At Eton he had attracted the notice of his gifted tutor, “Billy Johnson,” who described him as “one of those who like the palm without the dust,” and predicted that he would “be an orator, and, if not a poet, such a man as poets delight in.”  It was a remarkably shrewd prophecy.  From Eton to Christ Church the transition was natural.  Lord Rosebery left Oxford without a degree, travelled, went into society, cultivated the Turf, and bestowed some of his leisure on the House of Lords.  He voted for the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, and generally took the line of what was then considered advanced Liberalism.

But it is worthy of note that the first achievement which brought him public fame was not political.  “Billy Rogers,” the well-known Rector of Bishopsgate, once said to me:  “The first thing which made me think that Rosebery had real stuff in him was finding him hard at work in London in August, when everyone else was in a country-house or on the Moors.  He was getting up his Presidential Address for the Social Science Congress at Glasgow in 1874.”  Certainly, it was an odd conjuncture of persons and interests.  The Social Science Congress, now happily defunct, had been founded by that omniscient charlatan, Lord Brougham, and its gatherings were happily described by Matthew Arnold:  “A great room in one of our dismal provincial towns; dusty air and jaded afternoon light; benches full of men with bald heads, and women in spectacles; and an orator lifting up his face from a manuscript written within and without.”  One can see the scene.  On this occasion the orator was remarkably unlike his audience, being only twenty-seven, very young-looking even for that tender age, smartly dressed and in a style rather horsy than professorial.  His address, we are told, “did not cut very deep, but it showed sympathetic study of social conditions, it formulated a distinct yet not extravagant programme, and it abounded in glittering phrases.”

Henceforward Lord Rosebery was regarded as a coming man, and his definite adhesion to Gladstone on the Eastern Question of 1876-1879 secured him the goodwill of the Liberal party.  The year 1878, important in politics, was not less important in Lord Rosebery’s career.  Early in the year he made a marriage which turned him into a rich man, and riches, useful everywhere, are specially useful in politics.  Towards the close of it he persuaded the Liberal Association of Midlothian to adopt Gladstone as their candidate.  There is no need to enlarge on the importance of a decision which secured the Liberal triumph of 1880, and made Gladstone Prime Minister for the second time.

When Gladstone formed his second Government he offered a place in it to Lord Rosebery, who, with sound judgment, declined what might have looked like a reward for services just rendered.  In 1881 he consented to take the Under-Secretaryship of the Home Department, with Sir William Harcourt as his chief; but the combination did not promise well, and ended rather abruptly in 1883.  When the Liberal Government was in the throes of dissolution, Lord Rosebery returned to it, entering the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal in 1885.  It was just at this moment that Matthew Arnold, encountering him in a country-house, thus described him:  “Lord Rosebery is very gay and ‘smart,’ and I like him very much.”