Lord Bute's qualities as a historian appear conspicuously in the lecture on David Duke of Rothesay, where the scanty material available about this unfortunate prince is treated in a truly scientific spirit. The zeal for truth shown in it is only equalled by his noble desire, even at the eleventh hour, to do justice to the poor lad so cruelly murdered by his contemporaries and misrepresented by posterity. A rumour had been widely current, in the year of Queen Victoria's golden jubilee, that Bute was to be created "Jubilee" Duke of Glamorgan. It is permissible to question whether his patriotism would have allowed him to consent to the merging of his historic Scottish title in a brand-new one derived from a Welsh county; but his only written reference to the matter appears in a letter to a friend who had sent him a newspaper-cutting on the subject: I cannot believe that there is anything in the report to which you have called my attention. Were it so, I imagine that I should have heard of it before now through some other channel than the Society columns of a halfpenny newspaper. In the spring of 1890 the office of Lord-Lieutenant of Glamorganshire, then vacant, was offered to him {173} by the Prime Minister (Lord Salisbury), but he did not see his way to accept it. A single line in his diary records the fact; but there is a brief further mention of it in a letter written at the time: I have little or no acquaintance with the county, or with "them that dwell therein" beyond the limits of Cardiff and of my own property. For this and other more personal reasons, I have--in, I hope, a not unbecoming letter--begged leave to decline the honour. [Sidenote: 1890, Mayor of Cardiff] With another offer made to him a little later in the same year Bute found himself able to comply, much to the satisfaction of all concerned. This was a requisition that he should allow himself to be nominated as Mayor of Cardiff for 1890-91. It is a point of considerable interest, and one certainly illustrative of the strong sense of duty which always animated him, that the first peer to hold the highest municipal office in any English or Welsh borough for several generations--certainly since the Reform Bill--should have been one whom his natural love of retirement, and aversion from public display, might have prompted to refuse any office of the kind. Once elected, he attended with sedulous care to such duties as devolved on him in virtue of his office; and early in 1891 he wrote to his old friend Miss Skene, giving a cheerful account of his stewardship. The last part of this letter, in which some of his deeper feelings are touchingly disclosed, would have appealed with very special force to his correspondent, one of the chief works of whose life at Oxford was the rescue of girls and women; and for that reason a portion of her reply is appended: {174} Cardiff, _January_ 23, 1891. MY DEAR MISS SKENE,