The Mirrors of Downing Street Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster

If you think about it, no one since Napoleon has appeared on the earth who attracts so universal an interest as Mr. Lloyd George. This is a rather startling thought.

We are keeping up Voltaire's idea of our English character. Instead of only admirals, however, we are now hanging all sorts and descriptions of our public servants, but whether...

_"He is Attic in the sense that he has no bombast, and does not strive after affect, and that he can speak interestingly on many subjects 'without raising his voice.'"_--GILBERT...

Soon after he had taken his chair at the War Office, Lord Kitchener received a call from Mr. Lloyd George. The politician had come to urge the appointment of denominational chap...

_"A sceptre once put into the hand, the grip is instinctive; and he who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security and not progress, the highest lesson of state...

_"He was not free from that careless life-contemning desperation, which sometimes belongs to forcible natures.... He was too heedless of his good name and too blind to the truth...

In the _Merry Passages and Jests_ of old Sir Nicholas Lestrange record is made of the following witty definition: "Edm. Gurney used to say that a mathematitian is like one that...

If a novelist take for his hero an educated gentleman who expresses contempt for the licence and indecencies of modern life, it is ten to one that the critics, who confess thems...

_"While the advances made by objective science and its industrial applications are palpable and undeniable all around us, it is a matter of doubt and dispute if our social and m...

_"Dullness is so much stronger than genius because there is so much more of it, and it is better organized and more naturally cohesive_ inter se. _So the Arctic volcano can do n...

_" ... We cannot say that they have a great nature, or strong, or weak, or light; it is a swift and imperious imagination which reigns with sovereign power over all their beings...

_"Not to mention loss of time, the tone of their feelings is lowered: they become less in earnest about those of their opinions respecting which they must remain silent in the s...

One evening in London I mentioned to a man well versed in foreign affairs that I was that night meeting Lord Carnock at dinner. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "the man who made the war."

No man I have met ever gave me so authentic a feeling of originality as this dare-devil of genius, this pirate of public life, who more than any other Englishman saved British d...