PRIME MINISTERS AND SOME OTHERS.*

Ma. G. W. E. RUSSELL has a well-deserved and long-sustained reputation as an artist in agreeable printed talk about people and things. Here we have him once more, with varied impres- sions and recollections of seven Prime Ministers, of young " Will " Gladstone, and of many other men of note. The latter sections of the book are essays rather than talk: essays on Pan-Anglicanism, on Hatred and LOVC—he contests Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's thesis that "Hatred steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do "—essays on Revolution and Rations, on Freedom's New Friends, on Education and the Judge, The State and The Boy. Discussing Flaccidity, he recalls Liddon's gibe at the flabby leader in polities who an- nounced that he would " set his face against" a certain project " Yes, the dear man net his face, but hot as a flint—rather as a pudding."

Mr. Russell's essays are full of genial wisdom, without any straining after originality or epigram, and like all that he writes they are cursive and pleasant. But still and on he is at his best as the causeur about famous men. He understands, noae better, that for one :nen who is interested in the policy and the spirit of " Pam," ten are interested in what he ate at dinner. He was an heroic trencherman !—

" He ate two plates of turtle soup. He was then served very amply to cod mid oyster sauce. He then took a pate; after- wards he was helped to two very greasy-looking entreat He then despatched a plate of roast mutton ; there then appeared before him the largest, mid to my mind the hardest slice of hem that ever figured on the table of a nobleman, yet it disappeared just in time for him to answer the inquiry of the butler—' Snipe or pheasant, my lord I' He instantly replied 'Pheasant,' thus completing his ninth dish of meat at that meal. . . . In Ida eighties Pain used often to take a cab at night ; ' if you have both windows open, it is almost as good as walking home,' he measured the Speaker."

When one considers what Palmerston regarded as a meal for a healthy man, one may be thankful that he was not Prime Minister during last winter ; ho would have been irresistibly compelled, by personal famine, to make a premature and German Peace.

Not the least ph:temple figure in Mr. Russell's sheaf of Prime Ministers is his uncle, Lord John Russell, who formed his first Ministry in 1846. In his full awl varied life

" Ho had played bat, trap, and boll with Charles Fox : had been the travelling companion of Lord Holland bad corre- sponded with Tom Moore, debated with Francis Jeffrey, and rimed with Dr. Parr e had visited Melrose Abbey in the company of Sir Walter Scott, and criticized the acting of Mrs. Siddons: had conversed with Napoleon in his seclusion at Elba, and had ridden with the Duke of Wellington along the lines of Torres Vedras. He epitomized his whole career in the fines of Dryden-

' Not heaven itself upon the past hes power.

But what has been hes been, and I have had my l ow.'"

In Lord John Russell's era the Times was in the zenith of political power, and Delano was accustomed " to shape the whispers of Downing Street." Russell regarded with amused contempt the ambition of Helene to govern England. " I know that Mr. Delano is very angry because I did not kiss his hand instead of the Queen's."

Mr. Russell quotes Lord Shaftesbury on Disraeli :-

" Disraeli Prime Minister ! He is a Hebrew this is a good thing. Ho is a man sprung from an inferior station another good thing, in these dare, as showing the liberality of our in- stitutions. But he is a feper, without principle, without feeling, without regard to anything, human or divine, beyond hie own personal ambition."

Mr. Humphrey Paul said of Mr. Balfour, in his earlier phases, " he will always be held in honour wherever hairs areaplit"; and Mr. T. W. Russell described Samuel Whitbread, the subject of one of these papers, as " an umpire, perfectly impartial—except that ho never gives his own side out." We quote these as samples of Mr. Russell's lighter vein of anecdote.

Scott Holland wan a man who canted his sincere admiration. One unusual if not unique characteristic is noted thus

" Judged by the canons of strict art, Holland was perhaps greater as a speaker than as a preacher, though we listened to hia preaching as to ' a very lovely song.' He differed from moat people in this—that whereas most of us can restrain ourselves hotter on paper than when we are speaking, his pen ran away with him when he was writing a sermon, but on a platform he could keep his natural fluency in bounds."

"Freddy Les-eaon" is perhaps the brightest of all these • Prime 21 :Maim and Some Other, a Rack of ltem:hivem•es. Ry the Rt. Don. George W. E. Rurril. JAnnion: T. FLi:or Cowin. [DX al. neLl character studies—Freddy who remained Freddy into his eighty-ninth year, with a perennial youthfubreas of heart and mind, who enjoyed all the social pleasures and mental stimulus to be found at Chatsworth and Bowood and Woburn and Holland Park, In Lady Holland's liaise he had a second home alined with her wlienover I liked. Of course I never uttered a word at dinner, but listened with delight to the brilliant talk- te Matuedity's eloquence and varied information; to Sydney Smith's exquisite joke, which made me die with laughing ; to Roger's eareasnrs and Luttrell '• repartees."

Freddy remembered the Duke of Wellington, at Wherestead, shooting Lord Granville in the face and imperilling his eyesight. At Paris he was presented to Sir Walter Scott, who bad come to cline with the Ambassador ; while reading law with a con- veyancer called Plunkett he had for fellow-pupils the future Lord lddc-eleigh and Lord Ferrer ; he met Charles Gawille, Carlyle, Brougham, Wilberforce, Grote, and Reeve, Count D'Orsay, Tennyson, Browning, and Thaekeray. " I have never known a kinder heart. I could not imagine a more perfect gentkman," asps Mr. Russell. These qualities inform this book of gossip, like many prediwssors from the same pan.