After so solemn a tribute from so great a saint, it seems almost a profanity—­certainly a bathos—­to add any more secular touches.  Yet, if the portrait is even to approach completeness, it must be remembered that we are not describing an ascetic or a recluse, but the most polished gentleman, the most fascinating companion, the most graceful and attractive figure, in the Vanity Fair of social life.  He is full of ardour, zeal, and emotion, endowed with a physical activity which corresponds to his mental alertness, and young with that perpetual youth which is the reward of “a conscience void of offence toward God and toward man.”

Clarendon, in one of his most famous portraits, depicts a high-souled Cavalier, “of inimitable sweetness and delight in conversation, of a glowing and obliging humanity and goodness to mankind, and of a primitive simplicity and integrity of life.”  He was writing of Lord Falkland:  he described Lord Halifax.

IV

LORD AND LADY RIPON[*]

[Footnote *:  George Frederick Samuel Robinson, first Marquess of Ripon, K.G. (1827-1909); married in 1851 his cousin Henrietta Ann Theodosia Vyner.]

The Character of the Happy Warrior is, by common consent, one of the noblest poems in the English language.  A good many writers and speakers seem to have discovered it only since the present war began, and have quoted it with all the exuberant zeal of a new acquaintance.  But, were a profound Wordsworthian in general, and a devotee of this poem in particular, to venture on a criticism, it would be that, barring the couplet about Pain and Bloodshed, the character would serve as well for the “Happy Statesman” as for the “Happy Warrior.”  There is nothing specially warlike in the portraiture of the man

  “Who, with a toward or untoward lot,
  Prosperous or adverse, to his mind or not,
  Plays in the many games of life, that one
  Where what he most doth value must be won;
  Whom neither shape of danger can dismay,
  Not thought of tender happiness betray;
  Who, not content that former worth stand fast,
  Looks forward, persevering to the last,
  From well to better, daily self-surpast.”

These lines always recurred to my memory when circumstances brought me into contact with the second Lord Ripon, whose friendship I enjoyed from my first entrance into public life.

I know few careers in the political life of modern England more interesting or more admirable than his, and none more exactly consonant with Wordsworth’s eulogy: 

  “Who, not content that former worth stand fast,
  Looks forward, persevering to the last,
  From well to better, daily self-surpast.”