[Footnote 39:  History of English Poetry, iii., 394.]

[Footnote 40:  Hipp. 331.]

[Footnote 41:  “Great Zeus, why didst thou, to man’s sorrow, put woman, evil counterfeit, to dwell where shines the sun?  If thou wert minded that the human race should multiply, it was not from women they should have drawn their stock.”—­Hipp. 616-19.]

[Footnote 42:  Decline and Fall, v. 185.]

[Footnote 43:  Book ii. c. 11.]

[Footnote 44:  Eighteenth Century Literature, vol. vi. p. 331.]

[Footnote 45:  “By us he fell, he died, and we will bury him.”]

[Footnote 46:  Il. xxiii. 116.]

[Footnote 47:  Od. xi. 733.]

“THE QUARTERLY REVIEW”

III

SIR ALFRED LYALL

"Quarterly Review,” July 1913

After reading and admiring Sir Mortimer Durand’s life of Alfred Lyall, I am tempted to exclaim in the words of Shenstone’s exquisite inscription, which has always seemed to me about the best thing that Shenstone ever wrote, “Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse!” He was one of my oldest and best of friends.  More than this, although our characters differed widely, and although I should never for a moment think of rating my intellectual attainments on a par with his, at the same time I may say that in the course of a long life I do not think that I have ever been brought in contact with any one with whom I found myself in more thorough community of opinion and sentiment upon the sundry and manifold questions which excited our common interest.  He was a strong Unionist, a strong Free Trader, and a strong anti-suffragist.  I am, for good or evil, all these things.  He was a sincere Liberal in the non-party sense of that very elastic word.  So was I. That is to say, there was a time when we both thought ourselves good mid-Victorian Liberals—­a school of politicians whose ideas have now been swept into the limbo of forgotten things, the only surviving principles of that age being apparently those associated with a faint and somewhat fantastic cult of the primrose.  In 1866 he wrote to his sister—­and I cannot but smile on reading the letter—­“I am more and more Radical every year”; and he expressed regret that circumstances did not permit of his setting up as “a fierce demagogue” in England.  I could have conscientiously written in much the same spirit at the same period, but it has not taken me nearly half a century to discover that two persons more unfitted by nature and temperament to be “fierce demagogues” than Alfred Lyall and myself were probably never born.  In respect to the Indian political questions which were current during his day—­such as the controversy between the Lawrentian and “Forward” schools of frontier policy, the Curzon-Kitchener episode, and the adaptation of Western reforms to meet the growing requirements to which education has given birth—­his views, although perhaps rather in my opinion unduly pessimistic and desponding, were generally identical with my own.