spirit which is the true commentary of the life which the letters reveal. For there is something more in these volumes than a succession of good things; there is also what is present in every collection of letters worthy of notice-the portrait of a man. To open the book is to strike at once into the orbit of a new personality. One feels, when one has read it, that one has almost made a friend.

A remarkable range of interests, and a wide catholicity of tastes-these are perhaps the most obvious characteristics of Lord Lytton's correspondence. The letters flow on, naturally and copiously, into a multitude of unbidden channels; they pass without an effort from poetry to politics, from hypnotism to Wagner, from a string of anec

*"Personal and Literary Letters of Robert, First Earl of Lytton," edited by Lady Betty Balfour. In two volumes. Longmans, Green & Co., 1906. 21s. net.

dotes to reflections upon the destiny of man. Nor is their versatility merely of the dilettante kind; it is the versatility of an enthusiast-of one of those rare enthusiasts whose province is the whole world. Humani nihil a me alienum puto: the old sentence, so often thrown out at random, would have been a peculiarly fitting motto for these letters. And the variety of their subject matter is reflected in the diversity of the correspondents to whom they are addressed. Few men of his generation could have had so various an acquaintance as Lord Lytton. He discussed literature with the Brownings, he wrote state papers to Lord Salisbury, he speculated on life and death with Theodore Gomperz, he exchanged epigrams with Lady Dorothy Nevill, he gossiped with Mr. John Morley, and some of his most charming letters are those addressed, when he was Viceroy of India, to the late Queen. He had, too, a genius for friendship, so that his acquaintances very soon became his friends. One of his most intimate correspondents was Sir James Stephen, whom he met for the first time on the eve of his departure to India, and with whom he immediately struck up a lasting friendship. "India," says Lady Betty, "was of course the subject of their talk. Lytton was not more eager to hear than Stephen to tell all that he knew of the conditions of that great empire"; and the two men "did not part till they had spent half the night walking each other home. too absorbed in their subject to feel fatigue or the wish to

separate." Stephen went home to write for his new friend a pamphlet on the government of India, which Lord Lytton declared had given him "the master key to the magnificent system of Indian administration." During the four succeeding years Stephen wrote to the Viceroy by every mail. The friendship is remarkable for something more than its swift beginning: it was a mingling of opposites such as it is a rare delight to think upon. Sir James Stephen was eminently unromantic. His qualities were those of solidity and force; he preponderated with a character of formidable grandeur, with a massive and rugged intellectual sanity, a colossal commonsense. The contrast is complete between this monolithic nature and the mercurial temperament of Lord Lytton, with his ardent imagination, his easy brilliance, his passionate sympathy, his taste for the elaborate and the colored and the rococo. Such characteristics offended some of his stiff countrymen; they could not tolerate a man to whom conventions were "incomprehensible things," who felt at home "in the pure light air of foreign life," whose dress "was original, as nearly all about him," and who was not afraid to express his feelings in public. But the great lawyer judged differently. "I never knew a man," he wrote after Lord Lytton's death, "towards whom I felt so warmly and to whom I owed so much. . . . I shall always regard it as one of the most fortunate circumstances of my life that I was for many years one of his most intimate friends."

The story which the letters tell has much of the attractiveness of a romance. But it is one of those romances which state and amplify a problem, only to leave one, at last. still in doubt. Was the hero a statesman of genius whose true faculties the world misunderstood? Or was he a

poet, diverted by the pressure of circumstances from a great achievement in art? Different readers will answer the question differently; but, in either case, the reply must involve an admission of failure or perhaps rather of defeat. Lord Lytton's rule in India was at the time the object of unparalleled obloquy, and is now almost forgotten; his poetry blossomed early and blossomed late, but it never bore the fruit which brings immortality. Thus, behind all the sparkling movement of the letters, one may perceive a sense of melancholy, which at moments deepens into the actual expression of gloom. "Whether I look forward or backward, an immense despair always comes over me. If I were youngerbut it is all too late now; I know that as a poet I shall never do or be what I feel that I might have done and been." It is difficult to speculate on unfulfilled possibilities; but one may well believe that a writer who trembled so often on the verge of greatness might. if fortune had so willed it, have crossed the perilous line. As it is, one is constantly wondering why Lytton's verse never does quite "soar above the Aonian mount." Was Mrs. Browning right when she told her friend, "You sympathize too much"? Perhaps his father came nearer the mark in his protests to John Forster. "He is doing that which the richest mind and the richest soil cannot do long with impunity. He is always taking white crops off his glebe. He never allows poetry to lie fallow." In truth, diamonds are not made in a day; and, though a Shakespeare or a Coleridge may give you, in a moment, a handful of jewels, who knows how many years of superhuman concentration may have gone to the making of them? One may imagine, at Lord Lytton's poetical christening, a bad fairy gliding in among the rest. The good ones were lavish with their gifts of charm, and dis

tinction, and imagination, and humor, and feeling; and then, after them all, came the witch with her deceitful present: "Yes, my dear, and may you always write with ease!" The child grew up endowed with a fatal facility. He could put his thoughts into verse as easily as he could pick pebbles out of a brook. The pebbles, wet and glowing in his hand, were beautiful to look upon; and then in a little while, unaccountably, they seemed to be common stones after all. In this world, a glamor caught too easily fades too soon; it turns out to be an illusion. And an illusion is the one thing that a poet should never have.

A brief note from Disraeli, offering the Viceroyalty of India, dramatically shattered Lord Lytton's dreams of ease and poetry. He accepted the great office with an acute sense of all that it involved. "Oh, the changethe awful change!" he exclaims to Forster; and he assured Disraeli "that if, with the certainty of leaving my life behind me in India, I had a reasonable chance of also leaving there a reputation comparable to Lord Mayo's, I would still, without a moment's hesitation. embrace the high destiny you place within my grasp." This is not the place for a discussion of the still controversial questions surrounding Lord Lytton's Indian rule. But no reference to the man or to his life could be even superficially complete without some notice of his political capacity. There is enough in the present volumes-there is far more in Lady Betty Balfour's previous work (Lord Lytton's Indian Administration) — to make it clear to the most careless reader that the popular conception of Lord Lytton as a minor poet masquerading as a Viceroy, who scribbled verses when he should have been composing dispatches, is a glaring travesty of the facts. The antithesis, however, is delightful, like all anthitheses; and,

in this case, it is supported by that curious English prejudice which has always-since the days when Rochester libelled the most astute of monarchsrefused to allow that a witty man could be a wise one. The ignorance, too, with which the ordinary Englishman habitually seasons his judgments on Indian affairs has done much to obscure the true character of Lytton's statesmanship. Besides the Afghan

war, there is one event, and one alone, which "the man in the street" connects with Lytton's Indian administration— the proclamation of the Queen as Empress of India. Important as that event was, it is little short of ludicrous that it should be the one remembered act of the administration which gave free trade to India, which accomplished the great reform of the equalization of the inland duties on salt, which finally established the grand and far-reaching principle of Decentralization, and which instituted the Famine Insurance Fund. The truth is that Lytton's internal administration must take rank as one of the most pregnant and beneficent known in India since the great Governor-Generalship of Dalhousie. It is a curious irony that the Viceroy who carried, in the face of the opposition of a majority of his Council, the measure which opened the door to free trade in India, should labor under the imputation of political flippancy; but, after all, he was a Viceroy who had written love-poems, who wore unusual waistcoats, and who smoked cigarettes. Whether his Afghan policy did or did not deserve the virulent denunciation which it received is a question which does not concern us here; what does concern us is the obvious fact that Lytton's financial and administrative work was the work of a statesman endowed with no mean share of courage, of wisdom, of energy, and of determination. Unfortunately his opponents failed to

notice the distinction. In the heat of party, he was declared by one politician to be "everything which a Viceroy ought not to be"; by a second to be guilty of "financial dishonesty, trickery, treachery, tyranny and cruelty"; and by a third to have shown "a deliberate desire to shed blood, systematic fraud, violence and inveracity of the vilest kind." Lytton, though it is clear that he suffered keenly, never let his dignity desert him. To a friend, who had associated himself with these attacks, he wrote: "I confess I have sometimes fancied that had our positions been reversed-you placed in mine, and I in yours-my confidence in your character and intelligence would have sufficed to satisfy my judgment that there was more hunesty and wisdom in your action than in the denunciation of it by persons who could not be fully acquainted with the causes and conditions of it. But no man dare say of himself how he would feel, or what he would do, in a position he has never occupied." Such words as these have something in them of the old Roman æquanimitas-they might have come from the pen of a Pliny or a Trajan, calm in their great government and their mighty toil.

And it was in the same spirit that, when the time came for relinquishing his task, Lord Lytton wrote to Stephen:

"Were you ever in the Forest of Arden? I have always fancied it must be the most charming place in the world, more especially in the summerThe Independent Review.

time. I shall shortly be on my way to it, I think, and I hasten to give you rendezvous at the court of the Banished Duke. If you meet our friend, the melancholy Jaques, greet him from me most lovingly, and tell himDucdame!--that all the fools are now in the circle and he need pipe to them no more. . . . And tell your own great heart, dear and good friend, that the joy I take from the prospect of seeing you is more precious to me than all that Providence has taken from the fancy prospect I had painted on the blank wall of the Future of bequeathing to India the supremacy of Central Asia and the revenues of a first-class Power."

These are fine words; and, in their wit, their fancy, their ornate elaboration, their half-hidden sadness, their noble wealth of feeling, they are supremely characteristic of their author. One is reminded of the beautiful portrait by Watts, where the rich bright colors the auburn hair and beard, the blue eyes, the turquoise on the fingerblend so wonderfully into the mysteri ous melancholy of the face. It is easy to talk of defeat and failure. But if one turns back from the portrait to the book, and then back again from the book to the portrait, if one considers those records of achievement and of thought, one begins to wonder whether such things can be measured by such terms. One seems to discern in them something less unfortunate than failure, and something. perchance, more splendid than success. G. L. Strachey.

in his absence, by the Lord Chancellor, is always awaited with considerable curiosity, and even, at times, with some apprehension. In it the legisla

tive programme of the Government is foreshadowed.

To call the Speech the "King's Speech" is a polite fiction; aye, though the Lord Chancellor, before he reads it, in the absence of the King, is careful to say-following an ancient custom, the meaning of which changes in the Constitution have long since deprived of its old significance-that it is in "his Majesty's own words." The Sovereign has practically now no part in its original composition. It is really the Speech of the Cabinet. But though in these days of democratic government the "Speech from the Throne" is in truth the expression of the views of the Ministers, it bodied forth the King's will when that will was long ago the law of the land. Parliament could not then assemble until the Sovereign thought fit to summon it. When it did meet, the Sovereign in his Speech fixed and declared the business to be discharged, and the representatives of the people had to confine themselves strictly to the work thus prescribed for them at the Royal pleasure. This prerogative is still theoretically vested in the Crown. Parliament can be summoned only by the Sovereign, but since the Revolution the Sovereign acts solely on the advice of the Ministers. Parliament cannot proceed with business until the Speech from the Throne has been delivered; but since the Revolution, also, neither House as we shall see later-is bound to confine itself to the "causes of summons" set forth in the Speech.

The first draft of the Speech is usually written by the Prime Minister. Of course. the Cabinet first decides what Bills are to be submitted to Parliament. but the general contents of the Speech, and certainly its phrase ology, may be ascribed almost exclusively to the head of the Government. The draft is submitted to a full meeting of the Cabinet, where it is dis

cussed point by point; and probably undergoes some alteration in the way of a qualification here and an addition there. Then a copy of the Speech Is sent to the King for his approval.

In

That the "King's Speech" is the Speech of the Ministers has been admitted by the Sovereign even in the years following close on the institution of Constitutional Monarchy. the reign of George II. a too enterprising printer was prosecuted for publishing a spurious Speech on the eve of the opening of Parliament. "I hope," said the King, "the fellow's punishment will be light, for I have read both Speeches, the real and the false, and, so far as I understand them, I like the printer's speech better than my own." "Well, Lord Chancellor," said George III. to Lord Eldon, as he was leaving the House of Lords after . opening Parliament, "Did I deliver the Speech well?" "Very well indeed, sir," was the reply. "I'm surprised at that," said the King. "for there was nothing in it." The voice was the voice of the King, but the words were the words of his Ministers. Still, the King must surely be allowed some latitude of opinion in regard to the King's Speech beyond a formal expression of approval. The truth is that if he chooses he may suggest alterations, and no doubt insist upon them, provided no modification in the policy of his advisers is implied. He probably softens an expression now and then, or adds a gracious sentence. Did not George III. insert in his first Speech the famous words, "Born and bred in this country, I glory in the name of Briton!" He was the first English-born King since the Revolution. George I. could not speak a word of English. We are told that he and his Prime Minister, Walpole, discussed affairs of State in bad Latin. George

II. publicly proclaimed himself a foreigner every time he read the Speech