notabilities, go down to posterity as having been specially connected with any one episode or event of supreme historical importance; but, when those of the present generation who regarded him with esteem and affection have passed away, he will still deserve an important niche in the Temple of Fame as a thinker who thoroughly understood the East, and who probably did more than any of his contemporaries or predecessors to make his countrymen understand and sympathise with the views held by the many millions in India whose destinies are committed to their charge. His experience and special mental equipment eminently fitted him to perform the task he took in hand. England, albeit a prolific mother of great men in every department of thought and action, has not produced many Lyalls.

II.

CROMER.

ON a tablet dedicated to Sir Alfred Lyall's memory in Canterbury Cathedral, near the home of his boyhood and the place of his burial, it is engraved that he united in a rare degree the gifts of statesman, thinker, and poet.' This is true. A man in whom are not unequally blended the active, reflective, and imaginative faculties, will probably not attain to the highest glory in action, philosophy, or poetry, but he will excel in interest men entirely absorbed in any of the three. Marcus Aurelius, to take an instance on the large scale, might have been a greater emperor had he not been a philosopher, or a greater philosopher had he not been an emperor, but his combination of philosophy and command makes his remembrance live while other emperors are but names, and other philosophers are in the land where all things are forgotten. English and foreign visitors, who enjoyed the hospitality of Government House at Allahabad or Lucknow between 1881 and 1887, found in their host a man who was essentially a poet and a thinker, and yet, as Lieutenant-Governor, conducted the administration of a population as large as that of the United Kingdom. A Roman pro-consul of this kind may now and then have ruled in Asia Minor, or Syria, or Egypt. Perhaps Felix, in Syria, the Felix so much interested in Paul of Tarsus, was such a man. Alfred Lyall's cousin, the Countess

Martinengo Cesaresco, has written of him, in a recent and charming book," that it

'would be difficult to imagine a closer counterpart of the Roman public servant who could both think and do-scholar, poet, soldier on occasion, tried man of action, even the trend of his mind seemed to agree with the resemblance; he had a shade of that antique melancholy which sprang from a conviction of the worth of this fleeting life, not from discontent with it. He was' (the Countess adds) 'the only man I have ever known who gave me the idea that he would have been entirely at home in the Roman world.'

Sir Mortimer Durand, in his judiciously composed Memoir, has brought out different sides of this rare and manifold character by his own memories and by selections from letters. Lyall's letters are so vivid and characterful that one regrets they could not be given more fully than the limits of a biography allow; and it is to be hoped that his family will some day publish a collection. English literature is none too rich in letters that at once treat of events, are full of ideas, and are stamped with an intimate personal quality.

Lyall came, on both sides, of families lately domiciled in Kent and Sussex, whose progenitors had dwelt for centuries upon the rough Scottish - Northumberland borders; and on these stocks had recently been engrafted blood of the Highland Stewarts of Appin, the Scottish Comyns, and the Tschudis of Switzerland. Men of mixed race have, like Mr Kipling's 'Kim,' 'two sides to their heads,' can enter into the feelings of other races, and see themselves moving and acting in the fleeting show, better, perhaps, than can men of less mingled breed. From his Border and Highland ancestry may have descended the restlessness of disposition and craving for varied and exciting action which Lyall so often remarked, as a family trait, in himself, and his biographer remarks in him. It is a temper which may drive some men to destruction and others to renown, according to circumstances or the absence or presence of a saving grace. Hence, sometimes, the very diverse fates of brothers and sisters in the same family.

'Outdoor Life in the Greek and Roman Poets,' Macmillan, 1911,

p. 208.

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Intellectually, Lyall was a firm believer in strong government; and this made him an opponent of Irish Home Rule and of the grant to women of a share in sovereign political power. Hobbes, in this respect, was his favourite philosopher; belief in government was, perhaps, his most intimate conviction. A man was likely to hold this creed whose almost earliest Indian experience was that of shooting with his own hand a rebel Sepoy, and then riding for his life while his bungalow blazed behind him; who went through nearly two years of those 'perilous shindies'; who saw anarchy rampant and universal within a week of the first outbreak, and had, as a boy of twenty-two, to send strings of homicides and plunderers to the gallows, and superintend their executions, though not without 'queer thoughts about the divine right of revenge.' Yet he had a sentimental lurking sympathy, hereditary perhaps, with free anarchy against settled government. Never again did he enjoy life so keenly as in that same Mutiny time. As the country settled down again into dull order and official routine, he often felt poignant regret. In 1863 he wrote home, there is nothing to do or write about, and I continually find myself looking back to the old disturbing times as to the only piece of romance I am ever to enjoy.' He knew, sympathetically, the feelings expressed in some of his poems, the ennui, in tame settled times, of the old Pindari freebooter and the Rajput Chief of the old school.' In such poems as that on the Rajput rebels, the Amir's Soliloquy,' and 'Joab,' where he interprets Old Testament life by Indian experience, he expressed the feelings of men overborne by advancing civilisation.

Walter Scott in his boyhood talked with men who had, like some of Lyall's ancestors, been out in the "'45"' and had seen the last traces of clan autonomy vanish in the Highlands. The Lyalls were admirably brought up on Scott's poems and novels and on old Border ballads; and Alfred Lyall in his earlier Indian years found himself in a position like that of Scott in his youth. The 'Pax Britannica' had descended so swiftly upon a feudal medieval society that, in the Central Provinces and Rajputana, he could still talk with old men who had fought as youths in the last Mahratta war, or might even,

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as children, have seen some incident in the earlier romantic fight among the great Rajput chiefs for the hand of the lovely, ill-fated princess of Oodipore. In the mirror of imagination he caught the reflection of a vanishing world. Sir M. Durand well brings out the actuality of Lyall's poems, and shows how most of them were conceived out of real experience. A passing sight, for instance, of that Bulandshar road along which, twenty years earlier, the poet had ridden for his life, fired at by the way, inspired his throbbing ballad called 'Retrospection'; and the touching poem, After the Skirmish,' was born out of a jungle fight in Rohilcund in which he had taken part. As a rule, the men who act in stirring scenes cannot imaginatively write; and those who can write have never acted, and describe at second hand, or abstractedly. Toward the end of his Indian career Lyall saw, not actual fighting, but a British force occupying an outside country, or at least so much of it as they stood on, after recent fighting, when, as Foreign Secretary, he rode up to Kabul in the spring of 1880 and to Kandahar in the autumn. With this great exception, and the small exception of the Burmese campaign, profound peace brooded over India and its borders from the end of the Mutiny until Lyall went finally home in 1887.

Like many of the strongest believers in government, Lyall was rather pessimistic as to its ultimate results. Most men entomb themselves in the work of the day and concern themselves neither with past nor future. He did not belong to these, nor to that smaller company who are borne along by sure and enthusiastic faith in the permanence of the British Empire, or in the merits and advance of civilisation.'

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'It may be' (he wrote in a well-known passage of 'Asiatic Studies') that Asia has always been too deep a quicksand for Europe to build upon it any lasting edifice of morals, politics, or religion; that the material conditions forbid any lasting improvement; that the English legions, like the Roman, will tramp across the Asiatic stage and disappear; and that the clouds of confusion and superstition will roll up again. Then, after all, the only abiding and immovable figure in the midst of the phantasmagoria will be that of the Hindu ascetic and sceptic, looking on at the incessant transformation of men into gods and gods into men.'

He expressed the same thought in his verse study of the Hindu ascetic watching the proclamation of the Empire at Delhi. Something in his own nature corresponded. In his official work he rather resembled the hero of his Theology in Extremis.' He was supported not by buoyant faith in the far end, but by his sense of duty and service; and he was driven by the demons who haunt the idle hours of some men, though not of all. 'Have we no play

To ease the anguish of a torturing hour?'

Shakespeare makes Duke Theseus say. Just as Lyall much undervalued his poetic work, partly because he had a high idea of the art and little leisure to devote to its cultivation, so, probably, he undervalued his own powers of patient official work. In one letter he said, 'We brothers and sisters [the Lyalls] always have a lurking belief that we are impostors, about to be found out.' In another he writes that he had the trick of getting tired with any business that wants application,' just as he was, he elsewhere wrote, 'the most restless of mortals, and could not live for a few months in a place without longing for a change.' At the height of his career, in 1879, he wrote to a sister, 'I do not make a first-class secretary; the real habit and strength of my mind is reflection, and when I have not the time to reflect and work out ideas, I become bothered and dispirited.' Once he wrote that success in life belongs to those who can master details without being mastered by them,' an axiom true both in literature and action. He may have been at some disadvantage where close, quick, business reasoning was required, and have thought that his own weakness lay in over-repulsion to details. He could not see them in a glorifying light. His was the disposition incidental to imaginative minds, keenly alive to the speed of life and the brevity of the time distributable among its diverse attractive objects. Men of this kind are less strenuous than the Gladstones and Roosevelts, but they see things in truer proportion and perspective, and, so far, they are better suited to be Viceroys or Prime Ministers.

A certain indecision, a hesitation, came out in Lyall in lesser matters where he was not guided by fixed principles. In writing, he said himself, he was inclined,