For a year or two Lord Lyons had no very crucial question to face. The San Juan “difficulty,” in which the United States Government showed the most conciliatory temper, and the question of the possible absorption of Mexico by the United States, in which Great Britain had no more than a philanthropic concern inspired by the feeling that it would have threatened the extension of slavery, could hardly be reckoned as coming under such a category. In the meantime, in such negotiations as he had to conduct, his conciliatory and unobtrusive policy, his great discretion, had won for him golden opinions and much respect among all classes of American politicians; that, together with the popularity which the Prince of Wales never failed to gain and which was a conspicuous result of His Royal Highness’s visit to Canada and the United States in 1860, happily placed the relations between the two countries on such a footing as had probably never existed since the separation. The value of this was felt when the great strain came. In 1861, Mr. Buchanan had faded into that Stygian darkness in which ex-presidents of the United States flit as phantoms of a past dignity. Abraham Lincoln ruled in his stead—Abraham Lincoln, tree-feller, rail-splitter, village postman, and one of the greatest men that ever made history. This tall, gaunt, raw-boned, lantern-jawed man, fresh caught from Illinois, with none of the graces which the gods have given, save that supreme grace of truth and pellucid honesty which sweetens all intercourse, would have been an easy man for a minister like Lord Lyons, himself the very incarnation of transparent sincerity, to deal with. His Secretary of State, Mr. H. Seward, was a man of another kidney. Mr. Seward was a New York lawyer, a rough, coarse, unconciliatory nature, one of those impossible people who mistake bluster for courage, and braggadocio for strength—so unmannerly was he that on one occasion when he was a guest at a dinner-party at the British Legation, he talked so offensively to certain of the diplomatists present that Lord Lyons, a past-master in the art of turning a sharp corner, broke up the conversation by saying that as host it was now his duty to go and talk to the ladies. It needed all the tact, patience and self-control of Lord Lyons to treat with such a man. That he succeeded in taming him into something approaching to the amenities—I had almost written the decencies—of diplomatic intercourse, was one of Lord Lyons’ most notable achievements.