get information when he needs it. There
are some bits of metaphysics and some historical allusions scattered
over his novels, but these are mostly slight or superficial. He amused
himself and the public by now and then propounding doctrines on
agricultural matters, but would not appear to have mastered either
husbandry or any other economical or commercial subject. Such things
were not in his way. He had been so little in office as not to have
been forced to apply himself to them, while the tide of pure
intellectual curiosity had long since ebbed.

For so-called "sports" he had little taste. He liked to go mooning in
a meditative way round his fields and copses, and he certainly enjoyed
Nature; but there seems to be no solid evidence that the primrose was
his favourite flower. In his fondness for particular words and phrases
there was a touch of his artistic quality, and a touch also of the
cynical view that words are the counters with which the wise play
their game. There is a passage in _Contarini Fleming_ (a story into
which he has put a good deal of himself) where this is set out.
Contarini tells his father that he left college "because they taught
me only words, and I wished to learn ideas." His father answers, "Few
ideas are correct ones, and what are correct, no one can ascertain;
but with words we govern men."

He went on acting on this belief in the power of words till he
became the victim of his own phrases, just as people who talk
cynically for effect grow sometimes into real cynics. When he had
invented a phrase which happily expressed the aspect he wished his
view, or some part of his policy, to bear, he came to believe in
the phrase, and to think that the facts were altered by the colour
the phrase put upon them. During the contest for the extension of
the parliamentary franchise, he declared himself "in favour of
popular privileges, but opposed to democratic rights." When he was
accused of having assented, at the Congress of Berlin, to the
dismemberment of the Turkish Empire, he said that what had been done
was "not dismemberment, but consolidation." No statesman of recent
times has given currency to so many quasi-epigrammatic expressions:
"organised hypocrisy," "England dislikes coalitions," "plundering and
blundering," "peace with honour," "_imperium et libertas_," "a
scientific frontier," "I am on the side of the angels," are a few,
not perhaps the best, though the best remembered, of the many which