William the Fourth had called him “a great gentleman,” although he and his government had been “kicked out” by that obstinate, morbid, prejudiced and somewhat imaginative monarch. Naturally, Melbourne refused an earldom and a garter; but in his final advice to the sovereign he was as tactful as ever in making the latter partially modify the note of dismissal, thereby averting a storm of popular feeling and individual resentment of ministers. “Mind what you are about in Canada,” said the King when final instructions were given to Lord Gosford before he left England, and Melbourne and Glenelg--the Sleeping Beauty--found the monarch as hard to manage as the colony itself. “By ---- I will never consent to alienate the Crown Lands nor to make the Council elective. Mind me, my lord, the cabinet is not my cabinet; they had better take care, or by ---- I will have them impeached. You are a gentleman, I believe, I have no fear of you; but take care what you do.” Posing as a man of pleasure, in reality a capable man of business, Melbourne lounged through his duties in a way to exasperate friend and foe. But as he lounged, he learned men and manners, determined to _see into_ things, and even in Ireland, when Chief Secretary, said, “If agitation would not go to bed he would like to have a chat with it.” He was ever pleading for concession to the demands of the people, dreading the consequences of refusal. “Everything about him seems to betoken careless desolation; anyone would suppose from his manner that he was playing at chuck-farthing with human happiness, that he was always on the heels of fortune, that he would giggle away the great Charter.... But I accuse our Minister,” said his critic, “of honesty and diligence; I deny that he is careless and rude; he is nothing more than a man of good understanding and good principle, disguised in the eternal and somewhat wearisome affectation of a political _roué_.” Perfectly courteous to others, it was impossible for others to be discourteous to him, always excepting Brougham. But even before Brougham he did not quail, and always could give tit for tat, much to the delight of the audience of peers who, like schoolboys, exulted whenever their terror, the bully of the class, got a drubbing. The tongue which Brougham sarcastically spoke of as attuned to courtly airs, made to gloze and flatter, flayed him so completely with its quiet polish that he winced under its lash and betrayed, by his own increased violence of invective, the weight of the punishment. Soon after the accession the press said Lord Melbourne was about to publish a work on chess--the best method of playing the Queen, of getting possession of the castle, an entire disregard of the old system as to bishops, being points in the book. This genial, indolent statesman, who fearlessly told the truth irrespective of party, was rubicund, with the aquiline nose of the aristocrat; his large blue eyes sometimes