In many ways, Lord Cromer, during those long and desultory conversations about literature which will be so perennial a delight to look back upon, betrayed his constitutional detestation of the Romantic attitude. He believed himself to be perfectly catholic in his tastes, and resented the charge of prejudice. But he was, in fact, irritated by the excesses and obscurities of much that is fashionable to-day in the world of letters, and he refused his tribute of incense to several popular idols. He thought that, during the course of the nineteenth century, German influences had seriously perturbed the balance of taste in Europe. I do not know that Lord Cromer had pursued these impressions very far, or that he had formed any conscious theory with regard to them. But he was very "eighteenth century" in his suspicion of enthusiasm, and I always found him amusingly impervious to ideas of a visionary or mystical order. It was impossible that so intelligent and omnivorous a reader as he should not be drawn to the pathetic figure of Pascal, but he was puzzled by him. He described him as "manifestly a man full of contrasts, difficult to understand, and as many-sided as Odysseus." On another occasion, losing patience with Pascal, he called him "a half-lunatic man of genius." Fénélon annoyed him still more; the spiritual experiences of the Archbishop of Cambrai he found "almost incomprehensible." His surprising, but after all perfectly consistent, comment on both Fénélon and Pascal was, "How much more easy Buffon is to understand!" He recommended all young men who intend to take a part in politics carefully to study pre-Revolutionary history, and one of his objections to the romantic literature of Rousseau downwards was that it did not help such study. It was too individualistic in its direction. It tended, moreover, Lord Cromer thought, to disturb the balance of judgment, that "level-headedness" which he valued so highly, and had exercised with such magnificent authority. He disliked the idea that genius involved a lack of sanity, or, in other words, of self-command. He regretted that Dryden had given general currency to this idea by his famous lines in _Absalom and Achitophel_:-- "Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide;" but Lord Cromer was himself, perhaps, too ready to account by insanity for every odd or confused expression in literature. He had nothing to say about Mazzini, whom he swept aside impatiently, except that he "was a semi-lunatic," and I have heard him declare of Chatterton and Verlaine--a strange couple--that they were a pair of madmen. He objected violently to Baudelaire, but I think he knew very little about that poet's works.