ctory children? "Oh, if you'd only have the goodness to leave them
alone!" Free Trade was a delusion; the ballot was nonsense; and there
was no such thing as a democracy.

Nevertheless, he was not a reactionary; he was simply an opportunist.
The whole duty of government, he said, was "to prevent crime and to
preserve contracts." All one could really hope to do was to carry on. He
himself carried on in a remarkable manner--with perpetual compromises,
with fluctuations and contradictions, with every kind of weakness, and
yet with shrewdness, with gentleness, even with conscientiousness, and
a light and airy mastery of men and of events. He conducted the
transactions of business with extraordinary nonchalance. Important
persons, ushered up for some grave interview, found him in a
towselled bed, littered with books and papers, or vaguely shaving in a
dressing-room; but, when they went downstairs again, they would realise
that somehow or other they had been pumped. When he had to receive a
deputation, he could hardly ever do so with becoming gravity. The worthy
delegates of the tallow-chandlers, or the Society for the Abolition of
Capital Punishment, were distressed and mortified when, in the midst of
their speeches, the Prime Minister became absorbed in blowing a feather,
or suddenly cracked an unseemly joke. How could they have guessed that
he had spent the night before diligently getting up the details of their
case? He hated patronage and the making of appointments--a feeling rare
in Ministers. "As for the Bishops," he burst out, "I positively believe
they die to vex me." But when at last the appointment was made, it
was made with keen discrimination. His colleagues observed another
symptom--was it of his irresponsibility or his wisdom? He went to sleep
in the Cabinet.

Probably, if he had been born a little earlier, he would have been a
simpler and a happier man. As it was, he was a child of the eighteenth
century whose lot was cast in a new, difficult, unsympathetic age.
He was an autumn rose. With all his gracious amenity, his humour, his
happy-go-lucky ways, a deep disquietude possessed him. A sentimental
cynic, a sceptical believer, he was restless and melancholy at heart.
Above all, he could never harden himself; those sensitive petals
shivered in every wind. Whatever else he might be, one thing was
certain: Lord Melbourne was always human, supremely human--too human,
perhaps.

And now, with old age upon him, hi