well on many occasions, from the day when he succeeded to the
    laborious duties relinquished by Lord Lyons; but never was it of
    greater advantage than in the protracted and difficult controversy
    concerning the Alabama claims.  This discussion it fell to the lot of
    Sir F. Bruce to conduct on the part of Her Majesty; and we divulge no
    secret when we state that it was in accordance with the late
    Minister’s repeated advice and exhortations that a wise overture
    towards a settlement was made by the present Government.  He had
    succeeded in establishing for himself relations of cordial friendship
    with Mr. Seward and the President, and probably there are few outside
    the circle of his own family who will be more shocked at the tidings
    of his death than the astute and keen-eyed old man with whom he had
    sustained incessant diplomatic fence.’

[12] It certainly was not without truth, that one of the local papers most
    opposed to him remarked that ’Lord Elgin had, beyond all doubt, a
    remarkable faculty of turning enemies into friends.’

[13] Spencerwood, the Governor’s private residence.

[14] Sir Edmund Head, who succeeded Lord Elgin as Governor-General of
    Canada in 1854, had examined him for a Merton Fellowship in 1833. 
    Those who knew him will recognise how singularly appropriate, in their
    full force, are the terms in which he is here spoken of.

CHAPTER VII.

FIRST MISSION TO CHINA.—­PRELIMINARIES.

ORIGIN OF THE MISSION—­APPOINTMENT OF LORD ELGIN—­MALTA—­EGYPT—­CEYLON—­
NEWS OF THE INDIAN MUTINY—­PENANG—­SINGAPORE—­DIVERSION OF TROOPS TO INDIA
—­ON BOARD THE ’SHANNON’—­HONG-KONG—­CHANGE OF PLANS—­CALCUTTA AND LORD
CANNING—­RETURN TO CHINA—­PERPLEXITIES—­CAPRICES OF CLIMATE—­ARRIVAL OF
BARON GROS—­PREPARATION FOR ACTION.

’The earlier incidents of the political rupture with the Chinese Commissioner Yeh, which occurred at Canton during the autumn of 1856, and which led to the appointment of a Special Mission to China, were too thoroughly canvassed at the time to render it necessary to renew here any discussion on their merits, or recall at length their details.  As the “Arrow” case derived its interest then from the debates to which it gave rise, and its effects on parties at home, rather than from any intrinsic value of its own, so does it now mainly owe its importance to the accidental circumstance, that it was the remote and insignificant cause which led to a total revolution in the foreign policy of the Celestial Empire, and to the demolition of most of those barriers which, while they were designed to restrict all intercourse from without, furnished the nations of the West with fruitful sources of quarrel and perpetual grievances.’

These words form the preface to the ’Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan,’ by Laurence Oliphant, then private secretary to Lord Elgin.  To that work we must refer our readers for a full and complete, as well as authentic, account of the occurrences which gave occasion to the following letters.  A brief sketch only will here be given.