his love of antiquity. Lord Cromer made no pretension to be what is
called an "exact" scholar, but I think it is a mistake to say, as has
been alleged, that he did not take up the study of Latin and Greek until
middle life. It is true that he enjoyed no species of university
training, but passed from Woolwich straight into the diplomatic service.
In 1861, at the age of twenty, he was appointed A.D.C. to Sir Henry
Storks in the Ionian Islands, and I believe that one of the first things
he did was to look about for an instructor in ancient Greek. He found
one in a certain Levantine in Corfu, whose name was Romano, and their
studies opened with the odes of Anacreon. Whether this was a
coincidence, or a compliment to Mrs. Baring, I do not know. This is a
rather different account from what Lord Cromer gave in the preface to
his _Paraphrases_, but I report it on his own later authority.

If his scholarship was not professorial, it was at least founded upon a
genuine and enduring love of the ancient world. I suppose that for fifty
years, after the episode in Corfu, however busy he was, however immersed
in Imperial policy, he rarely spent a day without some communing with
antiquity. He read Latin, and still more Greek, not in the spirit of a
pedant or a pedagogue, but genuinely for pleasure and refreshment. He
had no vanity about it, and if he had any doubt as to the meaning of a
passage he would "consult the crib," as he used to say. We may
conjecture further that he did not allow his curiosity to be balked by
the barrier of a hopelessly obscure passage, but leaped over it, and
went on. He always came back to Homer, whom he loved more than any other
writer of the world, and particularly to the _Iliad_, which I think he
knew nearly by heart. But he did not, as some pundits consider dignified
and necessary, confine himself to the reading of the principal classics
in order to preserve a pure taste. On the contrary, Lord Cromer,
especially towards the close of his life, pushed up into all the byways
of the Silver Age. As he invariably talked about the books he happened
to be reading, it was easy to trace his footsteps. Eight or nine years
ago he had a sudden passion for Empedocles, whose fragments he had found
collected and translated by Mr. Leonard, an American. Lord Cromer used
to march into the Library, and greet me by calling out, "Do you know?
Empedocles says" something or other, probably some parallelism with a
modern phrase,