[APPENDIX]
LORD LYONS IN PRIVATE LIFE.
By Mrs. Wilfrid Ward.
It is not uncommon to find a seeming contradiction between the official and the private characters of the same individual. Extreme reserve, for instance, even an astonishing power of silence in conducting official work, may not indicate the same power of silence in private life, or the same reserve in the life of the affections. In Lord Lyons there was no such contrast, and no attempt to depict him could pretend to penetrate his extreme reserve as to his deeper feelings. This reticence on his part must severely limit any account of his vie intime. Moreover, curiously enough there is another difficulty in describing him which lies in quite an opposite direction. Lord Lyons had a keen sense of the ridiculous, and he loved the absolute relaxation of talking pure nonsense which, however amusing at the moment, would hardly bear the strain of repetition. Indeed, very little can be added to the history of the public life of a man so absolutely reticent as to his feelings, his thoughts, and his opinions, which he further concealed rather than revealed by an almost burlesque habit of talking nonsense among his intimates.
It would be easy to give many instances of his gift for silence when he did not wish to be 'drawn' by his interlocutor. A little story told to me by the late Sir Edward Blount is a case in point.
Sir Edward, waiting to see Lord Lyons at the Embassy, heard talking in the next room which lasted some time, and soon distinguished the voice of M. Blowitz. As soon as he was alone with Lord Lyons he said that he felt obliged to warn him that, if he had liked, he could have overheard his conversation with the journalist.
'You might,' was the answer, 'have overheard what was said by M. Blowitz, but you could not have heard anything said by me for the good reason that I said nothing at all!'
It was never known to anybody, as far as it is possible to ascertain, whether Lord Lyons had ever even contemplated marriage, though he certainly did not recommend celibacy. 'Matrimony,' he constantly used to repeat—slightly varying the phrase in his favourite Rasselas—'may have thorns, but celibacy has no roses.'
There was at one moment, while he was attached to the Embassy at Rome, a rumour that he was engaged to be married. Hearing something of it he inquired of a lady friend whether she could tell him to whom he was supposed to be attached, and later on he discovered that she was herself the person in question!