Lord Newton in his life of Lord Lyons has one or two ironically biting remarks about him: “This prosaic nobleman who is credited with having himself refused the throne of Greece.” “It must have been a congenial task for a man of Lord Stanley’s temperament to throw cold water upon the vague and slipshod proposals of the unlucky Emperor” (of the French); while “Lord Stanley’s comment upon the Empress’ frank and sensible conversation with Lord Lyons, upon the Roman question, urging that England should take a hand in it, was that it furnished the best reason he had received yet for keeping out of the affair altogether. The Emperor’s reason for proposing a conference was that he disliked bearing the responsibility which he had assumed. Why should he be asked to bear it for him?” Lord Stanley, afterwards Lord Derby, was certainly a remarkable man; his speeches were dull and prosaic, but they were full of wise common sense and they carried just weight. It always seemed to me that he showed in his public life those same qualities which he used to bring into Harrison’s gymnasium—the strength of a bull and the determination of a gladiator, without one spark of enthusiasm, without one care or thought beyond doing to the best of his great power what lay to his hand. A well-balanced, well-informed study of Lord Stanley would be a human document of great interest. At the end of two years I was moved out of the Slave Trade into the French department, which, of course, was the most important and hardest-worked of the many divisions, for the Paris Embassy was looked upon as a sort of branch Foreign Office; there could be no diplomatic subject in which France was not interested equally with England, whether in agreement or in rivalry. So every despatch of any slightest importance—not to speak of many which had none—was marked to be copied for Paris. I used to wonder whether Lord Cowley, insatiable worker as he was, could find time to read all that we so painfully copied. Such questions as those of the Danish duchies and the Danubian principalities (still alive under the title of “the Balkans”) were the favourite pabulum of all the Ministers at the small German courts, worthy men whose capacity for spoiling paper was in exact proportion to the greatness of their unimportance. I remember at Stuttgart an industrious creature who had all the spinning powers of a hen-spider.