“I asked him if he meant to cat it.  He thought not, and said, ’But I like to have the power of doing so.’  I observed, hadn’t he just as well the power of doing so when the apples were in the dish on the table?  He laughed and said, ‘Not the full power.’”

Melbourne was full of prejudices and whims and hatreds, but his charity was boundless, and he always had a good word for an enemy.  He excused the career of Henry VIII to the Queen by saying, “You see, those women bothered him so.”  And when he was superseded by Peel, he combated the Queen’s dislike of her new premier, and did his best to put Peel in a favourable light.  When Peel made his first appearance at Windsor, shy and awkward, and holding himself like a dancing-master, it was Melbourne who broke the awkward pause by going up to Peel, and saying in an undertone, “For God’s sake, go and talk to the Queen!” When I was privileged to work through all Melbourne’s letters to the Queen, so carefully preserved and magnificently bound, I was greatly touched by the sweetness and tenderness of them, the gentle ironical flavour, the delicate freedom, and the little presents and remembrances they exchanged up to the end.

Melbourne can hardly be called a very great man,—­he had not the purpose or tenacity for that, and he thought both too contemptuously and too indulgently of human nature,—­but I know of no historical figure who is more wholly transfused and penetrated by the aroma of charm.  Everything that he did and said had some distinction and unusualness:  perceptive observation, ripe wisdom, and, with it all, the petulant attractiveness of the spoiled and engaging child.  And yet even so, one is baffled, because it is not the profundity or the gravity of what he said that impresses; it is rather the delicate and fantastic turn he gave to a thought or a phrase that makes his simplest deductions from life, his most sensible bits of counsel, appear to have something fresh and interesting about them, though prudent men have said much the same before, and said it heavily and solemnly.

Not that charm need be whimsical and freakish, though it is perhaps most beautiful when there is something of the child about it, something naive and unconventional.  There are men, of whom I think that Cardinal Newman was pre-eminently one, who seem to have had the appeal of a pathetic sort of beauty and even helplessness.  Newman seems to have always been surprised to find himself so interesting to others, and perhaps rather over-shadowed by the responsibility of it.  He was romantically affectionate, and the tears came very easily at the call of emotion.  Such incidents as that when Newman said good-bye to his bare room at Littlemore, and kissed the door-posts and the bed in a passion of grief, show what his intensity of feeling might be.