Albeit he was an earnest reformer, he was a warm advocate of strong and capable government, and, in writing to our common friend, Lord Morley, in 1882, he anathematised what he considered the weakness shown by the Gladstone Government in dealing with disorder in Ireland.  Himself not only the kindest, but also the most just and judicially-minded of men, he feared that a maudlin and misplaced sentimentalism would destroy the more virile elements in the national character.  “I should like,” he said, in words which must not, of course, be taken too literally, “a little more fierceness and honest brutality in the national temperament.”  His heart went out, in a manner which is only possible to those who have watched them closely at work, to those Englishmen, whether soldiers or civilians, who, but little known and even at times depreciated by their own countrymen, are carrying the fame, the glory, the justice and humanity of England to the four quarters of the globe.

The roving Englishman (he said) is the salt of English land....  Only those who go out of this civilised country, to see the rough work on the frontiers and in the far lands, properly understand what our men are like and can do....  They cannot manage a steam-engine, but they can drive restive and ill-trained horses over rough roads.

He felt—­and as one who has humbly dabbled in literature at the close of an active political life, I can fully sympathise with him—­that “when one has once taken a hand in the world’s affairs, literature is like rowing in a picturesque reach of the Thames after a bout in the open sea.”  Yet, in the case of Lyall, literature was not a matter of mere academic interest.  “His incessant study was history.”  He thought, with Lord Acton, that an historical student should be “a politician with his face turned backwards.”  His mind was eminently objective.  He was for ever seeking to know the causes of things; and though far too observant to push to extreme lengths analogies between the past and the present, he nevertheless sought, notably in the history of Imperial Rome, for any facts or commentaries gleaned from ancient times which might be of service to the modern empire of which he was so justly proud, and in the foundation of which the splendid service of which he was an illustrious member had played so conspicuous a part.  “I wonder,” he wrote in 1901, “how far the Roman Empire profited by high education.”

Lyall was by nature a poet.  Sir Mortimer Durand says, truly enough, that his volume of verses, “if not great poetry, as some hold, was yet true poetry.”  Poetic expressions, in fact, bubbled up in his mind almost unconsciously in dealing with every incident of his life.  Lord Tennyson tells us in his Memoir that one evening, when his father and mother were rowing across the Solent, they saw a heron.  His father described this incident in the following language:  “One dark heron flew over the sea, backed by