Lord Randolph's talk was not much more than thinking aloud. His financial opinions which became afterward, like those of all Chancellors of the Exchequer, rigid, were in process of formation. Now and then he asked a question about the Treasury in America but for the most part his monologue was a soliloquy. I know few things more instructive than to see a mind like his at work. He thought as he talked on, but the sentences fell from his lips clean-cut and finished. He was not announcing conclusions nor laying down laws. Finance was then comparatively new to him. He would take up any idea or view as it occurred to him, hold it before him, look at it from all sides, and either drop it or put it on a shelf till he could see how it fitted with the next. I said as he pressed a proposal—I have forgotten what:

"You break with all tradition."

"What do you suppose I am here for? Have you ever known me to adopt an opinion because somebody else had adopted it?"

And in truth I had not, nor had any one. Part of his charm lay in his independence; and a large part. He was fettered by no restrictions nor overborne by any authority. Once only, as he told me at another time, did he find himself "in the presence of a superior being," Mr. Gladstone, to wit. "I could argue, but before the man himself I bent." But I have related that story in the paper referred to above. Yet we find Lord Randolph telling Prince Bismarck, who asked him whether the English people would exchange Mr. Gladstone for General Caprivi:

"The English people would cheerfully give you Mr. Gladstone for nothing but you would find him an expensive present."

Of Prince Bismarck, however, Lord Randolph seems not to have received the same impression he did of Mr. Gladstone, high as is the tribute he pays him. There had been a little friction. In 1888, in Berlin, Prince Bismarck had refused to see Lord Randolph, or to meet him at lunch at Count Herbert's, and he calls the great Chancellor a grincheux old creature who kept away because Lord Randolph had used all his influence "to prevent Lord Salisbury from being towed in his wake." But at Kissingen, in 1893—Lord Randolph, alas, being no longer in a position to influence, nor Prince Bismarck, alas, any longer Chancellor of the Empire he had created—there was a meeting. Lord Randolph wrote an account of it to his mother, and the letter, a most picturesque letter, is given in the Life. Lord Randolph felt the fascination the Prince could exercise when he chose, and pays due tribute to him. But it is admiration, not awe, he feels in the great German's presence. In truth, Lord Randolph had said savage things of Prince Bismarck in days past, as well as of Mr. Gladstone. "If you want to sup with him you must have a long spoon."

The domestic and personal side of Lord Randolph had a fascination quite other than that of his political life. Simplicity was one note of it; that and the absolute freedom from affectation which is natural to a man whose courage is equal to every demand. I began meaning to be domestic and personal but I shrink from saying most of the things I should like to. Two summers in succession he had an old Elizabethan house near Egham, known as Great Forsters; the house still encompassed by a moat, mostly dry. I had always thought him at his best in his own home, where, whoever might be his guest, he recognized his obligations as host, and his manner softened and the lawlessness of his tongue was restrained.

This impression grew stronger with these visits. It happened that two of their guests, his and Lady Randolph's, were attractive to both of them as well as to the rest of the world. The two were the beautiful Duchess of Leinster and Sir Henry Drummond Wolff. The Duchess of Leinster was at that time in the full splendour of her loveliness. I had never seen her except at a ball or dinner or on some other social occasion, in the glory of a toilet and of her shoulders and diamonds, when she was perhaps the most resplendent object to be seen in London. At Great Forsters she went about during the day in the simplest of gowns. She was less dazzling but not less charming. As for Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, he and Lord Randolph set each other off. Their intimacy was both political and personal. If I may use such a word of two men, I should say they were on affectionate terms. Both of them were capable of cynicism but that only made their affection the more striking. There were no ties of blood but as you looked on this little group and listened to their talk, which was both easy and brilliant, you felt as if you were present at a family gathering.

II

Lord Randolph Churchill despised two things which (I am told) are much respected in the United States; public opinion and money. Of course, in public life he had to take account of public opinion and he was a very good judge of it, and in 1886 he taught his party to take account of it. But what I mean is that, while he admitted and asserted the necessity of calculating forces as the first business of a statesman, he was never subservient to that majority which he sought to make his own. He was not frightened by names and he did not shrink from unpopularity. He told Prince Bismarck at Kissingen that nobody in England cared a rap what the papers said, which meant that he (Lord Randolph) did not care a rap. Yet at opportune moments he used the Press with skill. Or, if I ought not to say used, he availed himself adroitly of the Press to serve his own purpose. His midnight journey to The Times office in Printing House Square in order to tell Mr. Buckle that he had resigned from Lord Salisbury's Ministry and that his resignation had been accepted is a case in point. It is just conceivable that Mr. Buckle took, or might have taken, a more lenient view of Lord Randolph's coup de tête from having the exclusive news of it. It is, at any rate, conceivable that the resigning Minister imagined, or hoped, a friendly opinion would be expressed.