atesman we ever had. For the fifteen years up
till about 1906, he seemed like the greatest man ever born a citizen of
Canada. Before that period he was a romance. After it he was a
national hallucination. The last three years of his life he was a
tragedy.

Yet the tragedy kept on smiling. Half a century of smiles. We never
had a statesman who could smile so potently. Never one with such
mellifluous music in his voice, such easy grace in his style, such a
cardinal's hauteur when he wanted to be alone, and such a fascinating
urbanity when he wanted to impress a company, a caucus or a crowd. The
Romist whom Orangemen admired, the Frenchman who made an intellectual
hobby of British democracy, the poetic statesman who read Dickens and
re-read in two languages Uncle Tom's Cabin and sometimes played the
flute, and the Premier of a bilingual country who had a passion for the
study of the war which emancipated the negro, was the kaleidoscopic
enigma of Canadian public life.

Laurier was nearly all things to all men. He was sometimes many things
to himself. He idolized himself and laughed at himself. He venerated
British institutions and passionately loved Quebec. He came to his
flowering period in a party of Free Trade and went to seed in a party
committed to a species of protection. He spoke English as fluently as
Bach wrote fugues, and with more passion and beauty of utterance than
any of our English-Canadian orators. One moment he could be as
debonair as Beau Brummel, the next as forbidding and repellent as a
modern Caesar. He was consistently the best-dressed public man in
Canada. A misfitting coat to him was as grievous as a misplaced verb
in a peroration. He superficially loved many things. Life was to him,
even apart from politics, a gracious delight. He knew how to pose, to
feign affability and to be sincere. With more culture Laurier would
have been the most exquisite dilettante of his age. But he cared
little for poetry in verse, not much for fine music, had small taste
for _objets d'art_ or the precious in anything. His greatest affection
was in his home, his greatest charm in fine manners, his master passion
in speech, and in managing Cabinets to win elections for the party
which to him meant a greater and more inspiring Canada. We have had
better debaters; but never a man except himself who in the House could
make a sort of grand music out of an apologetic oration on National
Transcontinenta