But even apart from questions of humane sentiment and the supreme interests of social legislation, I always felt in my intercourse with Lord Shaftesbury that it would have been impossible for him to act for long together in subordination to, or even in concert with, any political leader.  Resolute, self-reliant, inflexible; hating compromise; never turning aside by a hair’s-breadth from the path of duty; incapable of flattering high or low; dreading leaps in the dark, but dreading more than anything else the sacrifice of principle to party—­he was essentially the type of politician who is the despair of the official wire-puller.

Oddly enough, Lord Palmerston was the statesman with whom, despite all ethical dissimilarity, he had the most sympathy, and this arose partly from their near relationship and partly from Lord Palmerston’s easy-going habit of placing his ecclesiastical patronage in Lord Shaftesbury’s hands.  It was this unseen but not unfelt power as a confidential yet irresponsible adviser that Lord Shaftesbury really enjoyed and, indeed, his political opinions were too individual to have allowed of binding association with either political party.  He was, in the truest and best sense of the word, a Conservative.  To call him a Tory would be quite misleading.  He was not averse from Roman Catholic emancipation.  He took no prominent part against the first Reform Bill.  His resistance to the admission of the Jews to Parliament was directed rather against the method than the principle.  Though not friendly to Women’s Suffrage, he said:  “I shall feel myself bound to conform to the national will, but I am not prepared to stimulate it.”

But while no blind and unreasoning opponent of all change, he had a deep and lively veneration for the past.  Institutions, doctrines, ceremonies, dignities, even social customs, which had descended from old time, had for him a fascination and an awe.  In his high sense of the privileges and the duties of kingship, of aristocracy, of territorial possession, of established religions, he recalled the doctrine of Burke; and he resembled that illustrious man in his passionate love of principle, in his proud hatred of shifts and compromises, in his contempt for the whole race of mechanical politicians and their ignoble strife for place and power.

When Lord Derby formed his Government in 1866, on the defeat of Lord Russell’s second Reform Bill, he endeavoured to obtain the sanction of Lord Shaftesbury’s name and authority by offering him a seat in his Cabinet.  This offer was promptly declined; had it been accepted, it might have had an important bearing on the following event, which was narrated to me by Lord Shaftesbury in 1882.  One winter evening in 1867 he was sitting in his library in Grosvenor Square, when the servant told him that there was a poor man waiting to see him.  The man was shown in, and proved to be a labourer from Clerkenwell, and one of the innumerable recipients of the old Earl’s charity.  He