There are very few great events in history the credit for which it would be just to ascribe to any one man, and so perhaps Lord Newton is right when he says that “It would be an exaggeration to attribute solely to Lord Lyons the credit of having successfully prevented the calamity of a war between England and the United States.” Energetic action of the Home Government, the wise moderation of the Queen and the Prince Consort, the loyal moral support of the French Government, and the good sense of the Americans, each and all of them played a restraining part. But when all is said and done, it was to the extraordinary patience and delicacy of touch of Lord Lyons, who never once made a mistake—never under the most goading provocation lost his head—that the ultimate success of the negotiations was due. “In after years,” Lord Newton writes, “Lord Lyons frequently expressed the opinion that if there had then been telegraphic communication across the Atlantic it would have been impossible to avert war, and it is more than likely that he was correct, although it is improbable that many people realized it at the time.” It was a notable case of a victory gained by the man on the spot. If a difficulty of the most threatening character had been conjured away there were soon others to which a war such as that which was raging was bound to give birth. Enlistment, desertion and other pretexts drove scores of men to seek protection of the consuls both in the North and in the South, on the ground of being British subjects. An article from a Southern newspaper is worth quoting: “We can conceive nothing more disgraceful than the conduct of Irishmen, for example, who have been cursing the British Government ever since they could talk, who have emigrated from their country to escape the British yoke, but who now run to an English Consul and profess themselves subjects of Queen Victoria in order to evade their duties in the land of their adoption.” That, of course, alludes to the South, but Lord Lyons himself on 11th May, 1863, writes no less bitterly: “I have been unwell for more than a month, and am beset by a quantity of small vexatious business concerning the wrongs of the British subjects who have suddenly proclaimed their unswerving loyalty to the British Crown and demand my protection.” Also there was the Alabama case—a very real stone of offence—and the bitter Anglophobia of Admiral Wilkes; all matters in which the United States Government behaved generously and even magnanimously. The work, however, which devolved upon Lord Lyons was stupendous; in November, 1863, he recorded that he had already received nine hundred notes from Mr. Seward in that year. But there was one episode so comic that it is difficult to repress a smile in alluding to it. Is there not a comedy in every tragedy? Is there not a gravedigger in _Hamlet_?