Lord Palmerston himself was a most adroit man of the world, and besides this there was in his character a certain not unpleasant mixture of French levity combined with English familiarity. His social qualities served him in excellent stead in his political life, for he had a manner of speaking to people, even to those he did not know, which conveyed the impression that their name, constituency, and even their family were perfectly well known to him. By these tactics, and also by asking the wives of M.P.’s to his parties, he was able to do a great deal in the way of retarding the passage of any measures which, for a time at least, he might not be anxious to see pressed forward. Mr. Bernal Osborne was often a terrible thorn in the flesh to Lord Palmerston, although nominally a strong supporter of that statesman, under whom he served as Secretary of the Admiralty in 1857. Towards the close of his tenure of this office Mr. Osborne, however, became very dissatisfied, and used to complain that his post had been reduced to something very like a mere head-clerkship, his duties being limited to registering minutes of the Board by day and furnishing silent notes by night. Mr. Osborne, of course, was by nature opposed to control of any sort, and being, above all, a political free-lance, the holding of office in any form was quite unsuitable to his disposition, interfering as it did with those onslaughts for which he was so well known in the House of Commons. Later on in life he became a trifle more restrained in his utterances, age causing him to regard everything with more patience. His long experience of politics, he once said, had sobered him so much that he could spy good qualities in every one—even in bishops. Lord Palmerston was a politician in whom the country, as a whole, reposed the utmost confidence. Though a Liberal, he was a regular John Bull, and neither “retrenchment” nor “reform” was, I think, particularly dear to him; whilst, as was well known, any slight to England would be met with very spirited remonstrances during his tenure of office. There were those indeed who assailed his Government as not being Liberal at all. Bernal Osborne, for instance, roundly attacked the Army Estimates in 1860, when he was particularly severe upon Aldershot, which he described as “an indifferent preparatory school for forming indifferent generals.” Later on, when the House had gone into Committee, Osborne declared that Lord Palmerston (who had characterised his assailant’s remarks as light and violent) was suffering from the effects of the Mansion House dinner, combined with the larger doses of colchicum taken to combat them. Lord Palmerston received this attack in a perfectly bland manner, merely retorting that colchicum was sedative rather than exciting, and consequently more suitable to the Honourable Member than to himself. On another occasion Mr. Osborne applied to Lord Palmerston the lines— He frolics with the burden of four score,