as children, have seen some incident in the earlier romantic fight among the great Rajput chiefs for the hand of the lovely, ill-fated princess of Oodipore. In the mirror of imagination he caught the reflection of a vanishing world. Sir M. Durand well brings out the actuality of Lyall's poems, and shows how most of them were conceived out of real experience. A passing sight, for instance, of that Bulandshar road along which, twenty years earlier, the poet had ridden for his life, fired at by the way, inspired his throbbing ballad called 'Retrospection'; and the touching poem, After the Skirmish,' was born out of a jungle fight in Rohilcund in which he had taken part. As a rule, the men who act in stirring scenes cannot imaginatively write; and those who can write have never acted, and describe at second hand, or abstractedly. Toward the end of his Indian career Lyall saw, not actual fighting, but a British force occupying an outside country, or at least so much of it as they stood on, after recent fighting, when, as Foreign Secretary, he rode up to Kabul in the spring of 1880 and to Kandahar in the autumn. With this great exception, and the small exception of the Burmese campaign, profound peace brooded over India and its borders from the end of the Mutiny until Lyall went finally home in 1887.

Like many of the strongest believers in government, Lyall was rather pessimistic as to its ultimate results. Most men entomb themselves in the work of the day and concern themselves neither with past nor future. He did not belong to these, nor to that smaller company who are borne along by sure and enthusiastic faith in the permanence of the British Empire, or in the merits and advance of civilisation.'

'It may be' (he wrote in a well-known passage of 'Asiatic Studies') 'that Asia has always been too deep a quicksand for Europe to build upon it any lasting edifice of morals, politics, or religion; that the material conditions forbid any lasting improvement; that the English legions, like the Roman, will tramp across the Asiatic stage and disappear; and that the clouds of confusion and superstition will roll up again. Then, after all, the only abiding and immovable figure in the midst of the phantasmagoria will be that of the Hindu ascetic and sceptic, looking on at the incessant transformation of men into gods and gods into men.'

He expressed the same thought in his verse study of the Hindu ascetic watching the proclamation of the Empire at Delhi. Something in his own nature corresponded. In his official work he rather resembled the hero of his Theology in Extremis.' He was supported not by buoyant faith in the far end, but by his sense of duty and service; and he was driven by the demons who haunt the idle hours of some men, though not of all.

'Have we no play

To ease the anguish of a torturing hour?'

Shakespeare makes Duke Theseus say. Just as Lyall much undervalued his poetic work, partly because he had a high idea of the art and little leisure to devote to its cultivation, so, probably, he undervalued his own powers of patient official work. In one letter he said, ' We brothers and sisters [the Lyalls] always have a lurking belief that we are impostors, about to be found out.' In another he writes that he had the trick of getting tired with any business that wants application,' just as he was, he elsewhere wrote, 'the most restless of mortals, and could not live for a few months in a place without longing for a change.' At the height of his career, in 1879, he wrote to a sister, 'I do not make a first-class secretary; the real habit and strength of my mind is reflection, and when I have not the time to reflect and work out ideas, I become bothered and dispirited.' Once he wrote that 'success in life belongs to those who can master details without being mastered by them,' an axiom true both in literature and action. He may have been at some disadvantage where close, quick, business reasoning was required, and have thought that his own weakness lay in over-repulsion to details. He could not see them in a glorifying light. His was the disposition incidental to imaginative minds, keenly alive to the speed of life and the brevity of the time distributable among its diverse attractive objects. Men of this kind are less strenuous than the Gladstones and Roosevelts, but they see things in truer proportion and perspective, and, so far, they are better suited to be Viceroys or Prime Ministers.

A certain indecision, a hesitation, came out in Lyall in lesser matters where he was not guided by fixed principles. In writing, he said himself, he was inclined,

when he had time, like Flaubert, to torment himself too much in the choice of the exact word or turn of a phrase to express a shade of meaning. He had what his sister called in one of her letters 'the repugnance to decisive action that lies in the Lyall disposition." His imagination raised pictures, all too vivid, of the alternative course, and inclined him to discount evil before the evil came. At the age of twenty-nine he was already vainly vexing himself with thoughts of the 'terrible idle years which will follow my retirement.' He belonged rather to the type running through Shakespeare's plays, of which Hamlet is the chief example, than to that illustrated by Bolingbroke or Octavius Caesar. Arjuna in the Bhagavadjita is the Indian model of the former species. All deeply reflective and brooding minds entangled in the world's affairs must of necessity belong to it. They are finely touched by great issues and rise to high occasions, and can act more strongly and promptly than others on fixed principle, but they have not that leading by instinct which carries inferior intellects to the most soaring success in affairs. The biggest and boldest things in the sphere of pure action have been done not by the Scotch but by the less metaphysical and reflective English and Anglo-Irish.

Lyall was not a man of the earnest, official, solemn, getting-on kind, nor yet of the hearty, cheerful, buoyant species, but of mixed character, of 'humorous-melancholy mark.' His look and manner expressed this. In repose his look was rather sad, but it was changed and illumined with striking suddenness when he was amused or interested. A friend said of him in his youth, his languid grey eyes would flash up delightfully when you touched the humorous spring that was ever ready to respond to a joke.' Sir M. Durand quotes another portrait of him by an Anglo-Indian about 1867:

'His figure was slight and wiry. . . . He moved well and sat a horse well. His head was that of a Konkani Brahmin, his eyes were wonderful, and he had an indescribable charm which attracted men and women alike. His way of speaking was very courteous and, some thought, studied. Although he unbent with his intimates, he was generally dignified and

* 'Letters of Mary Sibylla Holland,' 3rd edition, Arnold, 1907, p. 191.

reserved. We would sometimes laugh and say he had the manners of an ambassador.'

Strangers who saw Lyall at some great London reception in later years might indeed easily have taken him for a foreign ambassador; and his gifts were really more diplomatic than administrative. He would certainly have had a distinguished career in the service of the Foreign Office; and in India, ably though he conducted the administration of the great region now called the United Provinces, perhaps as Agent in Rajputana, and afterwards as secretary to the foreign department, he moved on lines even more suited to his genius. Though his demeanour was courteous and his voice and eyes were habitually gentle and even caressing, there was also a reserved sternness in his look, voice and manner. The picture by Shannon gives this last side of him; the beautiful sketch by the Duchess of Rutland gives the pure sage and poet. Lord Morley, thanking him for a portrait, added, 'But people say they would not like to meet you in a lonely place in times of mutiny and civil disturbance; there is a "whiff of grapeshot" look about you.' When one saw Lyall moving in a London party, the face struck one as that of a man who had seen things more real, and knew the illusion of the scene.

'Fanciful shapes of a plastic earth,

These are the visions that weary the eye,
These may I 'scape by a luckier birth,

Musing, and fasting, and hoping to die.'

In the midst of pleasure, even while enjoying, some minds feel this. Surgit amari aliquid.' In Lyall's eyes was the arrière-pensée one can notice in those of soldiers who have seen much active service, in most sailors, and in experienced priests.

His temperament, strongly curbed, was emotional. He was easily moved to laughter; and, often, tears were not far from his eyes. Some old ballad of love and death would move him thus if simply sung, like Helen of Kirkconnell Lee,' or the 'rich voluptuous cadence' of 'Annie Laurie,'' passionate strain of a love-lorn story,' which he once heard, or imagined he heard, 'full and clear from the pacing band,' over the grave of a comrade fallen in a jungle skirmish. In some ways Lyall's temperament

resembled that of Chateaubriand immortalised in the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe.' No one had more deeply the Virgilian feeling of 'the sense of tears in mortal things.' 'It is no use looking back' (he wrote); 'most of us can hardly bear to do that steadily; it is like looking at a strong river carrying away and out of sight all the scenes and friends that one has cared for, and all the old visions and hopes.'

From the rooms and gardens in Kent of a sister who had lately died he wrote,' She has gone, borne down on the rolling flood of existence, and soon these shadows of her will also vanish into oblivion.' In mid-life he wrote, 'I cling like a pagan to youth and strength and the flying years.' 'Life,' he wrote in 1884, 'never waits; it flashes by and changes like a kaleidoscope.' His mind was of those that almost see the flight of time. This was why Horace, with his sense of the swift passing of delights and occasions, attracted him. He could have said with Marvell:

'But at my back I ever hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near.'

Solitude he disliked, as waste of the precious hour; and yet, perhaps, he soon wearied of company. His conversation was delightful and threw an original ray on every subject. His mind moved rather by successive intuitions than by logical sequences. He was a cautious dispenser of information. He used to say that complete knowledge of a subject by any one of a company killed all discussion and talk, unless it were skilfully managed. He rarely pressed argument far, but he had a way, disconcerting to the rash dogmatist, of suggesting a simpler and more human explanation of a phenomenon as an alternative to one more general and abstract. He had always his critics or detractors. What man of worth has not? And there was in him a certain reserve and aloofness which prevents universal popularity, but those who best knew him loved him, and he was a loyal and generous friend and kinsSir M. Durand quotes a happily expressed tribute to his memory by a friend, Lady Lyttelton.

man.

'Though' (she says) 'he seemed to bring all the wisdom of the ages to illuminate anything he discussed, however small and human, however fundamental and insoluble, yet there was an