Balfour's Chief-Secretaryship. As I look back upon them--those five
dramatic years culminating first in the Parnell Commission, and then in
Parnell's tragic downfall and death, I see everything grouped round Mr.
Balfour. From the moment when, in succession to Sir Michael Hicks Beach,
Mr. Balfour took over the Chief-Secretaryship, his sudden and swift
development seemed to me the most interesting thing in politics. We had
first met him, as I have said, on a week-end visit to the Talbots at
Oxford. It was then a question whether his health would stand the rough
and tumble of politics. I recollect he came down late and looked far
from robust. We traveled up to London with him, and he was reading Mr.
Green's _Prolegomena to Ethics_, which, if I remember right, he was to
review for _Mind_.

He was then a member of the Fourth Party, and engaged--though in a
rather detached fashion--in those endless raids and excursions against the
"Goats"--i.e., the bearded veterans of his own party, Sir Stafford
Northcote in particular, of which Lord Randolph was the leader. But
compared to Lord Randolph he had made no Parliamentary mark. One thought
of him as the metaphysician, the lover of music, the delightful
companion, always, I feel now, in looking back, with a prevailing
consciousness of something reserved and potential in him, which gave a
peculiar importance and value to his judgments of men and things. He was
a leading figure among "The Souls," and I remember some delightful
evenings in his company before 1886, when the conversation was entirely
literary or musical.

Then, with the Chief-Secretaryship there appeared a new Arthur Balfour.
The courage, the resource, the never-failing wit and mastery with which
he fought the Irish members in Parliament, put down outrage in Ireland,
and at the same time laid the foundation in a hundred directions of that