on the Budget. But he said that he was not sure of his audience,
and then it was most painful to an orator to make a literary reference
which was not taken up. Once at Sheffield, when he was urging the
necessity of a strong Navy upon a large public meeting, he quoted
Swinburne's splendid lines:--

"All our past comes wailing in the wind,
And all our future thunders on the sea,"

without producing any effect at all. But the House of Lords is not an
illiterate audience, and I recollect that on one occasion, when Lord
Cromer himself was speaking on preferential treatment for the Colonies,
and quoted Prior:--

"Euphemia (that is Preference) serves to grace my measure,
But Chloe (that is Protection) is my real flame,"

the Peers received the couplet with hilarious appreciation.

He was very entertaining about the oddities of his life in the East, and
his stories were numberless. One was of a petition which he once
received from a young Egyptian with a grievance, which opened with these
words:--

"O Hell! Lordship's face grow red when he hear quite ghastly
behaviour of Public Works Department towards our humble servant."

He used to repeat these things with an inimitable chuckle of enjoyment.

We have been told that he who blows through bronze may breathe through
silver. The severe preoccupations of Lord Cromer's public life did not
prevent him from sedulously cultivating the art of verse. In 1903,
before his retirement from Egypt, he published a volume of _Paraphrases
and Translations from the Greek_, in the preparation or selection of
which I believe that he enjoyed the advice of Mr. Mackail. It was rather
unlucky that, with a view to propitiate the angry critics, Lord Cromer
prefixed to this little book a preface needlessly modest. He had no
cause to apologise so deeply for exercises which were both elegant and
learned. It is a curious fact that, in this collection of paraphrases,
the translator did not touch the Attic authors whom he knew so well--he
used to copy out pages of AEschylus and Sophocles in his loose Greek
script, with notes of his own--but dealt entirely with lyric and
epigrammatic poets of the Alexandrian age. Perhaps it seemed to him less
daring to touch them than to affront AEschylus. He was not quite sure
about these verses of his; he liked them, and then he was afraid that
they were unworthy of the original. Out in Cairo it was so difficult, he
said, to get a critical o