ay be, if an Irishman was sent over, by
accident, to be Chief Secretary, the official would not fall into the
mistake of trying to reconcile the irerconcilable.'

And to my mind Lord Morris had the last word in every sense.

Mr. W.E. Forster was far too honest to be the tool of Mr. Gladstone's
Hibernian dishonesty. He was perfectly fearless, but, beneath his rugged
exterior, deeply sensitive. He winced under 'buckshot,' and many other
epithets; but abuse and danger alike never prevented him from doing what
he had to do to the best of his ability. His earliest acquaintance with
Ireland had been in the famine, when he was one of the deputation of
succour organised by the Society of Friends, and everybody who has read
Mr. Morley's _Life of Cobden_ will remember the appreciation of their
efforts by the great free-trader.

Mr. Forster did not think the Irish administration should be all 'a
scuffle and a scramble,' and he inaugurated a reversal of the old
balance between Lord-Lieutenants and Chief Secretaries which has never
been subsequently changed. Indeed, it is often only the latter who has a
seat in the Cabinet. He was the victim of many misapprehensions--the
bulk of them wilful--but one which worried him was a widespread
conviction that he was a slow man. His delivery was slow, his manner
deliberate, and he did not lightly give an opinion. Yet emphatically he
was not a slow man, and as an instance may be stated the fact that he
elaborated his scheme of decentralising the powers of the Irish
Government in a single evening in December 1881. I know he was harassed,
nay, martyrised, beyond endurance, through the evasive volubility of Mr.
Gladstone, which, both by mouth and letter, formed a heavier burden than
all the Irish attacks; but he was a just and conscientious man, and I
never heard of a case where appeal was made to him on which he did not
act as reasonably as was compatible with loyalty to such a Prime
Minister.

His courage in walking unarmed and without police escort in Tulla and
Athenry was as great as ever was displayed by a knight-errant of old.
The Nationalist papers, no longer able to taunt him with cowardice, took
to declaring him to be a person notorious for ferocious brutality.

Sir Wemyss Reid said that in the House of Commons his fellow-members had
literally seen his hair whiten during those two years of patriotic
martyrdom in Ireland, and I always feel that the inner life of this
reticent, command