from which he couldn't recover for some time, and which did one good to hear. After this I said to him he had been so very kind about all that matter which vexed me so yesterday. "The advantage of Monarchy is unity," Lord Melbourne said, "which is a little spoilt by two people-but that must be contended against." "I've no doubt," he continued, "that is what kept Queen Elizabeth from marrying; but you mustn't think that I advocate that; I think that's not right, it's unnatural, and nothing's right that's unnatural." I said I was certain that Albert wouldn't interfere. 66 "Oh! I haven't the slightest doubt that he won't interfere," he replied warmly; and I added that that was the very reason why he might run into the other extreme. "My letter may have appeared dictating," he said, which I said was not the case. "That's my way of writing; I wrote so to you and did to the King." I said I was sure it would all do very well in a little time. "You understand it all," he said; "you have always lived here"; and I had had three years' experience, I said. "But you had just the same capability for affairs," Lord Melbourne said, "when you came to the Throne, as you have now-you were just as able; I'm for making people of age much sooner." He again went into an amazing fit of laughter about Dr Lum Qua. Talked . . . also about children learning, as he said, everything from the nurses and servants-which he talked of for some time. "I'm sure, all I have learnt that's useful was from the nursery maid," which made us laugh so. Talked of the H. of C. and the Provision. "I can't think there can be any real difficulty," he said; "one can't tell; a Legislative Assembly is as capricious as a woman." And here is Lord Melbourne on public instruction: 'We then had a great deal of fun with Miss Murray about Education, and I only wish I could repeat all Lord Melbourne said. "You had better try to do no good," he said, "and then you will get into no scrapes." "All that inter-meddling produces crime," he said. But we said if people didn't know what was wrong they couldn't help committing crime. "I don't believe there is anybody who doesn't know what is wrong and right," he said. He doubts education will ever do any good. We asked did he derive no benefit from education? "I derived no morality from it," he replied funnily; "that I derived at an earlier date”' (ii, 148). History would be more intelligible if we possessed more diaries like this one, containing authentic portraiture; and to excuse its author on the score of youth or otherwise is beside the mark. For one girl who can so transfer to her paper the tone and rhythm of living speech, and suggest the richness and variety of its content and the bulk of the speaker behind, there are any number who can learn to turn a neat sentence, or to say the right thing about the poets. We need go no further than this Journal, which closed before she was twenty-one, for proof that intellectual power was an essential ingredient in Queen Victoria's character. The quality which has been defined as intellectual integrity was hers by nature and by cultivation, and through the honesty of her vision we are enabled to see without any intervening obstacle the character and daily habits of her Minister and can gauge the value of what she gained from contact with his mind. His culture, tolerance and sympathetic humour he could not give her, for these things were outside the scope of her nature, as her 'vein of iron' was outside the scope of his. Nor perhaps did he possess that which, in the last resort, would compel her assent. Strong natures like hers need something more to control them than belief in what is tranquil and stable. But for the introduction to the special duties of the task before her no one more fit could have been found. Public affairs, it has been said, are most safely engaged in by those who have some dislike for them and are under no illusion as to what they really are. Government, as taught by Lord Melbourne, was no glorious game, but a business like any other, imperative and often tiresome or painful, so that a person must be severely trained to it. It's in the lot of your station, you must prepare yourself,' was his reply when the Queen assured him she could never bear up against her difficulties; and the same note recurs whenever her private inclinations run counter to her duty. He would not allow her to think that Windsor disagreed with her health. 'You have fancies about it. Your Majesty has a fixed idea.' Upon the Government's decision to begin the parliamentary session of 1840 at an unusually early date, the Queen declared that she would not open it in person. 'I wouldn't, I said, and always wished to get out of that. . . . "Oh! you will do it," he said earnestly, with his good kind face expressing anxiety I should; "not to do so would not be right when it is necessary for public affairs." ... His attitude was as towards one bound up with the fortunes of the country, and therefore debarred from indulging her own tastes and prejudices. Think of the scrape you'd get us all into,' was the final argument with which he overcame her refusal to be vaccinated. The pressure he put upon her to attend church in a public manner on the eve of her marriage was in the circumstances a trifle inconsiderate, but he justified it on the ground that 'it's of great importance that you should get over your dislike of going amongst everybody.' In the same way she was to get over her dislike of Sir Robert Peel. 'You must not give way to personal dislikes too much,' nor to partisanship and the political bitterness which sees only bad motives in opponents; 'I don't like you to have those feelings.' 'I don't see much difference. I think they are very much like the others,' he said, urging her to invite the great people on the Tory side. Such counsels must have come convincingly from a politician who could tell a colleague that, in his view, the great fault of the present time was that men hated each other so damnably; for my part I love them all.' However little at that time the Queen was able to acquire it herself, there is no doubt that this rather unusual political temper deeply impressed her; '& truly angelic disposition and worthy of eternal record,' is the comment following upon a conversation in which Melbourne had spoken generously of Brougham. ... Popularity, Melbourne taught the Queen, was very well if you did not make too much of it; but, Whig and aristocrat though he was, he laid great stress upon public feeling and the general conviction. It was an essential part of his political creed and sprang from the instinctive respect for individual rights in every class which made him jealous for the liberties of the poor and inspired those retorts to philanthropists, 'if you'd only have the goodness to leave them alone,' which the Queen noted down with so much amusement. The lessons which the young Sovereign found most hard to learn were probably those in connexion with the laws and customs of her country. The illustration afforded by her conflict with Ministers in the summer of 1839 is notorious, and perhaps its importance has been exaggerated. Melbourne characteristically blamed him self for the results of action which at the time he does not appear to have discouraged, but latest authority finds the Tories in the wrong rather than the Queen. She proved at least that she did not suffer from the disability to say 'No'; which is, said Melbourne, 'a very bad thing for a public man.' In her well-known subsequent reference to this affair the Queen did not say that, were it to be done again, she would have acted differently, but that she might have done so; and only the constitutional prig will wish that she had. The altercations in Parliament over Prince Albert's provision called forth something of the same imperious desire for power in its substance; and her interviews with Lord Melbourne show much 'pertinacity' on one side and some gentle reminders on the other. These are our laws '-he does not know that they are right, but there they are, and convenient at times. Even in social matters, 'in this country all should go by law and precedent'; otherwise a person is liable to make every sort of mistake. Law and precedent and the feeling of the people'whether the country is up to it. . . whether the feeling of the country is such'-these were the constitutional props he set up on either side of her. How much of his teaching was realised or deliberately adopted by the Queen, it is impossible to tell from her Journal. She made no summary or analysis of what she had learned from him; she stated simply that she owed him more than she could ever repay. The extent of her debt must be measured by the character of her reign. It was not for nothing that the ruler who became so identified with the life of the nation that the words Queen and Country ceased to have a separate significance, learned her first lesson in government from that one of her Ministers who, if not the greatest, was the most English of them all. A true public servant' she was called, after her death, by another great Englishman; and one may suppose that this was the title which Queen Victoria, in the height of her power, would have carried with most pride, and that Melbourne would most have desired for her. ELEANOR CECIL. Art. 10.-DISRAELI: THE FIRST TWO PHASES. 1912. 'WE may as well finish Cæsar's story because we never know until a man's end whether the play has been tragedy or comedy.' So writes Lord Morley, provoked by the consideration of Cæsar Borgia's career to a reflection which might nearly as well be suggested by that of his greater but scarcely more familiar namesake. Pascal, looking not at the things that are seen but at the things that are not seen, has, indeed, struck a deeper truth: 'Le dernier acte est toujours sanglant.' But if we make a background of the flaming ramparts of the world, each human life, in spite of some by-play and cross division, can doubtless be brought at last under one or other of the two accepted categories. We watch the rich humours and large ironies of terrestrial drama, wondering whether the close of the piece will make for laughter or tears. The very limitations of the actors only enhance the piquancy of the performance. They are as ignorant as ourselves of what is in store for them. In their perplexity they sometimes come to draw their words from temperament and their gestures from habit, and are themselves the sport of circumstance. The most solemn plausibilities ultimately disclose the finest comedy; tragedy, complete and overwhelming, is found to be the real tenour of a life that had seemed wreathed in smiles and crowned with roses. We cannot tell until the end. Even then we cannot always be sure, for there are cryptic cases where a man's character and intention are left hanging in dispute. Shall we, for example, ever quite know our own minds about Disraeli? Will the end of the biography resolve the vital issues that obtrude themselves from the first? The question whether it was tragedy or comedy turns, at least to a considerable extent, upon his attitude towards human things. No mind ever moved more swiftly from the sublime to the ridiculous; did his vast ambition ever outstrip the keen pursuit of his subtle, relentless irony? What are we to say of his work? Was he a great constructive statesman, filled |