xcitement in others, gave an indescribable charm
to all intercourse with him in critical and difficult circumstances. Hence
perhaps in great part, and not merely from his intellectual gifts, was
derived the remarkable power he seemed to me to exercise in winning
confidences without seeking to win them; and, on the whole, I believe that
this quality, could we hold it as it was held in him, would save us from
ten erroneous judgments for one into which it might lead. For the grand
characteristic of suspicion after all, as of superstition, is to see
things that are not.

I turn now to another point: Lord Aberdeen was not demonstrative; I do not
suppose he could have been an actor; he was unstudied in speech; and it is
of interest to inquire what it was that gave such extraordinary force and
impressiveness to his language. He did not deal in antithesis. His sayings
were not sharpened with gall. In short, one might go on disclaiming for
him all the accessories to which most men who are impressive owe their
impressiveness. Yet I never knew any one who was so impressive in brief
utterances conveying the sum of the matter....

History has also caught and will hold firmly and well the honoured name of
your father. There was no tarnish upon his reputation more than upon his
character. He will be remembered in connection with great passages of
European policy not only as a man of singularly searching, large, and calm
intelligence, but yet more as the just man, the man that used only true
weights and measures, and ever held even the balance of his ordered mind.
It is no reproach to other statesmen of this or other periods, to say that
scarcely any of them have had a celebrity so entirely unaided by a
transitory glare. But if this be so, it implies that while they for the
most part must relatively lose, he must relatively and greatly gain. If
they have had stage-lights and he has had none, it is the hour when those
lights are extinguished that will for the first time do that justice as
between them which he was too noble, too far aloft in the tone of his
mind, to desire to anticipate. All the qualities and parts in which he was
great were those that are the very foundation-stones of our being; as
foundation-stones they are deep, and as being deep they are withdrawn from
view; but time is their witness and their friend, and in the final
distribution of posthumous fame Lord Aberdeen has nothing to forfeit, he
has only to receive.

I