"a half-lunatic man
of genius." Fenelon annoyed him still more; the spiritual experiences of
the Archbishop of Cambrai he found "almost incomprehensible." His
surprising, but after all perfectly consistent, comment on both Fenelon
and Pascal was, "How much more easy Buffon is to understand!"

He recommended all young men who intend to take a part in politics
carefully to study pre-Revolutionary history, and one of his objections
to the romantic literature of Rousseau downwards was that it did not
help such study. It was too individualistic in its direction. It tended,
moreover, Lord Cromer thought, to disturb the balance of judgment, that
"level-headedness" which he valued so highly, and had exercised with
such magnificent authority. He disliked the idea that genius involved a
lack of sanity, or, in other words, of self-command. He regretted that
Dryden had given general currency to this idea by his famous lines in
_Absalom and Achitophel_:--

"Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide;"

but Lord Cromer was himself, perhaps, too ready to account by insanity
for every odd or confused expression in literature. He had nothing to
say about Mazzini, whom he swept aside impatiently, except that he "was
a semi-lunatic," and I have heard him declare of Chatterton and
Verlaine--a strange couple--that they were a pair of madmen. He objected
violently to Baudelaire, but I think he knew very little about that
poet's works.

If I mention these things, it is because they seem to be necessary to
give human character to any sketch of the mind of Lord Cromer. He
himself hated mere eulogy, which he said had ruined most of the
biographies of the world. The official lives of Disraeli and Gladstone
did not escape a measure of his blame in this respect, and it will be
recalled that resentment against what he thought a shadowless portrait
led to his own very vivacious paper on Disraeli, which he afterwards
issued as a pamphlet. He was an avid reader of memoirs, and of political
memoirs in particular, but he almost always passed upon them the same
criticism--that they were too _public_. "I don't want Mr. ----," he
would say, "to tell me what I can learn for myself by turning up the
file of the _Morning Post_. I want him to tell me what I can't find out
elsewhere. And he need not be so very much afraid of hinting that his
hero had faults, for if he had not had defects we should never hav