ss of sensible Tories all over the country
might perhaps have rallied to him, if he had appealed to them against
the intrigues by which it was sought to supplant him. He did not lack
courage. But he lacked what men call "backbone." For practical
success, it is less fatal to fail in wisdom than to fail in
resolution. He had not that unquenchable self-confidence which I have
sought to describe in Disraeli, and shall have to describe in Parnell
and in Gladstone. He yielded to pressure, and people came to know that
he would yield to pressure.

The end of it was that the weakened prestige and final fall of the
Liberal Ministry were not credited to his generalship, but rather to
those who had skirmished in advance of the main army. That fall was in
reality due neither to him nor to them, but partly to the errors or
internal divisions of the Ministry itself, partly to causes such as
the condition of Ireland and the revolt of Arabi in Egypt, for which
Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet was no more, perhaps less, to blame than many
of its predecessors. No Ministry of recent years seemed, when it was
formed, to have such a source of strength in the abilities of the men
who composed it as did the Ministry of 1880. None proved so
persistently unlucky.

The circumstances under which Northcote's leadership came to an end by
his elevation to the Upper House (June 1885) as Earl of Iddesleigh, as
well as those under which he was subsequently (1887) removed from the
post of Foreign Secretary in the then Tory Ministry, evoked much
comment at the time, but some of the incidents attending them have not
yet been disclosed, and they could not be discussed without bringing
in other persons with whom I am not here concerned. Conscious of his
own loyalty to his party, and remembering his long and laborious
services, he felt those circumstances deeply; and they may have
hastened his death, which came very suddenly in February 1887, and
called forth a burst of sympathy such as had not been seen since Peel
perished by an accident nearly forty years before.

In private life Northcote had the charm of unpretending manners,
coupled with abundant humour, a store of anecdote, and a geniality
which came straight from the heart. No man was a more agreeable
companion. In 1884, when the University of Edinburgh celebrated its
tercentenary, he happened to be Lord Rector, and in that capacity had
to preside over the festivities. Although a stranger to Scotland, and
a