MORE ANECDOTES ABOUT LOWE.
[To Tom EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—Your friendly review of Mr. Martin's "Life of Lord Sherbrooke" tempts me to add one or two anecdotes to those included in my " Reminiscences," published in that work. One of our Judges has lately told me that, when taking a walk with Lowe at Oxford, he called his attention to a place where the banks of the Cherwell had been supported by masonry. Lowe at once exclaimed,- " Quanto prcestantius esset
Numen aquas viridi si gamine cluderet uncles Herba."
Lowe said that, when he was Minister of Education, a parent would sometimes consult him about sending his son to a Pub- lic School. His invariable answer was : " My advice would be not to send him to a Public School. But, if you feel bound to send him to your own Public School, take him away as soon as possible." I think it was Talleyrand who said of the English Public Schools : " Elles sont les meilleures du monde, mais elles sont detestables ! "
It will be remembered that Lowe took an active part against the creation of Life-Peers. He made a speech at the time, in which he said that he wondered what sort of man that would be who would consent, as a Life-Peer, to take his seat beside the descendants of the Plantagenets. This rheto- rical flourish might obviously have been applied to the Bishops. And I find it hard to think that he can have meant his expres- sion to be taken more seriously than when be once said in conversation that the Life-Peers would be named " Lifers," and that this was the name given in Australia to prisoners transported for life ! Mrs. Lowe surprised a kinsman of mine by complaining of the difficulty of getting a housemaid ; but she presently added, " She must be able to read aloud to Mr. Lowe." At the close of his life, Lord Sherbrooke declared in conversation that everything convinced him that he was right in his opposition to Lord Russell's and Disraeli's Reform Bills.
I have sought to explain the fact (" Life," p. 534) that Lowe's success " differed in kind from the success of a trained craftsman." It must have been a sense of his political incompleteness which prompted one of his political opponents—I think Mr. Cobden—to describe him as the most conspicuous failure in the House of Commons. Few politicians, let us hope, would now deny that such a verdict was utterly unjust to Lowe; or that a truer, as well as a more generous, estimate of that ineffectual man of genius was formed by a great living statesman, who once said of him to a friend :- " If he had been as strong all round as he was in some direc- tions, he would have been the first man of our time."—I am,
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