CHAPTER XXXIV

A MINISTER'S LETTER

'BRITISH LEGATION, NAPLES, Nov., 18-.

'MY DEAR HARCOURT, - Not mine the fault that your letter has lain six weeks unanswered; but having given up penwork myself for the last eight months, and Crawley, my private sec., being ill, the delay was unavoidable. The present communication you owe to the fortunate arrival here of Captain Mellish, who has kindly volunteered to be my amanuensis. I am indeed sorely grieved at this delay. I shall be désolé if it occasion you anything beyond inconvenience. How a private sec. should permit himself the luxury of an attack of influenza I cannot conceive. We shall hear of one's hairdresser having the impertinence to catch cold, to-morrow or next day!

'If I don't mistake, it was you yourself recommended Crawley to me, and I am only half grateful for the service. He is a man of small prejudices; fancies that he ought to have a regular hour for dinner; thinks that he should have acquaintances; and will persist in imagining himself an existent something, appertaining to the Legationwhile, in reality, he is only a shadowy excrescence of my own indolent habits, the recipient of the trashy superfluities one commits to paper, and calls despatches. Latterly, in my increasing laziness, I have used him for more intimate correspondence; and, as Doctor Allitore has now denied me all manual exertion whatever, I am actually wholly dependent on such aid. I'm sure I long for the discovery of some other mode of transmitting one's brain-efforts than by the slow process of manuscript -some photographic process, that by a series of bright pictures might display en tableau what one is now reduced to accomplish by narrative. As it ever did, and ever will

happen too, they have deluged me with work when I crave rest. Every session of Parliament must have its blue-book; and by the devil's luck they have decided that Italy is to furnish the present one.

'You have always been a soldier, and whenever your inspecting general came his round, your whole care has been to make the troop-horses look as fat, the men's whiskers as trim, their overalls as clean, and their curbchains as bright, as possible. You never imagined or dreamed of a contingency when it would be desirable that the animals should be all sorebacked, the whole regiment under stoppages, and the trumpeter in a quinsy. Had you been a diplomatist instead of a dragoon, this view of things might, perhaps, have presented itself, and the chief object of your desire have been to show that the system under which you functionated worked as ill as need be; that the Court to which you were accredited abhorred you; its Ministers snubbed, its small officials slighted you; that all your communications were ill received, your counsels ill taken; that what you reprobated was adopted, what you advised rejected; in fact, that the only result of your presence was the maintenance of a perpetual ill-will and bad feeling; and that without the aid of a line-of-battle ship, or at least a frigate, your position was no longer tenable. From the moment, my dear H, that you can establish this fact, you start into life as an able and active Minister, imbued with thoroughly British principles —an active asserter of what is due to his country's rights and dignity, not truckling to Court favour, or tamely submitting to royal impertinences-not like the noble lord at this place, or the more subservient viscount at thatbut, in plain words, an admirable public servant, whose reward, whatever Courts and Cabinets may do, will always be willingly accorded by a grateful nation.

'I am afraid this sketch of a special envoy's career will scarcely tempt you to exchange for a mission abroad! And you are quite right, my dear friend. It is a very

unrewarding profession. I often wish myself that I had taken something in the colonies, or gone into the Church, or some other career which had given me time and opportunity to look after my health; of which, by the way, I have but an indifferent account to render you. These people here can't hit it off at all, Harcourt; they keep muddling away about indigestion, deranged functions, and the rest of it. The mischief is in the blood; I mean, in the undue distribution of the blood. So Treysenac, the man of Bagnères, proved to me. There is a flux and reflux in us, as in the tides, and when, from deficient energy, or lax muscular power, that ceases, we are all driven by artificial means to remedy the defect. Treysenac's theory is position. By a number of ingeniously contrived positions he accomplishes an artificial congestion of any part he pleases; and in his establishment at Bagnères you may see some fifty people strung up by the arms and legs, by the waists or the ankles, in the most marvellous manner, and with truly fabulous success. I myself passed three mornings suspended by the middle, like the sheep in the decoration of the Golden Fleece, and was amazed at the strange sensations I experienced before I was cut down.

'You know the obstinacy with which the medical people reject every discovery in the art, and only sanction its employment when the world has decreed in its favour. You will, therefore, not be surprised to hear that Larrey and Cooper, to whom I wrote about Treysenac's theory, sent me very unsatisfactory, indeed very unseemly replies. I have resolved, however, not to let the thing drop, and am determined to originate a Suspensorium in England, when I can chance upon a man of intelligence and scientific knowledge to conduct it. Like mesmerism, the system has its antipathies, and thus yesterday Crawley fainted twice after a few minutes' suspension by the arms. But he is a bigot about anything he hears for the first time, and I was not sorry at his punishment.

'I wish you would talk over this matter with any clever medical man in your neighbourhood, and let me hear the result.

'And so you are surprised, you say, how little influence English representations exercise over the determinations of foreign cabinets. I go farther, and confess no astonishment at all at the no-influence! My dear dragoon, have you not, some hundred and fifty times in this life, endured a small martyrdom in seeing a very indifferent rider torment almost to madness the animal he bestrode, just by sheer ignorance and awkwardness-now worrying the flank with incautious heel, now irritating the soft side of the mouth with incessant jerkings-always counteracting the good impulses, ever prompting the bad ones of his beast? And have you not, while heartily wishing yourself in the saddle, felt the utter inutility of administering any counsels to the rider? You saw, and rightly saw, that even if he attempted to follow your suggestions, he would do so awkwardly and inaptly, acting at wrong moments, and without that continuity of purpose which must ever accompany an act of address; and that for his safety, and even for the welfare of the animal, it were as well they should jog on together as they had done, trusting that after a time they might establish a sort of compromise, endurable, if not beneficial, to both.

'Such, my dear friend, in brief, is the state of many of those foreign Governments to whom we are so profuse of our wise counsels. It were doubtless much better if they ruled well; but let us see if the road to this knotty consummation be by the adoption of methods totally new to them, estranged from all their instincts and habits, and full of perils, which their very fears will exaggerate. Constitutional Governments, like underdone roast beef, suit our natures and our latitude; but they would seem lamentable experiments when tried south of the Alps. Liberty with us means the right to break heads at a county election, and to print impertinences in newspapers.

With the Spaniard or the Italian it would be to carry a poniard more openly, and use it more frequently than at present.

'At all events, if it be any satisfaction to you, you may be assured that the rulers in all these cases are not much better off than those they rule over. They lead lives of incessant terror, distrust, and anxiety. Their existence is poisoned by ceaseless fears of treachery-they know not where. They change Ministers as travellers change the direction of their journey, to disconcert the supposed plans of their enemies; and they vacillate between cruelty and mercy, really not knowing in which lies their safety. Don't fancy that they have any innate pleasure in harsh measures. The likelihood is, they hate them as much as you do yourself; but they know no other system; and to come back to my cavalry illustration, the only time they tried a snaffle, they were run away with.

I trust these prosings will be a warning to you how you touch upon politics again in a letter to me; but I really did not wish to be a bore. And now here I am, ready to answer, as far as in me lies, all your interrogatoriesfirst premising that I am not at liberty to enter upon the question of Glencore himself, and for the simple reason, that he has made me his confidant. And now, as to the boy. I could make nothing of him, Harcourt; and for this reason he had not what sailors call "steerage way" on him. He went wherever you bade, but without an impulse. I tried to make him care for his career-for the gay world -for the butterfly life of young diplomacy-for certain dissipations - excellent things occasionally to develop nascent faculties. I endeavoured to interest him by literary society and savants, but unsuccessfully. For art indeed he showed some disposition, and modelled prettily; but it never rose above "amateurship." Now enthusiasm, although a very excellent ingredient, will no more make an artist, than a brisk kitchen fire will provide a dinner where all the materials are wanting.