LORD BEACONSFIELDS MENTAL CONDITION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XVI, Issue 5496, 28 June 1879, Page 7

LORD BEACONSFIELDS MENTAL CONDITION.

The London correspondent of tho Liverpool Post thus refers to Lord Beaoonafield'« physical and mental condition :—There are many reasons for a do-nothing course being pursued this year; aoine of them, as I shall presently remind my readers, of a pressing public character. But there ie also a personal one of considerable practical weight and operation. I refer to Lord BeaconsGeld's physical condition and present mental habit. "You must not judge of Ms vigour by his public epeeches. One of the greatest and shrewdest 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, 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 in 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 the good of the State. This, however, is a matter that he accomplishes without any aid from his colleagues, and to his collegues 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 kaows, 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 m&n (Dr. Kidd, whose success when the allopaths did not care or please his Lorship, is a triumph for homcepathy) every day; and altogether is in that interesting state of valetudinarianism which in a fashionable and witty old gentleman of seventyfour secures him from his friends as much indulgence as can possibly be afforded him.