I use the words “leading part” advisedly; for Lord Lyons was essentially a leader, guide, and instructor, upon whose wisdom those who had the ultimate decision of affairs were able to lean with confidence. For the relation of intricate negotiations, Lord Newton has been happily documented with material that is entirely new and unpublished. The word “intricate” need scare no reader, for he has marshalled his facts so skilfully that much which might have been obscure is crystal-clear. The great Lord Lyons—for he was great—was born in 1817, the son of that famous old sea-dog and diplomatist, Admiral Sir Edmund Lyons, afterwards the first Lord Lyons. Like his younger brother, he was sent to sea when he was little more than a child—only ten years old. But he was quite unfitted for a sailor’s life; he was a martyr to sea-sickness, which he never got over, and so, as Lord Newton says, “it was probably with no slight satisfaction that the navy was exchanged for Winchester.” But it is a coincidence worthy of note that the two diplomatic achievements which chiefly made him famous were, as we shall presently see, both of them connected with the sea and shipping and maritime law. One would have liked to have had some knowledge of his early days, for the childhood that was to father a man of so marked a personality could not have been without interest, but upon this point his biographer is silent; indeed, a bare page and a half is all that is devoted to transferring him from Winchester to Christchurch, where he took his degree in 1838, and to the thirteen years during which he was eating out his heart as an attaché at Athens (where his father, the Admiral, was minister), despairing of promotion and half-minded to leave a profession in which he was destined to be so distinguished a figure. In 1853 we find him at Rome, a post of some importance, though, as England had no diplomatic relations with the Vatican, it was always filled by an official of no higher rank than one of the Secretaries of Legation at Florence, and afterwards at the Italian Court when it was at Turin, and later transferred to Florence. It was a post which needed no little skill and tact, and was later occupied with conspicuous ability by Lord Odo Russell (Lord Ampthill). Lord Lyons’ experience showed, as he himself wrote, that “in spite of my peculiar position, notwithstanding a very strong opinion to the contrary, at Rome, as at most other places, one succeeds best by transacting one’s business in the most plain and straightforward manner, and through the most direct channels. By acting on this principle and by being very quiet and unobtrusive, I think I have in part allayed the suspicions which are felt towards us always more or less at Rome, and I am certainly on a better footing with Cardinal Antonelli than I had at all expected to be.”