without producing any effect at all. But the House of Lords is not an illiterate audience, and I recollect that on one occasion, when Lord Cromer himself was speaking on preferential treatment for the Colonies, and quoted Prior:—
"Euphemia (that is Preference) serves to grace my measure,
But Chloe (that is Protection) is my real flame,"
the Peers received the couplet with hilarious appreciation.
He was very entertaining about the oddities of his life in the East, and his stories were numberless. One was of a petition which he once received from a young Egyptian with a grievance, which opened with these words:—
"O Hell! Lordship's face grow red when he hear quite ghastly behaviour of Public Works Department towards our humble servant."
He used to repeat these things with an inimitable chuckle of enjoyment.
We have been told that he who blows through bronze may breathe through silver. The severe preoccupations of Lord Cromer's public life did not prevent him from sedulously cultivating the art of verse. In 1903, before his retirement from Egypt, he published a volume of Paraphrases and Translations from the Greek, in the preparation or selection of which I believe that he enjoyed the advice of Mr. Mackail. It was rather unlucky that, with a view to propitiate the angry critics, Lord Cromer prefixed to this little book a preface needlessly modest. He had no cause to apologise so deeply for exercises which were both elegant and learned. It is a curious fact that, in this collection of paraphrases, the translator did not touch the Attic authors whom he knew so well—he used to copy out pages of Æschylus and Sophocles in his loose Greek script, with notes of his own—but dealt entirely with lyric and epigrammatic poets of the Alexandrian age. Perhaps it seemed to him less daring to touch them than to affront Æschylus. He was not quite sure about these verses of his; he liked them, and then he was afraid that they were unworthy of the original. Out in Cairo it was so difficult, he said, to get a critical opinion.
Among his unpublished translations there is one, from a fragment of Euripides, which should not be lost, if only because Lord Cromer himself liked it better than any other of his versions. It runs:—
"I learn what may be taught;
I seek what may be sought;
My other wants I dare
To ask from Heaven in prayer."
Of his satirical vers-de-société, which it amused him to distribute in private, he never, I believe, gave any to the world, but they deserve preservation. Some serious reflections on the advantages of the British occupation of Egypt close with the quotation:—