Te death of Lady Salisbury has constrained the sympathy and' more than the normal attention of the British peoples to the personality of their working King. The average onlooker is so used to the burly frame and strong, massive head of the Premier as depicted in the comic and illustrated Press as to forget the fact that Lord Salisbury is now an old man, close on the Psalmist's " three sore years and ten." Although age cannot stale love and affection, it can and does impair our power of resistance to the pangs that ever attend the loss of our nearest and dearest. When the brilliant but poor Lord Robert Cecil in 1857 married Miss Alderson, the daughter of a Baron of the Exchequer and niece of the once celebrated Mrs. Opie, society thought the youth had blundered: but in this case wisdom was in alliance with love, and both lived to scoff at society's ift of prophecy. No man of his time jad truer helpmate or nobler companion, and when after the death of his elder brother in1865 and his father in 1868, the quondam Pressman succeeded to a great historic title and patrimony, his wife not only rose to the position but conferred honour on it. No woman of her day surpassed the deceased lady in the dignity, tact, and exquisite grace with which she presided at F. O. receptions, or with which she dispensed the princely hospitality of Hatficld. When the "fell serjeant" arrests those we love, the obtrusive sympathy of outsiders is an offence and even that of friends but " vacant chaff well meant for grain." Work is the only anodyne to grief; it is good that, in this the supreme sorrow of his life, Lord Salisbury has the distraction of a great public duty. If fellow-foehn, is to be shown at all, we hope it will issue in the restraint of party ran-cour and in the wise subordination of partisan to national interests in these troublous times.
Robert Cecil, third Marquis of Salisbury, has for half a century been one of the most striking individualities in English public life. It would be idle to deny that ancestry and family influence have been favourable to his ascent to power; these adjuncts can at least put young sprigs of nobility on the lower rungs of the political ladder, and pretty often push them a good way up. Granting this, it may yet be maintained that Lord Salisbury is a self-made man of rare mental endowment ini character. In his salad days he eked out the scanty allowance of a younger son by a fellowship at All Souls'; he became a' Saturday Reviewer when that organ of the acidulated was still a power in the land, and when brains, caustic wit, and a spirit of catholic unfairness were the sole claims for admission to its columns. He was for years a director in that poor man's benefactor, the Great Eastern Railway. When he entered Parliament for Stamford in 1853 he took up the rule of a keen, vitriolic critic and soon became a sort of patrician swashbuckler in opposing reform rational or sentimental. His oratory was a terror to friends and foes alike, for he cultivated epigram, gibe, and satire, qualities which like curses often come home to roost. Though prudent in act and sage in counsel, his Lordship has never quite freed himself from the vice of an unbridled biting tongue. We think he deserved Disracli's memorable castigation. Responsibility and age have, however, toned down his verbal asperity, while his prudence, sagacity, and now unrivalled experience as a Foreign Minister have not only ensured him the rare honour of three premierships, but have given him in large measure the confidence of his opponents in anxious times.
Great as Lord Salisbury's qualities are we do not esteem him among the greatest of our statesmen. No ruler in a free democracy like ours can ever reach the highest levels without imagination "and sympathy with the common folk. Very critical times are also necessary to give great flight to political genius. Cunsequently few have reached it—Alfred, Longshanks, Elizabeth, Cromwell, Shaftesbury,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.