serve at a pinch. But we much fear that in these volumes he allows himself to overrate his own political importance; and the public will not be the more disposed to take him at his own estimate, that he takes no trouble to conceal his contempt for others whose capacity no one would ever think of placing on a level with his own. When, however, sufficient deductions have been made for egotism, imagination, and inaccuracy, Mr Greville's concluding volumes may be skimmed over both with interest and amusement.

The new volumes of the Memoirs open during the last days of Lord Derby's first ministry, with an account of the depressed condition of the Whigs, whose fortunes had been brought to a very low ebb by the dissensions between Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell. The Conservative Government, weakened by the Peelites, was in no condition to carry on long; but the difficulties in the way of constructing a Whig Cabinet were by no means confined to the Premiership, but extended almost to the whole personnel of the Cabinet. On October 22d, 1852, Mr Greville writes: "Lord John Russell declares he will take no office but that of Premier, considering any other a degradation.

Palmerston professes personal regard for Lord John, but declares he will never again serve under him, though he would with him." Lord Lansdowne was the only leader who presented a possibility of uniting the discordant elements. But Lord Lansdowne's health was then uncertain, and as the Peelites had coalesced with the Whigs immediately the fate of Lord Derby's Government was sealed, Lord Derby advised the Queen to send for Lord Aberdeen as well as Lord Lansdowne. Mr Greville states,

on the authority of the Duke of Bedford, that his advice was confidentially asked by the Queen on this occasion, and that his Grace had recommended her Majesty to send for both Lansdowne and Aberdeen, and had said that "it was evident Lord John Russell could not make a Government, and that he himself was conscious of it." Thus was formed the illstarred Coalition Administration, which satisfied no party unless the Peelites, who secured the lion's share of office, disappointed the Whigs, on whom it had to depend for existence, and blundered on through two of the most disastrous years in our annals. From his intimacy with Lord Clarendon, who took the seals of the Foreign Office after Lord John Russell's short term, Mr Greville seems to have considered himself a species of terrestrial providence to the Coalition Government, endeavouring to patch up its dissensions and prevent the constantly threatening danger of explosion from some one or other of the recalcitrant Ministers. Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell were the most difficult subjects to deal with, and the reader will require to exercise caution regarding what Mr Greville says of both these statesmen. Thus, on December 23, 1852, Mr Greville writes of an interview between Lords Aberdeen and Palmerston, relative to the latter joining the Coalition Cabinet: "Palmerston replied that he had no hostile feeling towards him, but they had for so many years been in strong opposition to each other that the public would never understand his taking office in Aberdeen's Government, and he was too old to expose himself to such misconceptions. And so they parted on ostensibly very friendly terms, which will

largely in the earlier volumes, we have not much; and what little there is, can scarcely be said to be new. The funeral eulogia which he pronounces over his friends, as one by one they precede him to the grave, do not lose in candid asperity even as his own turn approaches. Take, for instance, his summing up of the character of his friend Frederic Lamb, Lord Beauvale and Melbourne, in vol. i. pp. 34-36. Here is his entry regarding the death of Croker :

:

"While Macaulay is thus ascending to the House of Peers, his old enemy and rival Croker has descended to the grave, very noiselessly and almost without observation, for he had been for some time so withdrawn from the world that he was nearly forgotten. He had lived to see all his predictions of ruin and disaster to the country completely falsified. He continued till the last year or two to exhale his bitterness and spite in the columns of the Quarterly Review,' but at last the Editor (who had long been sick of his contributions) contrived to get rid of him. I never lived in any intimacy with him, and seldom met him in society, but he certainly occupied a high place among the second-rate men of his time; he had very considerable talents, great industry, with much information and a retentive memory. He spoke in Parliament with considerable force, and in society his long acquaintance with the world and with public affairs, and his store of general knowledge, made him entertaining, though he was too overbearing to be agreeable. He was particularly disliked by Macaulay, who never lost an opportunity of venting his antipathy by attacks upon him."

It may be observed in mitigation of these remarks, that Croker, had he survived him, would certainly have said worse things of Greville, and said them much better, too; for, so far as rancour was concerned, there was not a pin to choose between the reviewer of the 'Quarterly' and him of the 'Edinburgh.'

A more finished sketch is that devoted to the Princess Lieven, a remarkable figure in politics and society from the days of the Regency downwards. As Mr Greville was intimately acquainted with this lady, and was for some years her constant correspondent, we may accept his estimate of her as being as correct as it is graphic :

She knew a vast deal of the world and its history during the half-century she had lived and played a part in it,

but she was not a woman of much

reading, and probably at no time had been very highly or extremely educated; but her excessive cleverness and her finesse d'esprit supplied the want of education, and there was one book with which her mind was perpetually nourished by reading it over and over again. This was the Letters of Madame de Sévigné,' and to the constant study of those unrivalled letters she was no doubt considerably indebted for her own epistolary eminence, and for her admirable style of writing, not, however, that her style and Madame de Sévigné's were at all alike. She had not (in her letters at least) the variety, the abundance, or the abandon of the great Frenchwoman, but she was more terse and epigrammatic, and she had the same graphic power and faculty of conveying much matter in few words.

"Nothing could exceed the charm of her conversation, or her grace, ease, and tact in society. She had a nice and accurate judgment, and an exquisite taste in the choice of her associates and friends; but though taking an ardent pleasure in agreeableness, and peculiarly susceptible of being bored, she was not fastidious, full of politeness and good-breeding, and possessed the faculty of turning every one to account, and eliciting something either of entertainment or information from the least important of her acquaintance. It has been the vulgar and ignorant press, to stigmafashion here, and the habit of the tise Madame de Lieven as a mischievous intriguer, who was constantly occupied in schemes and designs hostile to the interests of our country. I

firmly believe such charges to be utterly unfounded. She had resided for above twenty years, the happiest of her life, in England, and had imbibed a deep attachment to the country, where she had formed many more intimacies and friendships than she possessed anywhere else; and to the last day of her life she continued to cherish the remembrance of her past connection, to cultivate the society of English people, and to evince without disguise her predilection for their country. She had never lived much in Russia; her connection with it had been completely dissolved, and all she retained of it was a respectful attachment to the Imperial family, together with certain sympathies and feelings of loyalty for her native country and her sovereign which it would have been unnatural and discreditable to disavow. Her well-known correspondence with the Imperial Court was only caused by the natural anxiety of those great persons to be kept au courant of Social and political affairs by such an accomplished correspondent, but I do not believe she was ever employed by them in any business or any political design; on the contrary, she was rather distrusted and out of favour with them, on account of her being so denaturalised, and for her ardent af fection for England and the English. Russia was the country of her birth,

France the country of her adopted abode, but England was the country of her predilection. With this cosmopolitan character shedreaded everything which might produce hostile collision between any two of these countries. She was greatly annoyed when the question of the Spanish marriages embittered the relations between France and England, but infinitely more so at the Turkish quarrel, and the war which it produced. Those who fulminated against her intrigues were, as I believe, provoked at the efforts she made, so far as she had any power or influence, to bring about the restoration of peace, an unpardonable offence in the eyes of all who were bent on the continuation of the war. She lived to see

peace restored, and closed her eyes almost at the moment that the last seal was put to it by the Conference of Paris. Her last illness was sudden and short. Her health had always been delicate, and she was very nervous about herself. An attack of bronchitis brought on fever, which rapidly consumed her strength, and brought her, fully conscious, within sight of death. That consummation, which at a distance she had always dreaded, she saw arrive with perfect calmness and resignation, and all the virtues and qualities for which the smallest credit was given her seem to have shone forth with unexpected lustre on her deathbed."

Mr Greville resigned the Clerkship of Council in May 1859; but if the story told by Lord Malmesbury in his Memoirs of an ExMinister' is true, he had ceased his attendance for more than a year before--since the time, in fact, when the second Derby Government took office; and, says Lord Malmesbury, he did not conceal his omitting to do so on purpose. When Lord Derby's attention was called to this fact, he said he had not observed his absence, as he never knew whether it was John or Thomas who answered the bell.'"'

In justice to Lord Derby, it must be said that Mr Greville was only being paid in coin. Absurd as Mr Greville's pretensions were to pose as a political personage, they were yet sufficiently pronounced to justify the reminder that party politics did not lie within the legitimate sphere. If Mr Greville heard the story, as in all likelihood some candid friend would be good enough to inform him of it, we have an explanation of the rancour with which the Conservative statesman is assailed throughout these volumes.

Mr Robert Buchanan's Look round Literature' will be allowed

1887.

to be a tolerably wide one, when we say that it begins with Prometheus and ends with "the writer who calls herself Ouida." "From Æschylus to Victor Hugo" is the title of the first chapter, or rather of the first paper; for it is again a collection of serial articles which we have here made into a volume, after a precedent which we have already taken the liberty to remark upon, and which is equally undesirable, we think, whether it come from the hands of the comparatively little or the comparatively great. Which of these categories Mr Buchanan belongs to is a question which perhaps will be answered differently by himself and by the world. But fortunately there is not much room for doubt as to the estimate which his contemporaries at least will form. He is one of those writers who, like the Ancient Mariner, are recognised at once by those whose weird it is to listen to them. The reader who likes this sort of thing, for instance, will recognise it at once :

"The scene is Mount Caucasus, a craggy desert, silent, inaccessible; the clouds come and go silently above. The Euxine glimmers faintly far away. All the eye beholds is solemn, terrible, colossal, shadowed with the mystery of some awful event. Three gigantic shapes rise, leading a fourth

in chains."

The reader predestined would no doubt wish us to go on: the unselect most probably would-not. And we will not; but the volume is very accessible, and what those three gigantic shapes are about to do can be discovered there. It is very curious and wonderful, however, to our own unenlightened faculties, that Mr Buchanan should have chosen as his pendant to the picture of Prometheus that of one of Victor Hugo's least remarkable

heroes-Gilliat, in the Travailleurs de la Mer.' Why? we are bound to admit we cannot tell. There is a rock in the one case and there is a rock in the other, just as there was a river in Macedon and one in Monmouth: but that is all. The names don't even begin with the same letter. Poor Gilliat, in dumb relinquishment of that struggle with fate which he had carried on in many (no doubt) fabulous and impossible ways, is neither a Titan nor a conqueror, but a very woful, humble mortal, most easily vanquished by the contrariety of things. Mr Buchanan discusses a great many other matters, favouring us with "A Note on Lucretius,' and also a more elaborate study, as became the superior importance of the subject, on Sydney Dobell; but perhaps his leading effort is "A Talk with George Eliot," who received him, dressed in a plainly-cut, tight-fitting dress of blue cashmere, fastened at the throat with a cameo brooch." George Lewes was the only other member of the party, and these two notable persons are treated by their interviewer as is usual in such narratives. The great novelist was to Mr Buchanan a metaphysical lecturer, and no more. It is thus that he represents the talk in which he evidently feels "myself" to be quite on the same level with his hosts. They had been discussing the decay of the faculties in old age as an argument against immortality.