Great as were Lyall’s literary attributes and powers of initiation and construction, his critical faculties were even more fully developed.  This made him at times somewhat difficult to deal with, for he was very critical and cautious in the tendering of advice as regards any new policy or any suggested change.  When once he could see his way through difficulties, or came to the conclusion that those difficulties must be faced, then his caution and critical instincts disappeared, and he was prepared to be as bold in the prosecution of what he advocated as he had previously been reluctant to start.

The mental attitude which Lord George Hamilton thus describes is by no means uncommon in the case of very conscientious and brilliantly intellectual men, such, for instance, as the late Lord Goschen, who possessed many characteristics in common with Lyall.  They can cite, in justification of their procedure, the authority of one who was probably the greatest man of action that the world has ever produced.  Roederer relates in his journal that on one occasion Napoleon said to him: 

Il n’y a pas un homme plus pusillanime que moi quand je fais un plan militaire; je me grossis tous les dangers et tous les maux possibles dans les circonstances; je suis dans une agitation tout a fait penible; je suis comme une fille qui accouche.  Et quand ma resolution est prise, tout est oublie, hors ce qui peut la faire reussir.

Within reasonable limits, caution is, indeed, altogether commendable.  On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that, carried to excess, it is at times apt to paralyse all effective and timely action, to disqualify those who exercise it from being pilots possessed of sufficient daring to steer the ship of state in troublous times, and to exclude them from the category of men of action in the sense in which that term is generally used.  In spite of my great affection for Alfred Lyall, I am forced to admit that, in his case, caution was, I think, at times carried to excess.  He never appeared to me to realise sufficiently that the conduct of public affairs, notably in this democratic age, is at best a very rough unscientific process; that it is occasionally necessary to make a choice of evils or to act on imperfect evidence; and that at times, to quote the words which I remember Lord Northbrook once used to me, it is even better to have a wrong opinion than to have no definite opinion at all.  So early as 1868, he wrote to his mother, “There are many topics on which I have not definitely discovered what I do think”; and to the day of his death he very generally maintained in respect to current politics the frame of mind set forth in this very characteristic utterance.  Every general has to risk the loss of a battle, and every active politician has at times to run the risk of making a wrong forecast.  Before running that risk, Lyall was generally inclined to exhaust the chances of error to an extent which was often impossible, or at all events hurtful.