The paradox of his political career was no less curious.  By temperament an aristocrat, by conviction a conservative, he came to power as the leader of the popular party, the party of change.  He had profoundly disliked the Reform Bill, which he had only accepted at last as a necessary evil; and the Reform Bill lay at the root of the very existence, of the very meaning, of his government.  He was far too sceptical to believe in progress of any kind.  Things were best as they were or rather, they were least bad.  “You’d better try to do no good,” was one of his dictums, “and then you’ll get into no scrapes.”  Education at best was futile; education of the poor was positively dangerous.  The factory children?  “Oh, if you’d only have the goodness to leave them alone!” Free Trade was a delusion; the ballot was nonsense; and there was no such thing as a democracy.

Nevertheless, he was not a reactionary; he was simply an opportunist.  The whole duty of government, he said, was “to prevent crime and to preserve contracts.”  All one could really hope to do was to carry on.  He himself carried on in a remarkable manner—­with perpetual compromises, with fluctuations and contradictions, with every kind of weakness, and yet with shrewdness, with gentleness, even with conscientiousness, and a light and airy mastery of men and of events.  He conducted the transactions of business with extraordinary nonchalance.  Important persons, ushered up for some grave interview, found him in a towselled bed, littered with books and papers, or vaguely shaving in a dressing-room; but, when they went downstairs again, they would realise that somehow or other they had been pumped.  When he had to receive a deputation, he could hardly ever do so with becoming gravity.  The worthy delegates of the tallow-chandlers, or the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, were distressed and mortified when, in the midst of their speeches, the Prime Minister became absorbed in blowing a feather, or suddenly cracked an unseemly joke.  How could they have guessed that he had spent the night before diligently getting up the details of their case?  He hated patronage and the making of appointments—­a feeling rare in Ministers.  “As for the Bishops,” he burst out, “I positively believe they die to vex me.”  But when at last the appointment was made, it was made with keen discrimination.  His colleagues observed another symptom—­was it of his irresponsibility or his wisdom?  He went to sleep in the Cabinet.

Probably, if he had been born a little earlier, he would have been a simpler and a happier man.  As it was, he was a child of the eighteenth century whose lot was cast in a new, difficult, unsympathetic age.  He was an autumn rose.  With all his gracious amenity, his humour, his happy-go-lucky ways, a deep disquietude possessed him.  A sentimental cynic, a sceptical believer, he was restless and melancholy at heart.  Above all, he could never harden himself; those sensitive petals shivered in every wind.  Whatever else he might be, one thing was certain:  Lord Melbourne was always human, supremely human—­too human, perhaps.