Lord Dufferin made on Tuesday a farewell speech to the
British colony in Paris, marked by all his usual literary skill and by a little of his habit of saying pleasant things. It is rather strong, for example, to describe Paris as an intellectual -"Mecca." He painted the world in gloomy colours, " a bundle of nerves" amidst which any one of six persons might even unwittingly start a war that would cover all four continents with blood, and therefore maintained, very justly, the im- portance of diplomatists, the "meek, civil, and mild-man- nered persons" who have been " invented" to avert such catastrophes. He thought promotion should be made a little quicker for them, and paid high compliments to the rank-and. tile of diplomacy, who often did the work for which their -chiefs got credit. He had, however, one sarcastic reference to the modern world, in which wives assume " the Imperial knickerbocker," daughters "exhibit their new womanhood by writing improper novels," and sons refer to their fathers as " ancient chappies." Lord Dufferin ended with a somewhat pathetic reference to those few years of a man's life after he has retired, which can only be considered an appendix to his biography, " printed in smaller type." That is wonderfully felicitous.
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