LORD MELBOURNE

Hawera Star, Volume L, 26 July 1930, Page 18

LORD MELBOURNE

T OBI) MELBOURNE is one of; those political figures which in our day have hardily received the attention to which they are entitled, though he has recently been resuscitated in the pages •of a book by Mr Lytton Strachev. Mr Bernard Newman’s “Lord Melbourne’’ •is planned on a larger scale than Mr Strachev’s brilliant, but fragmentary sketch * (says “John o’ London’s Weekly”). Melbourne belonged both by : birth and hr prediction to that small group of Whig families iwhich dominated English politics for over a hundred years, and whose main object appears to have been to resist the encroachment of the monarchy on the one hand, and of the populace on the other. They have left, few successors, though perhaps Mr Baldwin approximates more nearly to the Whig ideal than any living statesman. The first fifty years of Melbourne’s life were comparatively devoid of incident. He had been harassed alike by the infidelities of his wife and by tnc idiocy of his sole surviving child. _ It was not, indeed, until he became Prime Minister that lie was afforded the opportunity of revealing to the world 1 liis character and his many talents. To his contemporaries he was something of a puzzle. He concealed beneath a mask of cynicism a curiously sensitive nature. A man of notorious profligacy, he was at. the same time a

A Man of Contrasts

profound scholar and a. student of the Early Fathers, and he appears to have derived as much enjoyment from iiis manuscripts as from his mistresses. He could scarcely be described as a religious man, but he had a genuine regard for the Church of England_as a State institution, and his ecclesiastical appointments were invariably made with extreme care. Ft is in his fatherly affection for rho vouthful! Queen of England that the best side of his- character is seen. She adored him, and) he in his turn implanted in her mind those principles of Whiggism which only Disraeli, at a much later period, was able to eradicate. He was a consistent patron- of the arts, but honours and titles lie held in slight, esteem. His remark about the Garter, “which had no damned nonsense of merit about it,’’ is well known.

When the Garter was offered to himself, as it. was more than once, he declined it: “A Garter,” ho once remarked, “may attract to ns somebody of consequence whom nothing else can reach, but what is t'he good of my taking it;?. I cannot bribe myself.” But his humour did not always allow him to be consistent ns regards the irrelevance o fmerit in this connection: “'Give him the Thistle? 'God — he’d eat it!” he is reported to have exclaimed on receiving a request from a Scottish peer or limited intelligence.