A young man of another type, inheriting from the Cecils on the one side, and from his grandfather, the first Lord Selborne, on the other, the best traditions of English Conservatism and English churchmanship--open-eyed, patriotic, devout--has been lost to the nation in Robert A.S. Palmer, the second son of Lord and Lady Selborne, affectionately known to an ardent circle of friends whose hopes were set on him, as "Bobbie Palmer." He has fallen in the Mesopotamian campaign; and of him, as of William Henry Gladstone, the grandson and heir of England's great Liberal Minister, who fell in Flanders a year ago, it may be said, as his Oxford contemporaries said of Sir Philip Sidney, Honour and Fame are got about their graves, And there sit mourning of each other's loss. In one of his latest letters, quoted by a friend in a short biography, Robert Palmer wrote:--"Who isn't weary to death of the war? I certainly have been, for over a year; yes, and sorrowful almost unto death over it, at times, as you doubtless have too. But of one thing I am and always have been sure, that it is worth the cost and any cost there is to come, to prevent Prussianism--which is Anti-Christ--controlling Europe." The following eloquent passage written by an Oxford Fellow and Tutor, in a series of short papers on the losses sustained by Oxford in the war, is understood to refer to Mr. Palmer:-- "To-night the bell tolls in the brain (_haud rediturus_) over one of the noblest--if it be not a treason to discriminate--of all the dead one has known who have died for England. Graciousness was in all his doings and in all the workings of his mind. The music and gymnastic whereof Plato wrote, that should attune the body to harmony with the mind, and harmonise all the elements of the mind in a perfect unison, had done their work upon him. He seemed--at any rate, to the eyes of those who loved him, and they were many--to have the perfection of nature's endowment: beauty of mind knit to beauty of body, and all informed by a living spirit of affection, so that his presence was a benediction, and a matter for thanksgiving that God had made men after this manner. So to speak of him is perhaps to idealise him; but one can only idealise that which suggests the ideal, and at the least he had a more perfect participation in the ideal than falls to the general lot of humanity." Such he was: and now he too is dead. From the work to which he had gone, thousands of miles away (a work of service, and of his Master's service), he had hastened back to England, and for England he has died. His tutor had once written in his copy of the Vulgate: "_Esto vir fortis, et pugnemus pro populo nostro et pro civitate Dei nostri_." He was strong; and he fought for both.