be admitted that the dangers to which a public man was exposed, in those days of conflicting tyranny and sedition, were of a most serious kind.  He could not bear discomfort, bodily or mental.  His lamentations, when in the course of his diplomatic journeys he was put a little out of his way, and forced, in the vulgar phrase, to rough it, are quite amusing.  He talks of riding a day or two on a bad Westphalian road, of sleeping on straw for one night, of travelling in winter when the snow lay on the ground, as if he had gone on an expedition to the North Pole or to the source of the Nile.  This kind of valetudinarian effeminacy, this habit of coddling himself, appears in all parts of his conduct.  He loved fame, but not with the love of an exalted and generous mind.  He loved it as an end, not at all as a means; as a personal luxury, not at all as an instrument of advantage to others.  He scraped it together and treasured it up with a timid and niggardly thrift; and never employed the hoard in any enterprise, however virtuous and useful, in which there was hazard of losing one particle.  No wonder if such a person did little or nothing which deserves positive blame.  But much more than this may justly be demanded of a man possessed of such abilities, and placed in such a situation.  Had Temple been brought before Dante’s infernal tribunal, he would not have been condemned to the deeper recesses of the abyss.  He would not have been boiled with Dundee in the crimson pool of Bulicame, or hurled with Danby into the seething pitch of Malebolge, or congealed with Churchill in the eternal ice of Giudecca; but he would perhaps have been placed in the dark vestibule next to the shade of that inglorious pontiff

“Che fece per viltate il gran rifiuto.”

Of course a man is not bound to be a politician any more than he is bound to be a soldier; and there are perfectly honourable ways of quitting both politics and the military profession.  But neither in the one way of life, nor in the other, is any man entitled to take all the sweet and leave all the sour.  A man who belongs to the army only in time of peace, who appears at reviews in Hyde Park, escorts the Sovereign with the utmost valour and fidelity to and from the House of Lords, and retires as soon as he thinks it likely that he may be ordered on an expedition, is justly thought to have disgraced himself.  Some portion of the censure due to, such a holiday-soldier may justly fall on the mere holiday-politician, who flinches from his duties as soon as those duties become difficult and disagreeable, that is to say, as soon as it becomes peculiarly important that he should resolutely perform them.