a rat. I hate his party. I hated him till I learned better,
for I hated that whole Salisbury crowd. They wanted to Cecil
everything. But I'll tell you, Sir, apropos of his visit to your
country, that in all those years he has never spoken of the United
States except with high respect and often with deep affection. I
should have caught him, if he had."

I went with him to a college in London one afternoon where he
delivered a lecture on Dryden, to prove that poetry can carry a
certain cargo of argument but that argument can't raise the
smallest flight of poetry. Dry as it sounds, it was as good a
literary performance as I recall I ever heard.

At his "family" luncheon, I've found Lord Milner or Lord Lansdowne,
or some literary man who had come in to find out from Lady Rayleigh
how to conduct the Empire or to write a great book; and the modest
old chemical Lord sits silent most of the time and now and then
breaks loose to confound them all with a pat joke. This is a
vigorous family, these Balfours. There's one of them (a cousin of
some sort, I think, of the Foreign Secretary) who is a Lord of much
of Scotland, about as tall as Ben Nevis is high--a giant of a man.
One of his sons was killed early in the war and one was
missing--whether dead or not he did not know. Mrs. Page expressed
her hope one day to the old man that he had had news from his
missing son. "No, no," said he simply, "and me lady is awearying."

We've been lucky, Mr. President, in these days of immortal horrors
and of difficulties between two governments that did not know one
another--uncommonly lucky, in the large chances that politics gives
for grave errors, to have had two such men in the Foreign Office
here as Lord Grey and Mr. Balfour. There are men who were
mentioned for this post that would have driven us mad--or to war
with them. I'm afraid I've almost outgrown my living hero worship.
There isn't worshipful material enough lying around in the world to
keep a vigorous reverence in practice. But these two gentlemen by
birth and culture have at least sometimes seemed of heroic size to
me. It has meant much to know them well. I shall always be grateful
to them, for in their quiet, forceful way they helped me much to
establish right relations with these people--which, pray God, I