one has once taken a hand in the world's affairs, literature is like
rowing in a picturesque reach of the Thames after a bout in the open
sea." Yet, in the case of Lyall, literature was not a matter of mere
academic interest. "His incessant study was history." He thought, with
Lord Acton, that an historical student should be "a politician with his
face turned backwards." His mind was eminently objective. He was for
ever seeking to know the causes of things; and though far too observant
to push to extreme lengths analogies between the past and the present,
he nevertheless sought, notably in the history of Imperial Rome, for any
facts or commentaries gleaned from ancient times which might be of
service to the modern empire of which he was so justly proud, and in the
foundation of which the splendid service of which he was an illustrious
member had played so conspicuous a part. "I wonder," he wrote in 1901,
"how far the Roman Empire profited by high education."

Lyall was by nature a poet. Sir Mortimer Durand says, truly enough, that
his volume of verses, "if not great poetry, as some hold, was yet true
poetry." Poetic expressions, in fact, bubbled up in his mind almost
unconsciously in dealing with every incident of his life. Lord Tennyson
tells us in his _Memoir_ that one evening, when his father and mother
were rowing across the Solent, they saw a heron. His father described
this incident in the following language: "One dark heron flew over the
sea, backed by a daffodil sky." Similarly, Lyall, writing with the
enthusiasm of a young father for his firstborn, said: "The child has
eyes like the fish-pools of Heshbon, with wondrous depth of intelligent
gaze." But, though a poet, it would be a great error to suppose that
Lyall was an idealist, if by that term is meant one who, after a
platonic fashion, indulges in ideas which are wholly visionary and
unpractical. He had, indeed, ideals. No man of his imagination and
mental calibre could be without them. But they were ideals based on a