nything but guilt and folly.

Thus adopting, to a great extent, your Majesty's view, Mr.
Gladstone can confirm your Majesty's belief that (with the
exception of a sentence addressed by him to the King of the
Hellenes singly respecting Bulgaria), there was on all hands an
absolute silence in regard to public affairs....

In proposing at Kirkwall the health of the poet who was his fellow-guest
on the cruise, Mr. Gladstone let fall a hint--a significant and perhaps a
just one--on the comparative place of politics and letters, the difference
between the statesman and orator and the poet. "Mr. Tennyson's life and
labour," he said, "correspond in point of time as nearly as possible to my
own; but he has worked in a higher field, and his work will be more
durable. We public men play a part which places us much in view of our
countrymen, but the words which we speak have wings and fly away and
disappear.... But the Poet Laureate has written his own song on the hearts
of his countrymen that can never die."

III

It was said in 1884 that the organisation of Egypt was a subject, whether
regarded from the English or the European point of view, that was probably
more complicated and more fraught with possible dangers in the future,
than any question of foreign policy with which England had had to deal for
the last fifty years or more.

The arguments against prolonged English occupation were tolerably clear.
It would freeze all cordiality between ourselves and the French. It would
make us a Mediterranean military power. In case of war, the necessity of
holding Egypt would weaken us. In diplomacy it would expose fresh surface
to new and hostile combinations. Yet, giving their full weight to every
one of these considerations, a British statesman was confronted by one of
those intractable dilemmas that make up the material of a good half of
human history. The Khedive could not stand by himself. The Turk would not,
and ought not to be endured for his protector. Some other European power
would step in and block the English road. Would common prudence in such a
case suffer England to acquiesce and stand aside? Did not subsisting
obligations also confirm the precepts of policy and self-interest? In many
minds this reasoning was clenched and clamped by the sacrifices that
England had made when she took, and took alone, the initial military step.

Egyptian affairs were one of the heaviest loads that (M44) weig