reason of this probably was that the Greek of the Stoic Emperor is crabbed and corrupt, and that Lord Iddesleigh had a scholarly dislike of translations. Now there is a medium between Emerson's belief that Plato is sufficiently Attic in the prose of Bohn, on one side, and a total rejection of "cribs" on the other. The New Testament we are mostly content to read in English, and probably there is no disgrace in preferring for everyday use the English of Mr Long and the anonymous translators of the eighteenth century to the Greek of Marcus Aurelius. But Lord Iddesleigh appears to have been of another mind, and scholars will be the last to condemn him unless they have written translations.

In the spirit of his own Edinburgh lecture, he re"nounced the idea of being a bookman like "our old giants of learning, of whose powers of reading we hear so much, and of whose powers of writing we see remaining so many substantial proofs." Only while reading ten or twelve hours a day for his class, could he emulate the toil of Buchanan or Casaubon. But in that very period of solid study he read more novels than at any other time in his life. The man who worked through the 'Arabian Nights' during the evenings of the week when he was "in the Schools," gave proof of that mental activity which finds repose in variety of interest. But this is not desultory reading in any invidious sense.

There are people who will and must read, who, as Scott when a child defined the dilettanti, "will and must know everything." There are others to whom all reading is a

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These two classes will never underLord Iddesleigh was an excellent specimen of the first class. He read all round him; and his memory, which nearly equalled Macaulay's, enabled him to remember most of what he read. His reading was not, and could not be, "indolent reading": it flowed not idly and wastefully through his mind, but left a golden deposit of knowledge, and of bright and apt illustrations. He could amuse and instruct his Edinburgh undergraduates with ancient instances from Seneca and Lucian, as easily as with anecdotes from Mr Pepys his Diary. He shared Mr Lowell's and Mr Matthew Arnold's distrust of new books, "which, like new bread, bring one to mental dyspepsia." Probably Lord Iddesleigh will remain one of the last of English statesmen who knew the literature of Greece and Rome widely and well. New times, new manners, Soon there will be no scholars but scholars by profession. The ancients, it seemed to our fathers, keep a school of taste and knowledge, because they reached the heights and depths of human wisdom by paths not ours, and in lives lived under very different conditions. To know the literature of Greece and Rome is to be wise with a threefold experience, the experience of many ages, of varying civilisations. This knowledge, too, should teach discretion and limit in style. Lord Iddesleigh usually kept in his pocket a small volume of one of the Greek or Roman writers. Like Cicero or Macaulay, he might have said that they were his companions by night, by day, in town and in the country. Perhaps from this constant

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companionship with the best minds and the best styles (the more impressive because foreign and old), he learned to shun fine writing, fine speaking, eloquence for the sake of sound, and parliamentary wit, which is apt to turn to waggery. It was his opinion that "funny speeches are not difficult to make, but it is difficult to make them and retain the respect of the hearers." The plain manner of Lord Iddesleigh, in writing and in speaking, seems to have been derived, then, from that sense of appropriateness which the classics ought to teach, though often they fail to teach it. In all his many letters he never makes a needless point; he never aims at literary brilliance; he never attempts display; he is never fantastic. They are often more like a woman's letters, in their fulness of domestic news, than like the compositions of a wit at rest, and yet constrained by habit or inclination to be diverting. This unusual sobriety may be partly due to a perpetual familiarity with what the classics teach, and what many of their assiduous readers fail to learn. Some of the most florid and "Asiatic" writers of our age are those to whom Greek is most familiar. They miss, with all their ornament, what Lord Iddesleigh did not miss, the great and difficult lessons of Greece, the lessons of appropriateness, of moderation, and of dignity. Nor is it easy to see whence, save from the classics of the world, these lessons are to be learned by politicians in our age, which neglects the past, and is deafened, like the Black Knight at the siege of Front de Bouf's castle, by the noise of the blows it deals at every bulwark of antique renown. To be

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sure it might be replied that moderation and dignity were not exactly the merits of Cicero, nor often of Demosthenes and Eschines, in their political harangues. We need not all be politicians; and those who are or who are not may still retire on Lord Iddesleigh's favourites, Sophocles and Shakespeare, Molière and Lucian, Rabelais and Sir Walter Scott.

In fiction, Lord Iddesleigh knew Sir Walter above all others. Perhaps he too, like a living critic, thought 'Count Robert of Paris' better than any novel that has been written since. Almost the last exercise of his pen, in the days which preceded his death, was to jot down the heads of an Edinburgh lecture on the parallel characters in Sir Walter Scott. Almost the last book, perhaps the very last book, which he read with pleasure, was a volume that contains more of the spirit of Scott than any other in English fiction, Mr R. L. Stevenson's Kidnapped.' Lord Iddesleigh was a very warm admirer of Mr Dickens, and he did his best, but unavailingly, to make Mr Disraeli appreciate the fun of 'Pickwick.' On the other hand, Lord Iddesleigh had no sympathy with the works of Mr Thackeray. Nature has made many people Dickensites or Thackerayans, as we are all born either Aristotelians or Platonists, and they are few to whom our two great humorists shine like double stars, Gemini in the skies of literature.

It is no inconsiderable pleasure to a biographer, separated from the topic of his study by so many differences of life, interest, and habit, to find that in literature, at

least, he and his hero are at one. If Scott was Lord Iddesleigh's favourite novelist, Molière was his favourite comedian. By "favourite " one means the comedian whom he chose out of all the world for his own delight, because Shakespeare is imposed upon all of us, no less by patriotism than by natural bent of taste. But in Shakespeare's

comedies, the poetry, after all, outshines the humour and the wit. Molière's wit, let his most ardent English friends confess, has little to dread from the competition of his poetry. As Lord Iddesleigh said, "Comedy has been defined as the bienséance of society," or rather as the humorous representation of that bienséance. Of the world's three chief comedians this narrow definition almost excludes Shakespeare, quite excludes Aristophanes, and is only filled by Molière.

A very fair idea of Lord Iddesleigh's literary taste and of his humour may be gathered from a correspondence between him and Sir John Lubbock in 1885. Sir John Lubbock was preparing his famed list of one hundred books, though why any one should select the best hundred, more than the best eleven, or the best thirty books, it is hard to conjecture. His list, at all events, he submitted to the criticism of Lord Iddesleigh, who decidedly preferred Theocritus (omitted) to Wake's Apostolic Fathers,' which was included by Sir John Lubbock. He confessed, as we have seen, his ignorance of Marcus Aurelius, of Wake, of Confucius, of the Indian epics, and of the Shahnameh.' He complained, on the other hand, that Livy, Tacitus, Lucretius, Ovid, Juvenal, and Chaucer