o much
success. Not merely was he the saviour and organizer of New Zealand,
South Australia, and South Africa; not merely was he an explorer of
the deserts of New Holland, and a successful campaigner in New Zealand
bush-warfare, but he found time, by way of recreation, to be an
ethnologist, a literary pioneer, and an ardent book-collector who
twice was generous enough to found libraries with the books which had
been the solace and happiness of his working life. A mere episode of
this life was the fanning of the spark of Imperialism into flame in
England thirty years ago. There are those who will think the eloquence
with which he led the New Zealand democracy, the results he indirectly
obtained for it, and the stand which at the extreme end of his career
he made with success for a popular basis for the inevitable Australian
Federation, among the least of his feats. To the writer they do not
seem so. Before a life so strenuous, so dramatic, and so fruitful,
criticism--at least colonial criticism--is inclined respectfully to
lay down its pen. But when we come to the man himself, to the mistakes
he made, and the misunderstandings he caused, and to the endeavour to
give some sort of sketch of what he _was_, the task is neither easy
nor always pleasant. I have known those who thought Grey a nobler
Gracchus and a more practical Gordon; and I have known those who
thought him a mean copy of Dryden's Achitophel. His island-retreat,
where Froude described him as a kind of evangelical Cincinnatus,
seemed to others merely the convenient lurking-place of a political
rogue-elephant. The viceroy whose hated household the Adelaide
tradesmen would not deal with in 1844, and the statesman whose visit
to Adelaide in 1891 was a triumphal progress, the public servant whom
the Duke of Buckingham insulted in 1868, and the empire-builder whom
the Queen delighted to honour in 1894, were one and the same man.
So were the Governor against whom New Zealanders inveighed as
an arch-despot in 1848, and the popular leader denounced as
arch-demagogue by some of the same New Zealanders thirty years
afterwards. In a long life of bustle and change his strong but mixed
character changed and moulded circumstances, and circumstances also
changed and moulded him. The ignorant injustice of some of his Downing
Street masters might well have warped his disposition even more than
it did. The many honest and acute men who did not keep step with Grey,
who were disap