person whose portrait I sketch. The Secretary in the Foreign
Department is a scholar and a man of letters by instinct. Whatever he
writes is something more than correct and precise--it is impressed
with the sweep and cadence of the sea; it is rhythmical, it is
sonorous.]

[But let us return to the prisoner in the dock] I have said that the
Secretary is clever, scornful, jocose, imperfectly sinful, and nimble
with his pen. I shall only add that he has succeeded in catching the
tone of the Imperial Bumbledom; and then I shall have finished my
defence.

This tone is an affectation of æsthetic and literary sympathies,
combined with a proud disdain of everything Indian and Anglo-Indian.

The flotsam and jetsam of advanced European thought are eagerly sought
and treasured up. "The New Republic" and "The Epic of Hades" are on
every drawing-room table. One must speak of nothing but the latest
doings at the Gaiety, the pictures of the last Academy, the ripest
outcome of scepticism in the _Nineteenth Century_, or the aftermath in
the _Fortnightly_. If I were to talk to our Secretariat man about the
harvest prospects of the Deckan, the beauty of the Himalayan scenery,
or the book I have just published in Calcutta about the Rent Law, he
would stare at me with feigned surprise and horror.

"When he thinks of his own native land,
In a moment he seems to be there;
But, alas! Ali Baba at hand
Soon hurries him back to despair."