The last time that I saw Lord Clarendon was, as I have already intimated, in the early summer of 1870. During the time that I was in the Far East he used to make my father send him the letters which I wrote home, and when I reached London his welcome to me was of the warmest. He at once invited me to dinner, and after dinner kept me in talk for some time. He asked me about the book I was writing, giving me great encouragement and some advice, which, unlike most advice, was followed. Two or three weeks later he was gone. On the 27th of April he died in harness, in the heat of the work which he loved so well, and busy with the craft of which he was a past master. Was Bismarck right in saying that if he had lived the war of 1870 would not have taken place? I doubt it. I think that when Bismarck made his famous speech to Lady Ampthill, telling her that nothing had ever given him so much pleasure as her father’s death, because it meant that his schemes would not be foiled, that was his rough, _burschikos_ way of paying her a compliment on Lord Clarendon’s power, sagacity and skill as a diplomatist. There is no doubt that he had immense influence both with Louis Napoléon and with the Empress, whom he had known as a child in the intimacy of her mother’s house when he was Minister at Madrid; but there were silent intrigues of which the English Foreign Office and our Ambassadors abroad knew nothing, as was shown when Mr. Hammond told Lord Granville on his taking over Lord Clarendon’s succession that there never had been a time when there was such a perfectly peaceful outlook. In a fortnight the Paris mob was shouting “_A Berlin!_” In recent works Mr. Hammond has been greatly and most unjustly blamed for his want of prescience. Nothing could be more unfair. Mr. Hammond was guided by the reports, and, more important still, by the private letters, of the Ambassadors at Paris, Berlin, and other Courts. That no one—not even Bismarck himself—knew how near war was is amply proved by Bismarck’s own memoirs. The thing fell like a thunder-clap—the result of the Ems episode—and Bismarck was as much staggered as the rest of the world by the opportunity which arose for him.