LORD BEACONSFIELD.

Evening Post, Volume XVIII, Issue 5, 5 July 1879, Page 1 (Supplement)

LORD BEACONSFIELD.

The London correspondent of the Liverpo >1 Post thus refers to Lord Beaconsfield's physical and mental condition :—": — " There are many reasons for a do-nothing course being pursued this year — some of them, as I shall presently remind my readers, of a pressing public chiracter. But there is also a personal one of considerable practical weight and operation. I refer to Lord Beaconsfield's physical condition and present mental habit. You must not judge of his vigor by his public speeches. One of the greatest and shrowdest of our public men said that the power of speaking is the last faculty that is lost by one who has conspicuously possessed it. Lord Beaconsfield has not lost it. He can speak as Well as ever, better perhaps. He can absorb as much information as is necessary for the mill of his ingenious thought to turn out the cunning fabric of his rhetoric. But he can do little else, and the talk in the best-informed circles is, that he does nothing else. I believe this is not literally true, besides speaking now and then, he keeps her Majesty all right— persuades her by daily attentions and communications that he is of all men most essential at present to her comfort and tha good of the State. This, however, is a master that he accomplishes without aid from his colleagues, and to his colleagues he gives no help whatever, * attends to nothing,' it is said, though I think this means that the lazy old fox just attends to what is necessary, and no more. Doubtless the Queen knows, and so do the Prime Minister's colleagues, that his health is in a condition of senile fragility He has chronic, or at least frequent, bronchitis. He is a good deal haunted by gout. 11l or well, he sees his medical man ( Dr Kidd, whose success when the allopaths did not cure or please his Lordship is a triumph for homoeopathy) every day ; and altogether is in that interesting state of valetudinarianism which in a fashionable aad witty oLi gentleman of 74 secures him from his friends as much indulgence as can possibly he afforded him."