places, but even then
his most telling argument seems to have been less that codification was
good in itself than that success in passing a code would be a feather in
the Government cap. Up to 1876 he had not even got so far. Russell
Gurney, indeed, had helped him, and Coleridge had shown an interest in
his work; but the general answer to his appeals was even more provoking
than opposition; it was the reply of stolid indifference.

In India his hands had been free. There he had really done a genuine and
big stroke of work. The contrast to English methods, and the failure of
his attempts to drive his ideas into the heads of any capable allies,
had strengthened his antipathy to the home system, though it had not
discouraged him from work. But now at last he had made a real and
enthusiastic convert; and that convert a Governor-General, who would be
able to become an effective agent in applying his ideas. The longing for
real sympathy, scarcely perhaps admitted even to himself, had been
always in existence, and its full gratification stimulated his new
friendship to a rapid growth. Lord Lytton left for India on March 1,
1876. Before he left, Fitzjames had already written for him an
elaborate exposition of the Indian administrative system, which Lytton
compared to a 'policeman's bull's-eye.' It lighted up the mysteries of
Indian administration. Fitzjames writes to him on the day of his
departure: 'You have no conception of the pleasure which a man like me
feels in meeting with one who really appreciates and is willing to make
use of the knowledge which he has gained with great labour and much
thought. I have had compliments of all sorts till I have become almost
sick of them, but you have paid me the one compliment which goes
straight to my heart--the compliment of caring to hear what I have to
say and seeing the point of it.' 'You have managed,' he afterwards says,
'to draw me out of my shell as no one else ever did.' Three years later
he still dwells upon the same point. You, he says (January 27, 1879)
'are the only prominent public man who ever understood my way of looking
at things, or thought it in the least worth understanding.' 'Others have
taken me for a clever fellow with dangerous views.' 'You have not only
understood me, but, in your warm-hearted, affectionate way, exaggerated
beyond all measure the value of my sayings and doings. You have not,
however, exaggerated in the least my regard for you, and my desire to