14 MAY 1892, Page 3

The Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society for May, contain

a charming paper on the late Lord Arthur Russell, contributed, we believe, by Sir M. E. Grant-Duff, the President of the Society. It represents Lord Arthur as the studious, observant, cultivated Liberal he was, with large knowledge of all the higher thought of Europe, but not the less earnest patriotism for all these cosmopolitan sympathies. He combined, indeed, the detachment of view of the intellectual foreigner with the strong British prepossessions of one of the oldest and most popular of English families. And Sir M. Grant-Duff tells us, what we did not know, that he was an exact, faithful, and very copious correspondent. "If his letters to his brother when the latter was serving abroad at Rome and Berlin have been preserved, as I hope and think has been the case, and if his brother's to him are also safe, they will illustrate many interesting moments in the Victorian era." Lord Arthur was usually "silent in several languages." But, luckily, the letters of the silent are twice as well worth reading as the letters of the voluble. The taciturn know what is not worth saying.