To resume about the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honour. The French Official statement when conveying to me the felicitations of the President of the French Republic was that I had the distinction of being at that time the only living Englishman who had received this honour, but the disaster that had been averted by the timely action of the British Fleet deserved it. So that evening, on meeting King Edward, I told His Majesty of the quite unexpected honour that I had received, and that I had been informed that I was the only Englishman that had got it, on which the King said: “Excuse me I’ve got it!” Then, alas, I made a _faux pas_ and said “Kings don’t count!” And no more do they! He got it because certainly they all loved him in the first place, and secondly, President Loubet couldn’t help it, while if it hadn’t been for the British Fleet on this occasion the Germans would have been in Paris in a week, and if the Germans had known as much as they do now they would have been! I don’t mean to urge that King Edward was in any way a clever man. I’m not sure that he could do the rule of three, _but he had the Heavenly gift of Proportion and Perspective!_ Brains never yet moved the Masses--but Emotion and Earnestness will not only move the Masses, but they will remove Mountains! As I told Queen Alexandra on seeing his dear face (dead) for the last time, his epitaph is the great words of Pascal in the “Pensées” (Chapter ix, 19): “Le cœur a ses raisons Que la raison ne connaît point.” (“The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing about”!) He was a noble man and every inch a King! God Bless Him! I don’t either say he was a Saint! I know lots of cabbages that are saints!--they couldn’t sin if they wanted to! _Postscript._ It suddenly occurred to me to send these notes on King Edward to Lord Esher as he had peculiar opportunities of realizing King Edward’s special qualities as a King, and realized how much there was in him of the Tudor gift of being an autocrat and yet being loved of the people! _Lord Esher to Lord Fisher_ ROMAN CAMP, CALLANDER, N.B. _July 30, 1918._ MY DEAR ADMIRAL, The pages are wonderful, because they are _you_. Not a square inch of pose about them. Tears! that was the result of reading what you have to say about King Edward. But do you recollect our talk with him on board the Royal Yacht about France and Germany? Surely that was worth recording. I have kept many of his letters. They show him to have been one of the “cleverest” of men. He had never depended upon book-learning--why should he? He read, not books--but men and women--and jolly good reading too!