The celebrations in connection with the coming of age of
Lord Dalmeny have enabled Lord Rosebery to display his gift for occasional oratory to the greatest advantage. Speaking at a dinner to his Scottish tenantry held at Edinburgh on the night of Friday week, Lord Rosebery humorously lamented the personal drawbacks to this occasion of rejoicing. "It puts an end to that boyish position which in a son is so charming to a father, and to the father—if he regards it in a selfish point of view—it gives a dowager feeling for the first time in his life." For, as Lord Rosebery proceeded to contend, there are male dowagers as well as female dowagers. Indeed, in one Scotch family, as he learnt from Mr. Gladstone, the relation was formally recognised; and it was the practice of the family that when the proprietor reached a certain period of life, he handed over the estate and mansion to his eldest son, and retired into a smaller house. This arrangement, according to Lord Rosebery, though it should not be a premature proceeding, showed great good sense. It was bad for a man to be kept in a state of suspended animation, as it were, with regard to his estate up to the confines of old age. His own father, had he lived to succeed, would have been fifty-nine when he succeeded. Lord Wemyss succeeded at sixty-five. With these two examples before him, he gave his son the fullest license when he approached the age of sixty-five, or even fifty-nine, to remind him of what he had just said. We are all Roseberyites when Lord Rosebery eschews practical politics.
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