“Of what profit is it to a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

The soul here is freedom from self.

Lord Rosebery was too thin-skinned, too conscious to be really happy.  He was not self-swayed like Gladstone, but he was self-enfolded.  He came into power at a time when the fortunes of the Liberal party were at their lowest; and this, coupled with his peculiar sensibility, put a severe strain upon him.  Some people thought that he was a man of genius, morbidly sensitive shrinking from public life and the Press, cursed with insufficient ambition, sudden, baffling, complex and charming.  Others thought that he was a man irresistible to his friends and terrible to his enemies, dreaming of Empire, besought by kings and armies to put countries and continents straight, a man whose notice blasted or blessed young men of letters, poets, peers or politicians, who at once scared and compelled every one he met by his freezing silence, his playful smile, or the weight of his moral indignation:  the truth being that he was a mixture of both.

Lord Salisbury told me he was the best occasional speaker he had ever heard; and certainly he was an exceptionally gifted person.  He came to Glen constantly in my youth and all of us worshipped him.  No one was more alarming to the average stranger or more playful and affectionate in intimacy than Lord Rosebery.

An announcement in some obscure paper that he was engaged to be married to me came between us in later years.  He was seriously annoyed and thought I ought to have contradicted this.  I had never even heard the report till I got a letter in Cairo from Paris, asking if I would not agree to the high consideration and respectful homages of the writer and allow her to make my chemises.  After this, the matter went completely out of my head, till, meeting him one day in London, I was greeted with such frigid self-suppression that I felt quite exhausted.  A few months later, our thoughtful Press said I was engaged to be married to Arthur Balfour.  As I had seen nothing of Lord Rosebery since he had gone into a period of long mourning, I was acclimatised to doing without him, but to lose Arthur’s affection and friendship would have been an irreparable personal loss to me.  I need not have been afraid, for this was just the kind of rumour that challenged his insolent indifference to the public and the Press.  Seeing me come into Lady Rothschild’s ball-room one night, he left the side of the man he was conversing with and with his elastic step stalked down the empty parquet floor to greet me.  He asked me to sit down next to him in a conspicuous place; and we talked through two dances.  I was told afterwards that some one who had been watching us said to him: 

“I hear you are going to marry Margot Tennant.”

To which he replied: 

“No, that is not so.  I rather think of having a career of my own.”

Lord Rosebery’s two antagonists, Sir William Harcourt and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, were very different men.