career he made with success for a popular basis for the inevitable Australian Federation, among the least of his feats.  To the writer they do not seem so.  Before a life so strenuous, so dramatic, and so fruitful, criticism—­at least colonial criticism—­is inclined respectfully to lay down its pen.  But when we come to the man himself, to the mistakes he made, and the misunderstandings he caused, and to the endeavour to give some sort of sketch of what he was, the task is neither easy nor always pleasant.  I have known those who thought Grey a nobler Gracchus and a more practical Gordon; and I have known those who thought him a mean copy of Dryden’s Achitophel.  His island-retreat, where Froude described him as a kind of evangelical Cincinnatus, seemed to others merely the convenient lurking-place of a political rogue-elephant.  The viceroy whose hated household the Adelaide tradesmen would not deal with in 1844, and the statesman whose visit to Adelaide in 1891 was a triumphal progress, the public servant whom the Duke of Buckingham insulted in 1868, and the empire-builder whom the Queen delighted to honour in 1894, were one and the same man.  So were the Governor against whom New Zealanders inveighed as an arch-despot in 1848, and the popular leader denounced as arch-demagogue by some of the same New Zealanders thirty years afterwards.  In a long life of bustle and change his strong but mixed character changed and moulded circumstances, and circumstances also changed and moulded him.  The ignorant injustice of some of his Downing Street masters might well have warped his disposition even more than it did.  The many honest and acute men who did not keep step with Grey, who were disappointed in him, or repelled by and embittered against him, were not always wrong.  Some of his eulogists have been silly.  But the student of his peculiar nature must be an odd analyst who does not in the end conclude that Grey was on the whole more akin to the Christian hero painted by Froude and Olive Schreiner than to the malevolent political chess-player of innumerable colonial leader-writers.

Grey had the knightly virtues—­courage, courtesy, and self-command.  His early possession of official power in remote, difficult, thinly-peopled outposts gave him self-reliance as well as dignity.  Naturally fond of devious ways and unexpected moves, he learned to keep his own counsel and to mask his intentions; he never even seemed frank.  Though wilful and quarrelsome, he kept guard over his tongue, but, pen in hand, became an evasive, obstinate controversialist with a coldly-used power of exasperation.  He learned to work apart, and practised it so long that he became unable to co-operate, on equal terms, with any fellow-labourer.  He would lead, or would go alone.  Moreover, so far as persons went, his antipathies were stronger than his affections, and led him to play with principles and allies.  Those who considered themselves his natural friends were never astonished to find him operating against their flank to the delight of the common enemy.  Fastidiously indifferent to money, he was greedy of credit; could be generous to inferiors, but not to rivals; could be grateful to God, but hardly to man.