_"Quarterly Review," July 1913_


After reading and admiring Sir Mortimer Durand's life of Alfred Lyall, I
am tempted to exclaim in the words of Shenstone's exquisite inscription,
which has always seemed to me about the best thing that Shenstone ever
wrote, "Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse!"
He was one of my oldest and best of friends. More than this, although
our characters differed widely, and although I should never for a moment
think of rating my intellectual attainments on a par with his, at the
same time I may say that in the course of a long life I do not think
that I have ever been brought in contact with any one with whom I found
myself in more thorough community of opinion and sentiment upon the
sundry and manifold questions which excited our common interest. He was
a strong Unionist, a strong Free Trader, and a strong anti-suffragist.
I am, for good or evil, all these things. He was a sincere Liberal in
the non-party sense of that very elastic word. So was I. That is to say,
there was a time when we both thought ourselves good mid-Victorian
Liberals--a school of politicians whose ideas have now been swept into
the limbo of forgotten things, the only surviving principles of that age
being apparently those associated with a faint and somewhat fantastic
cult of the primrose. In 1866 he wrote to his sister--and I cannot but
smile on reading the letter--"I am more and more Radical every year";
and he expressed regret that circumstances did not permit of his setting
up as "a fierce demagogue" in England. I could have conscientiously
written in much the same spirit at the same period, but it has not taken
me nearly half a century to discover that two persons more unfitted by
nature and temperament to be "fierce demagogues" than Alfred Lyall and
myself were probably never born. In respect to the Indian political
questions which were current during his day--such as the controversy