Prime Ministers and Some Others: A Book of Reminiscences

tual ghosts of former greatness, yet still touched by that human infirmity which prefers praise to blame. It will behove me to walk warily

r of the two Houses of Parliament; so I may be fairly said to have the Parliamentary tradition in my blood. But I cannot profess to have taken any intelligent interest in

ther distorted feet-"each foot, to describe it mathematically, was a four-sided irregular figure"-his strong and comfortable seat on the old white hack which carried him daily to the House of Commons. L

often heard Palmerston speak. I remember his abrupt, jerky, rather "bow-wow"-like style, full of "hums" and "hahs"; and the sort of good-te

ance of a speech; so, for a frank estimate of Palmerston's policy at the period which I am d

parties laugh at one another; the Tories at the Liberals, by his defeating all Liberal measures; the Liberals at the Tories, by their consciousness of getting everything that is to be got in Church and State; an

erhaps because it did not end with his death-is the estimation in which he was h

s born and bred a Tory, and from 1807 to 1830 held office in Tory Administrations. The remaining thirty-five years of his life he spent, for the most part, in Whig Administrations, but a Whig he was not. The one thing in the world which he loved supremely was power, and, as long as this was secured, he did

orror. His bearing towards the Queen, who abhorred him-not without good reason-was considered to be lamentably lacking in that ceremonious respect for the Crown which the Whigs always maintained even when they were dethroning Kings. Disraeli likened his manner to that of "a favourite footman on easy terms with his mistress," and one who was in official relations with him wrote: "He

took a pacirc;té; afterwards he was helped to two very greasy-looking entrées; he then despatched a plate of roast mutton; there then appeared before him the largest, and to my mind the hardest, slice of ham that ever figured on the table of a nobleman, yet it disappeared just in time to answer the enquiry of the butler, 'Snipe or pheasant, my lord?' He instantly replied, 'Pheasant,' thus completing his ninth dish of meat at that meal.

Afterwards Lo

to the statesman who, as Lord John Russell, had been her Prime Minister twenty years before, and who, as Earl Russell, had been for the last six years Foreign Secretary in Palmerston

his uncle's nephew." He has made a much better job of his task than I have made of mine; and yet I have never been indifferent to the fact that I