the detection of which always particularly amused Lord
Cromer.

In 1908 he took a fancy to Theognis, whose works I procured for him at
the House of Lords, since he happened not to possess that writer at 36
Wimpole Street. He would settle himself in an armchair in the
smoking-room, his eyes close to the book, and plunge into those dark
waters of the gnomic elegist. He loved maxims and the expression of
principles, and above all, as I have said, the discovery of identities
of thought between the modern and the ancient world. He was delighted
when he found in Theognis the proverb about having an ox on the tongue.
I suppose this was quite well known to the learned, but the charm of the
matter for Lord Cromer was that he was not deterred by any fear of
academic criticism, and found out these things for himself. He read
Theognis as other people read Rudyard Kipling, for stimulus and
pleasure. He swept merely "scholarly" questions aside. He read his
_Iliad_ like a love-letter, but he was bored to death by discussions
about the authorship of the Homeric epics.

In one matter, the serene good sense which was so prominently
characteristic of Lord Cromer tinged his attitude towards the classics.
He was not at all like Thomas Love Peacock, who entreated his friends to
desist from mentioning anything that had happened in the world for the
last 2,000 years. On the contrary, Lord Cromer was always bent on
binding the old and the new together. It was very noticeable in his
conversation that he was fond of setting classic instances side by side
with modern ones. If books dealt with this parallelism, they exercised a
charm over Lord Cramer's imagination which may sometimes have led him a
little astray about their positive value. I recall a moment when he was
completely under the sway of M. Ferrero's _Greatness and Decline of
Rome_, largely because of the pertinacity with which the Italian
historian compares Roman institutions with modern social arrangements.
It was interesting to the great retired proconsul to discover that
Augustus "considered that in the majority of cases subject peoples had
to be governed through their own national institutions." It is scarcely
necessary to point out that these analogies form the basis of what is,
perhaps, Lord Cromer's most important late essay, his _Ancient and
Modern Imperialism_.

In a practical administration of India and Egypt, those oceans of
unplumbed antiquity, the ordinary British offici