dible Lady Caroline,
"With pleasures too refined to please, With too much spirit to be
e'er at ease, With too much quickness to be ever taught, With too much
thinking to have common thought," was very nearly the destruction of
his life. When at last he emerged from the anguish and confusion of her
folly, her extravagance, her rage, her despair, and her devotion, he was
left alone with endless memories of intermingled farce and tragedy, and
an only son, who was an imbecile. But there was something else that he
owed to Lady Caroline. While she whirled with Byron in a hectic frenzy
of love and fashion, he had stayed at home in an indulgence bordering
on cynicism, and occupied his solitude with reading. It was thus that he
had acquired those habits of study, that love of learning, and that wide
and accurate knowledge of ancient and modern literature, which formed so
unexpected a part of his mental equipment. His passion for reading never
deserted him; even when he was Prime Minister he found time to
master every new important book. With an incongruousness that was
characteristic, his favourite study was theology. An accomplished
classical scholar, he was deeply read in the Fathers of the Church;
heavy volumes of commentary and exegesis he examined with scrupulous
diligence; and at any odd moment he might be found turning over the
pages of the Bible. To the ladies whom he most liked, he would lend some
learned work on the Revelation, crammed with marginal notes in his own
hand, or Dr. Lardner's "Observations upon the Jewish Errors with respect
to the Conversion of Mary Magdalene." The more pious among them had high
hopes that these studies would lead him into the right way; but of this
there were no symptoms in his after-dinner conversations.

The paradox of his political career was no less curious. By temperament
an aristocrat, by conviction a conservative, he came to power as the
leader of the popular party, the party of change. He had profoundly
disliked the Reform Bill, which he had only accepted at last as
a necessary evil; and the Reform Bill lay at the root of the very
existence, of the very meaning, of his government. He was far too
sceptical to believe in progress of any kind. Things were best as they
were or rather, they were least bad. "You'd better try to do no good,"
was one of his dictums, "and then you'll get into no scrapes." Education
at best was futile; education of the poor was positively dangerous. The
fa