Like the Emperor, Lord Lyons had a quite irresistible trick of giving a whimsical expression to a commonplace subject. He, too, was in his quiet way a humorist. The personal relations between him and the Emperor were always pleasant and sometimes, perhaps, cordial. Lord Lyons liked His Majesty, though, in one of those rare outbursts of confidence in which he revealed his thoughts, he confessed to Lord Newton that he had formed no very high opinion of his abilities. The attempt to arouse in England interest in the Roman question was fruitless, but he never quite gave up the hope of inducing the English Government to act as pacificators between France and Germany. But he had lost confidence, he was out of spirits, and when Lord Cowley, in August, 1868, paid him a visit at Fontainebleau, he told Lord Lyons on his return that he found him much depressed and aged—a disappointed man, who would willingly, had it been possible, have retired into private life. The glamour of the early glories of his reign had faded into mist, and he was weary. A little later in the same year Lord Clarendon, whose influence with him and with the Empress, whom he had known from her childhood when he was Minister at Madrid, was a matter of common knowledge, dined with His Majesty at St. Cloud, and having just returned from Berlin, was able to repeat to him the pacific language which he had heard from the King and Queen of Prussia and General Moltke. This was good hearing, but the Emperor was at no pains to conceal his anxiety lest anything should occur that might arouse the feeling of the army and the nation, and he expressed his earnest wish that “England should step in to enable France and Prussia to withdraw with honour from their present antagonistic attitude.” Lord Clarendon, with that nobility which characterized all his dealings, communicated to Lord Lyons all that he had learned both at Berlin and at St. Cloud, although he knew that it would be for the benefit of his political opponents. But by the end of the year there was a change of Government in England, and to the Emperor’s great joy Lord Clarendon, the friend whom he loved, was once more at the Foreign Office. A visit of the Crown Prince of Prussia to England enabled Lord Clarendon to tell Lord Lyons that His Royal Highness was to the full as peacefully inclined as his father, and indeed he went a step further, for while he personally was willing to see the army placed upon a peace footing, the King would not hear of it. But how strange it seemed at a moment when we in England have been proposing naval holidays to read talk of the same nature earnestly exercising the minds of men nearly half a century ago.