THE FIRST EARL OF SALISBURY.'

IT is one of the tragedies of letters when an incompetent scribe " discovers " a fresh and fireterate subject and then "queers the pitch " for those who come after him. And con- versely it is a matter for rejoicing when the opportunity falls, as it has fallen in the present instance, to a writer fully equipped for the task and in addition impelled thereto by family piety. Robert Cecil, as Mr. Algernon Cecil reminds na, has never found in any adequate sense of the term a biographer. Why this was so he explains in a passage which gives a key to the book :— " Though he was for fourteen years to all intents and purposes Prime Minister of England, though his premiership chanced to cover almost exactly the duration of those momentous years in which Shakespeare was giving to the world the supreme glories of the English race, yet he has met with the soantiest attention ; and in the long procession of English statesmen, his figure, naturally pathetic, seems to have acquired all the added pathos of neglect. Beside the splendid gifts of his contemporaries, beside the reckless valour of Essex, the splendid vitality of Ralegh, the far-shining wisdom of Bacon, his own patient labour has passed unperceived, just as amid that crowd of splendid gallants, among whom his lot was cast, his own insignificant person passed unnoticed or despised. Statesmanship is commonly impatient of heroics, and Robert Cecil was not a hero. He carried on the tradition of a cautious policy, under which his country_ had grown great, and in no contemptible sense he was his father's son. Placed between two epochs of momentous revolution—between the close of the great Protestant upheaval and the bursting of the greater Puritan storm—the • dministration of the Cecile possesses of necessity rather the tentative character of a provisional government than the strong repose of a national spirit perfectly at one with itself. The country was passing through a hundred and fifty years of unrest, the inevitable consequence of the tremendous mental and spiritual shock of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The time was not ripe for a settlement, and the merit of the Cecile is that they made no attempt to hurry it. But this is perhaps of all merits the least alluring. Also, in a measure, it is true that Robert Cecil has been his own worst enemy. He made no hide for popu- larity; he was usually indifferent to the opinion of the mob; and he left little record of that inner life of thought and being which might have won him the sympathy or the interest of more peso. tratbag critics. Careful only of that which was his care, well. beloved only of those who knew him well, he moves across the page of history, a dim figure picking his way across untravelled country, beneath uncertain lights, towarls a goal which no man clearly saw."

But if the subject is one of deep interest, the biographer labours under drawbacks which are clearly foreshadowed in the foregoing passage. Robert Cecil was overshadowed by the more commanding personality of his father, though in resourcefulness, dexterity, and tenacity he was at least his equal. We associate the great figures of his age with splendour exuberance, and daring, but there was no bravura in the character or career of Robert Cecil. If he did not exactly scorn • A Igo of Robert Cara, Arai Sort f Bolia5inw By Algernon ceeiL With Illustrations. London: John Murray. UN. net] ' delights, his delicate health and deformity condemned him to a certain amount of enforced asceticism ; and be certainly lived laborious days. He was a man of low vitality ; he was only forty-nine at his death, and though, unlike so many of his eminent contemporaries, he died in his bed, after holding the highest post in the realm under two Sovereigns and spending himself in the service of the State, hardly a single voice, high or low, was raised in sympathy or regret when he passed away. "The old precept had been utterly reversed, and about the dead man there was nothing spoken but what was bad. ' More ill spoken of and in more several kinds, than I think ever any one was' is Dorset's report to Edrnondea."

Robert Cecil lived in what are known as "the spacious times of great Elizabeth," and with due reserves no one can deny the appropriateness of the epithet. But along with their spaciousness those times were charged with the stifling air of the hothouse, and it was in this mephitic atmosphere of intrigue and suspicion that Robert Cecil chiefly moved. He graduated in the secret service established by his father, who was his only master, and whose policy he faithfully continued. He was wise and cautious beyond his years, and though his rapid promotion excited envy, it was justified by his con- tinuous efficiency and success. He made his mark as a Commissioner in the Low Countries, then, as now, the cockpit of Europe; and he early won the confidence of Elizabeth, whom, according to his lights, he served faithfully and vigilantly. Az for the blasphemous adulation in which he indulged —equalling that of the courtiers of the Roman Emperors—. it was the common form of the time, and nobler natures were not immune from it. He was not a Quixote or a Bayard, but an opportunist, and yet he was not wanting in courage, witness his fearlessness in the negotia- tions with Henry of France. He stood for the policy of caution, and thus came into inevitable conflict with the more attractive and picturesque leaders of the opposing policy of adventure and expansion. Yet when the conflict became acute he seldom failed to exercise a moderating influence. He acquiesced in rather than initiated Draconian measures of repression. And if he achieved a commanding position and escaped the rain that blighted so many of his contem- poraries, the price that he paid for his success was heavy. He never fell, but he was never free from anxiety; he was great but not glorious ; he made few intimate friends and lost the most famous of them; he was tragically estranged from his wife's brothers and has been immortalized by the detraction of his cousin Francis Bacon. Mr. Algernon Cecil has not in any way attempted to give us a whitewashing portrait of Robert Cecil or to extenuate bin failings. He deals candidly with the Ralegh episode and the ugly fact of the Spanish pension. Where there are so many reservations there is /10 room for hero-worship, and Mr. Algernon Cecil explicitly renounces all claim to heroic qualities for his ancestor. He allows that he had cunning, but holds him guiltless of Macbiavellism in its most siuister sense, and, when the divorce of public and privets morality which marked his age is taken into account, does not hesitate to pronounce him a good and wise man. The best summary of his strength and weakness as a statesman is given in the following passage :— "It is clear at a glance that Salisbury does not take rank amongst the greatest rulers—with Henry V., for example, or

Elizabeth, or Chatham ; with those few who have had the will

and the presence and the inspiration to weld men together and spur them on to do the actions that become as household is ords.

Such things were quite beyond his reach. He achieved his ends

diplomatically, by a skilful calculation and nice handling of the common forces that move mankind. Lacking any kind of inspire, tams, he not unnaturally lacked also—and this was, perhaps, the most serious of all his defects—the capacity to attract and make use of other men's labour. Perhaps he distrusted mankind too much ; perhaps his natural reserve presented an insurmountable

barrier; perhaps he had to the full that fatal dislike of seeing things done rather differently or rather worse than he would have

done them himself. At any rate, he engrossed more and more the

whole burden of government until ho bad incensed others and exhausted himself. But the greatness that is from above neither

excites envy, nor fears assistance, nor epende itself idly upon detail..

He falls, then, into the second class of statesmen, amongst those of whom Walpole might be taken, for the type, amongst men of good,

sense, efficiency, and talent falling somewhat short of genius. There are some who will think that this in still to place him too high. They will urge, and urge with perfect truth, that he was never

proved in the fires of adversity; that he was born, so to say, in the purple ; that his great position wan rather a legacy ho had inherited than a fortune he had made. But, though this is the ease, the fact that he held his post for fourteen years, unsheltered.

by his father's shadow, and unsupported, as Somerset was and as Buckingham wee, by the capricious predilections of the King, is a sufficient proof of his fitness to occupy it. He never fell, and in all likelihood he never would have fallen, bemuse, as Naunton quaintly observes, • his little crooked person . . . carried . . . a headpiece of a vast content.' He was as wise a man as could be looked for, and probably as wise a man as could be found to accomplish the particular work he had to do Like Walpole and like William III., he was required to establish a dynasty, and like them he did his business with en unassuming but unfaltering perseverance. It was no fault of his that the dynasty which ho introduced proved the most undesir- able that the country has over known. He had, in 1602, not to call up the spirits of the past to read the riddles of the future, but to consider how he might avoid a war of succession, such as in his own day devastated France and such as was to devastate Spain a hundred years later. He did avoid it. There was not even the ghost of a pretender, as had been the case at Queen Mary's accession just fifty years before and, as many people thought, them must be again. And, if Prince Henry had chanced to live, the world might even now bo blessing the skill and wisdom which established the Stuarts. It is of a piece with the idea that Salisbury was nothing but his father's nominee to regard him as the slave of his father's policy. He stood, no doubt, for much the same principles as had guided Burghley's statesmanship, but they are principles with which it is hard to quarrel. His diplomacy, like his predecessor's, was directed towards a peace resting upon the old alliance of England with the Low Countries, and stands out, as Burghley's did, in contrast to the martial but premature imperialism of Essex and Ralegh. National liberty had but just been vindicated, at the coat of a long and exhausting struggle. We can hardly blame him for want of originality, because he did not plunge the country into a policy of rapid expansion; and all the less since, as it chanced, the first fruitful seeds of Empire were sown by Smith and watered by De la Warr during the very time that he was pilot- ing the ship of State. Again, at home he held, no doubt, by the theory of the Constitution that he had received. He believed in monarchy; he believed in English gentlemen ; he believed in the doctrines of degree and order and obedience which breathe in the then recent Church Catechism and still more recent 'Ecclesiastical Polity.' ' I have no fear of men of worth,' he told the Star Chamber in 1199. ' When has England felt any harm by soldiers or gentle- men or men of worth? The State has ever found them truest. Some Jack Cade, or Jack Straw, and such rascals are those that have endangered the kingdom.' I shall never forget,' says Lloyd, 'hie or his father's discourse with Claud Grollart, premier president of Rouen, about the troubles in France, wherein he advised him to stick to the King though he saw difficulties ; for it was his maxim that "kings are like the sun, and usurpers like falling stars." For the sun, though it be obfuscated and eclipsed with mists and clouds, at length they are dispersed, where the others are but the figural of stare in the eyes of view and prove no more but exhalations which suddenly dissolve and fall to the earth where they are consumed."

Mr. Algernon Cecil does not belong to the school of scientific historians, though his book is remarkably well documented, and he has made good use of his access to the Hatfield archives. He is not afraid to reveal his own leanings and prejudices, and though at times overprone to epigram, he has command of a brilliant and caustic style. In fine, he has given no a vivid rather than a judicial biography of a remarkable man, and if he does not wholly convert us to his estimate of Robert Cecil, he has earned our respect for his natural piety and our admiration for his wit and literary skill.