at Rome, he was very willing to go. But
public interest stood in the way. He had made for himself an exceptional
place at St. Petersburg. No one could be found to replace him
adequately, and the Tsar expressed a desire that his departure should be
postponed. He consented to stay on, and the next two years of work in
that climate, together with the death in 1891 of his only son, broke
his spirit and his strength. Too late he went in search of health, first
to the Crimea and then to Switzerland. Death came to him as the winter
of 1893 was approaching, when he was at Montreux on the Lake of Geneva,
close to the home of his ancestors.

The impression which he made on his friends and colleagues is clear and
consistent, and the ignorance of the general public about men of his
profession justifies a few quotations. Sir Louis Mallet brackets him
with Sir James Hudson[45] and Lord Cromer as 'the most admirable trio of
public servants he had known'. Sir William White speaks of him and Odo
Russell as 'two giants of the diplomatic service'. Lord Acton, who knew
Europe as well as any Foreign Minister, and weighed his words, refers to
him in 1884 as 'our only strong diplomatist', and again 'as a strong
man, resolute, ready, well-informed and with some amount of real
resource'. More than one Foreign Secretary has borne testimony to the
value of Morier's dispatches; and Sir Charles Dilke, who, without
holding the portfolio himself, often shaped our foreign policy and was
an expert in European questions, is still more emphatic about his
intellectual powers, though he thinks that Morier's imperious temper
made him 'impossible in a small place'. Sir Horace Rumbold,[46] in his
_Recollections_, has many references to him, especially as he was in
earlier years. He speaks of Morier's 'prodigious fund of spirits that
made him the most entertaining, but not always the safest, of
companions'; 'of his imperious, not over-tolerant disposition'; 'of the
curious compound that he was of the thoughtless, thriftless Bohemian and
the cool, calculating man of the world'; of his 'exceptionally powerful
brain and unflagging industry'. Elsewhere he recalls Morier's journeys
among the Southern Slavs, in which he opened up a new field of
knowledge, and adds, 'since then he has made himself a thorough master
of German politics, and is, I believe, one of the few men whom Prince
Bismarck fears and correspondingly detests'.

[Note 45: Sir James Hudson, G.C.B.,