If I mention these things, it is because they seem to be necessary to give human character to any sketch of the mind of Lord Cromer. He himself hated mere eulogy, which he said had ruined most of the biographies of the world. The official lives of Disraeli and Gladstone did not escape a measure of his blame in this respect, and it will be recalled that resentment against what he thought a shadowless portrait led to his own very vivacious paper on Disraeli, which he afterwards issued as a pamphlet. He was an avid reader of memoirs, and of political memoirs in particular, but he almost always passed upon them the same criticism--that they were too _public_. "I don't want Mr. ----," he would say, "to tell me what I can learn for myself by turning up the file of the _Morning Post_. I want him to tell me what I can't find out elsewhere. And he need not be so very much afraid of hinting that his hero had faults, for if he had not had defects we should never have heard of his qualities. We are none of us perfect, and we don't want a priggish biographer to pretend that we are." He was speaking here mainly of political matters; but Lord Cromer's training and experience had a strong bearing on his literary tastes. With him politics reacted on literature, although he liked to fancy that he kept them wholly apart. No doubt a selection from his correspondence will one day be given to the world, for he was a vivid, copious, and daring letter-writer. I suppose that he wrote to each of his friends mainly on the subject which absorbed that friend most, and as his own range of sympathies and interests was very wide, it is probable that his letters will prove excellent general reading. As in so many other of the departments of life, Lord Cromer did not think letter-writing a matter to be lightly regarded or approached without responsibility. He said:-- "There are two habits which I have contracted, and which I have endeavoured to pass on to my children, as I have found them useful. One is to shut the door after me when I leave the room, and the other is always to affix the day of the month and the year to every document, however unimportant, that I sign. I have received numbers of letters, not only from women, one of whose numerous privileges it is to be vague, but also from men in high official positions, dated with the day of the week only. When the document is important, such a proceeding is a fraud on posterity." He often, both in conversation and in letters, took up one of his favourite classic tags, and wove a shrewd modern reflection round it. For instance, a couple of years before the war, a phrase of Aristotle recommending a ruthless egotism in the conduct of war, led him to say:-- "I think that at times almost every modern nation has acted on this principle, though they gloss it over with fine words. Its principal exponents of late have unquestionably been the Hohenzollerns."