ers. The proposal was made under the inspiration of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, the novelist and dramatist, who had become Secretary for the Colonies in the Tory Government. Bulwer Lytton's career in Parliament had up to this time been little better than an absolute failure. He had been in the House of Commons from 1831 to 1841, and his attempts at Parliamentary debate had ended in almost absolute breakdown. But he was a man of indomitable perseverance, and he seems to have said to himself that he would not die until he had made a name as a Parliamentary orator. A debater he never could have been, because he was so deaf that he had to read a speech in the newspapers before he could attempt to reply to it. His articulation was, from actual physical causes, so defective that almost any other man would have considered himself utterly debarred from any attempt at eloquence. But Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton had a boundless confidence in himself I should have called it a boundless self-conceit, if he had not made good his pretensions so far as popularity was concerned. One may smile at the extravagance of the style displayed in several

of his novels, but it is impossible to deny that the novels had an immense popularity. He wrote a play, and was told by the critics that he had no dramatic gift. He accepted the fact that the play was a failure, but he said that he could do better, and he wrote the "Lady of Lyons," which, with all its preposterous faults, had for more than a generation a vast success, and even still holds the stage. Inspired by these successes, he seems to have made up his mind that he would conquer the House of Commons also. He did in the end conquer the House of Commons, after a fashion, very much as he had conquered the literary and the dramatic public. Even in the full popularity of Dickens and Thackeray he held his own with the literary public; even in the days of Gladstone and Bright and Disraeli he accomplished a marvelous success in the House of Commons. He was a master of the art of gorgeous phrase-making, elaborate no doubt, but very splendid. Whenever it was known that he was about to speak in a debate, the House was crowded. I am really unable to explain the secret of his success, but the success itself was at the

to doubt. His speeches are well-nigh forgotten now in the House of Commons, and nobody any longer believes that he was a great orator. Some of us did not believe it even then; and even while we were under the influence of the spell we felt pretty clear that it was but a glamour and a magic destined to lose its effect. Still, we could not deny that Bulwer Lytton had conquered the House of Commons and held it for the time enthralled. Then he turned on to prove him self a practical statesman. He founded, for example, the Colony of British Columbia. But the mission of Mr. Gladstone to the Ionian Islands was something more in keeping with Bulwer Lytton's general tastes and tendencies. The seven Ionian Islands were united as a kind of commonwealth by the Treaty of Vienna, and they were placed under the protection of England, which had the right of main

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE

represented by a Lord High Commissioner, who was usually a soldier, and who was Commander-in-Chief as well as civil Governor. The Republic of the Seven Islands had a Senate and a Legislative Assembly. For many years there had been growing complaints in the islands against English administration. The complaints admitted, in fact, of no real compromise. What the islanders wanted above all things was to be Greeks and to be united with the Kingdom of Greece. It was futile to point out to them that their material affairs were much better administered under the English Government than they were likely to be under the Government of King Otho, the dull, incapable ruler of the Greek Kingdom. It was of no use to tell the islanders that they had much better roads and harbors and lines of steamers than were possessed by the inhabitants of the Greek Kingdom.

Their whole ideas of life were not limited to roads and piers and bridges and harbors. They had an impassioned, romantic, indomitable desire to be united with their brothers of the Kingdom. Futile, unreasonable critics in this country tried to convince them that the islanders, after all, were not of kin with the Greeks of the mainland. It was argued that the inhabitants of the mainland had got so intermixed with other races that they could hardly be considered genuine Greeks at all. The islanders could not be reasoned out of their national sentiments by any inquiries into the pedigree or the family tree of the Grecian Kingdom. So there was always some trouble in the Ionian Islands, and the Lord High Commissioner every now and then dismissed

some more or less mutinous Parliament and convened another by a general election, and the new Parliament was in spirit just the same as the old, and things went on exactly as they had been going before.

Bulwer Lytton was, it would seem, the first statesman in office to whom it occurred to ask himself whether, after all, there might not be something worth considering in the claims made by the people of the Seven Islands. "Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton," says a modern writer, "had not been long enough in office to become soaked in the ideas of routine. He did not regard the unanimous opinions of the insular legislature, municipalities, and press as evidence merely of the unutterable

stupidity or the incurable ingratitude and wickedness of the Ionian populations." Therefore it occurred to him that it might be as well to send out some impartial statesman who could examine the controversy on the spot; and he could think of no one so well fitted for such a task as Mr. Gladstone. Every one knew that Mr. Gladstone was in strong sympathy with the general movement of Greece to accomplish a high destiny in Europe, and the mere fact that such a man was sent out would be enough in itself to prove to the islanders that no predetermined spirit of hostility was dictating the mission. The news of the offer was at first received in English society with incredulity, and

then with a good deal of ridicule. Is it possible, wise and solemn people asked, that Mr. Gladstone could be induced to accept so crazy a mission? Mr. Glad stone, however, did not think the mission altogether crazy, and he at once accepted it. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton had made in his dispatch an eloquent allusion to Mr. Gladstone's Homeric studies, and dry officials insisted that this was nothing short of an unwarrantable outrage on all the precedents of conventional diplomacy. "What are we coming to?" they asked. "We have a Prime Minister, Lord Derby, who goes in for Greek studies; we have a novelist as leader of the Government in the House of Commons; we have a novelist as Colonial Secretary; and these three propose to send out a man on a mission to the disturbed Ionian Islands for no other reason than because he is fond of reading Homer !"

Mr. Gladstone, however, was in hope that he could do some good by accepting the mission, and he went out to the Ionian Islands, arriving at Corfu in November, 1858. Up to that time I believe he never had been in Greece. It must have been to him like the actual realization of youth's best dream when he stood on the soil of Greece, when he went from island to island of that enchanting Greece for which nature and poetry and history and tradition have done so much, when he saw the

home of Ulysses and the fabled rock of Sappho, and, above all, when he climbed the Acropolis of Athens and gazed upon the Parthenon, and, turning his eyes one way, looked on Mount Hymettus, and turning another way saw Salamis, and then, on a clear day, the outlines of the steep of Acro-Corinth.

Even the most commonplace among us who have in our early days been at all in love with Greek poe'ry and Greek history, were it through the blurring medium of translations and "cribs," have felt as we reached that enchanted soil rather as if we were coming home to some familiar scenes of our boyhood than as if we were entering for the first time into a foreign country. If that is so with the commonplace among us, how must it have been with a man like Mr. Gladstone, steeped to the lips in all the poetry, the history, and the traditions of Greece, and with now an opportunity given to him of visiting Greece, not merely as a tourist, however loving and devoted, but as a man intrusted with a mission to listen to the complaints of the Greek islanders and to endeavor to find some remedy for any genuine grievances of which they complained. Mr. Gladstone, it is needless to say, behaved with the most genuine and exact loyalty to the task he had undertaken for the British Government. December the third, 1858, he called to

On

gether the Senate of the Septinsular Commonwealth at Corfu, and he explained to them the task which he had set out to accomplish if he could. At Corfu, and during all his public addresses in the Greek islands and the mainland, he spoke in Italian, which is the commanding foreign language once you leave Trieste on the way to the Levant. Mr. Gladstone did not attempt to speak in modern Greek. He could read modern Greek with perfect fluency, and has been heard to complain that he found found some difficulty only when Greeks would write to him in a very bad hand and in "cursive Greek." But the hopeless incompatibility between the pronunciation of Greek taught at Oxford and the Greek spoken in Corfu or in Athens would have rendered it impossible for him to make himself effectively understood if he attempted to address in Greek a modern Greek audience. Every one who has been in Greece, and who knows anything at all of classic Greek, must have found that, while it is easy enough to make out the meaning of a leading article in an Athenian newspaper, it is hardly possible to make one's self understood by or to understand the courteous Greek to whom one puts a question in the streets.

I have

been told that the effect of Mr. Gladstone's discourses in Italian was something superb and electrifying. He told the Senate of the Ionian Islands at Corfu that the liberties guaranteed to the islanders by the treaties of Paris and by the Ionian law were absolutely sacred in the eyes of the Queen of England. But, he said, on the other hand, "the purpose for which the Queen has sent me here is not to inquire into the British Protectorate, but to examine into what way Great Britain may most honorably and amply discharge the obligations which, for purposes European and Ionian rather than British, she has contracted." Then he made an official visit to all the islands, receiving deputations. and delivering replies. He undertook that a full inquiry should be made into every complaint or grievance, and that a thorough system of constitutional government should be established in the islands. As I have said, however, the Ionians had one uncompromising grievance the grievance that they were kept from a thorough union with the Kingdom of Greece. The Legislative Assembly of the Seven Islands voted unanimously an address to the Queen, praying that they might be allowed to annex themselves to the Greeks of the mainland. Mr. Gladstone's visit was, in