was very nearly the destruction of his life. When at last he emerged from the anguish and confusion of her folly, her extravagance, her rage, her despair, and her devotion, he was left alone with endless memories of intermingled farce and tragedy, and an only son who was an imbecile. But there was something else that he owed to Lady Caroline. While she whirled with Byron in a hectic frenzy of love and fashion, he had stayed at home in an indulgence bordering on cynicism, and occupied his solitude with reading. It was thus that he had acquired those habits of study, that love of learning, and that wide and accurate knowledge of ancient and modern literature, which formed so unexpected a part of his mental equipment. His passion for reading never deserted him; even when he was Prime Minister he found time to master every new important book.[19] With an incongruousness that was characteristic, his favourite study was theology. An accomplished classical scholar, he was deeply read in the Fathers of the Church; heavy volumes of commentary and exegesis he examined with scrupulous diligence; and at any odd moment he might be found turning over {62} the pages of the Bible.[20] To the ladies whom he most liked he would lend some learned work on the Revelation, crammed with marginal notes in his own hand, or Dr. Lardner's 'Observations upon the Jewish Errors with respect to the Conversion of Mary Magdalene.' The more pious among them had high hopes that these studies would lead him into the right way; but of this there were no symptoms in his after-dinner conversation.[21] The paradox of his political career was no less curious. By temperament an aristocrat, by conviction a conservative, he came to power as the leader of the popular party, the party of change. He had profoundly disliked the Reform Bill, which he had only accepted at last as a necessary evil; and the Reform Bill lay at the root of the very existence, of the very meaning, of his government. He was far too sceptical to believe in progress of any kind. Things were best as they were--or rather, they were least bad. 'You'd better try to do no good,' was one of his dictums, 'and then you'll get into no scrapes.' Education at best was futile; education of the poor was positively dangerous. The factory children? 'Oh, if you'd only have the goodness to leave them alone!' Free Trade was a delusion; the ballot was nonsense; and there was no such thing as a democracy. Nevertheless, he was not a reactionary; he was simply an opportunist. The whole duty of government, he said, was 'to prevent crime and to preserve contracts.' All one could really hope to do was to carry on. He himself carried on in a remarkable manner--with perpetual compromises, with fluctuations and {63} contradictions, with every kind of weakness, and yet with shrewdness, with gentleness, even with conscientiousness, and a light and airy mastery of men and of events. He conducted the transactions