It not seldom happens that the man at the other end of the wire, though he may be thoroughly acquainted with the brutal facts under discussion, may, for lack of knowledge of the temper of a minister and of the peculiar pressure which at a given moment is being brought to bear upon him by the internal politics of the country which he represents, be inclined to some move which the astute agent, wary and watchful, would easily avoid, by smoothing difficulties and counterchecking dangerous arguments. It is difficult in these days to realize the initiative power exercised by some of the older diplomatists. A Russianized Pozzo di Borgo forces on an alliance between Austria and the country which employs him for the annihilation of a brother Corsican. A Stratford de Redcliffe, in the execution of a policy of which his own government hardly conceals its hatred, plunges five great nations in war. Such masterful agents as these are unthinkable to-day. Not much more astonished would the world be by the dispatches of ministers accredited to the long since defunct small German and Italian Grand Ducal Courts—proud records of august handshakes prolonged beyond those accorded to rival plenipotentiaries, chronicles of snarlings and bickerings over some vital question of precedence at a Court supper or dinner. These were subjects upon which the lesser men expatiated in deadly earnest, deeply penetrated with a sense of their importance—and yet they were not altogether without their value, for we owe them some measure of grateful respect, since the judicious handling of such twaddle occasionally brought to light the talents of a man fitted for the nice conduct of real affairs. Indeed it was such a case that first gave the Foreign Office an inkling of the worth of a man who in the story of later years was destined to play a dominant part, the importance of which not even his excessive modesty and self-effacement could keep altogether in the background. There is little need to call Dr. Johnson into court to prove that “nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat (sic) and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.” Lord Lyons has been lucky in having such a biographer as Lord Newton, who not only had daily social intercourse with him, “eating and drinking with him” for some years, but being moreover a man of his own profession and his intimate subordinate, though at the time when they were together only a brilliant youngster, had something more than the ordinary opportunities of estimating his chief’s public worth. Lord Newton is, as the House of Lords well knows, a master of subtle humour and delicate irony; he writes excellent English—terse, bright and to the point; and with these qualifications it is no wonder that he has produced a book, which, seeing the momentously important events in which Lord Lyons took a leading part, must be largely consulted in all attempts to write the history of the latter half of the nineteenth century.