THREE TYPES OF MIND.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18199, 21 March 1921, Page 6

THREE TYPES OF MIND.

BERNHARDI, BALFOUR, AND LORD FREDERICK HAMILTON. By Constant Readeb. lII.—THE DIPLOMATIC MIND. “I was born the thirteenth child of a family of fourteen, on the thirteenth day of the month, and I have for many years resided at No. 13 in a certain street in Westminster. In spite of the popular prejudice attached to this number, I am not conscious of having derived any particular ill-fortune from my accidental association with it.” In this sprightly fashion Lord Frederick Hamilton, with 60 years of recollections behind him, encouraged by the reception accorded to “The Vanished Pomps of Yesterday,” launches forth into another volume of reminiscences to which he has given the title “The Days Before Yesterdays.” Born in Ulster, and with his boyhood spent in London at a home frequented by many of the notabilities of the day, Lord Frederick has much to tell of entrancing interest. At the age of six he remembers Mr Disraeli lunching at Chesterfield House, and this when Lord Frederick had three of his elder brothers in the_ House of Commons. An interesting reminiscence of that time is as follows:

In 1865 my uncle. Lord John Russell, my mother’s brother, was Prime Minister. My Uncle, who had been born as far back as 1792, was a very tiny man, who always wore one of the old-fashioned high black satin stocks right up to his chin. I liked hiim for he was always full of . fun and small jokes; but in that rigorously Tory household he was looked an with scant favour. It was his second term of office as Prime Minister, for he had been First Lord of the Treasury from 1846 to 1852; he had also sat in the House of Commons for 47 years. My father was rather inclined to ridicule his brother-in-law’s small stature, and absolutely detested "his political opinions, declaring that he united all the. ineradicable opinions of the Whigs in hi’a diminutive 1 person. Listening, «s a child will do to the conservation of his elders, I derived the most grotesquely false ideaa as to the Whigs and their traditional policy. . . . At a very early age Lord Frederick was taken to see Queen Victoria. The child had pictured “a dazzling apparition, arrayed in sumptuous robes, seated golden throne; a glittering crown on her head, a sceptre in one hand, an orb grasped in the other.” Picture the boy’s disappointment when “a middle-aged lady, simply dressed in widow’s ‘weeds’ and wearing et widow’s cap, rose from an ordinary armcrair to receive us.” It is natural that Lora _ Frederick should champion the early Victorian era: It is, of course, the easy fashion now to sneer at Victorian standards. To my mind they embody all that is clear and sound in the nation. It does not follow that because Victorians revelled in hideous wallpapers, and loved ugly furniture, that therefore their points of view were mistaken ones. There are things more important than wallpapers. They certainly liked the obvious in painting, in music, and perhaps in literature, but it hardly seems to follow logically from that, that their conceptions of a man’s duty to his wife, family, and country were necessarily false ones. They were not afflicted with the perpetual modern restlessness, nor did they spend “their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear, some new thing”; still,all their ideas seem to me eminently sweet and wholesome. There was strict Sabbatarianism in the “sixties.” “In our own family,” says Lord Frederick, “our toys and books all disappeared on Saturday night. On Sundays we were only allowed to read ‘Line upon Line,’ ‘The Peep of Day,’ and ‘The Fairchild Family ’ ” Some idea of the religious atmosphere in which the future diplomat was reared is conveyed in the following:—. In London we all went on Sundays to the Scottish Presbyterian Church in Crown Court just opposite Drury Lane Theatre. Dr Gumming, the minister of the church at that time, enjoyed an immense reputation amongst his congregation. He was a very eloquent man, but was principally known as always prophesying the imminent end of the world. He had been a little unfortunate in some of the dates he had predicted for the' final cataclysm, those dates having slipped by uneventfully without anything whatever happening, hut'finally definitely fixed on it date in 1867 as the exact date. of the Great Catastrophe. His influence with his flock rather diminished when it was found that Dr Gumming had renewed the lease of his home fop 21 years, only two months before the date he had fixed with absolute certainty as being the end of all things. All the same I am certain that he was thoroughly in earnest and perfectly . genuine in his convictions. When Lord Frederick’s father was appointed ' Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the family spent the greater portion of the year m Dublin, and he was there for the Christmas holidays of 1866 at the time of the Fenian rebellion, and many characteristic anesdotes are related of Irish men and women. At the age of 13 Lord Frederick, following the footsteps pf his elder brothers, his father, and his grandfather, went to Harrow, where he stayed for four years. It being settled that he was to enter the diplomatic servifco, he went to France, ,and afterwards to Germany, at the age of 17, in order to become proficient in the French and German languages, a task estimated to occupy three years. The events of these years are punctuated with stories and anecdotes of all kinds. Then came London in 1876, when the metropolis “boasted an extraordinary galaxy of lovely women, ’ and many parliamentary giants, including Gladstone, Bright, and Chamberlain. In 1876 Lord Frederick entered the Foreign Office, and subsequently saw service in Berlin, in Petrograd, in Canada, and in India, and he concludes a most fascinating record, every page of which has its attraction—although largely occupied with purely superficial matter —by saying I had hoped to tell of reef-fishing in the West Indies; of surf-riding on planks at Mouzenberg in South Africa; of the extreme inconvenience to which the inhabitants of Southern China are subjected owing to the inconsiderate habits of their local devils; of sapphire seas where coconut palms toss their fronds in the Trade wind over gleaming white coral beaches; of vast frozen tracts in the Far North where all animate life seems suspended; of Japanese villages clinging to green hill-sides where boiling springs gush out of the cliffs in clouds of steam, and of many other things beside, for it has been my good fortune to have seen most of the surface of this globe. But all these must wait until the present preposterous price of paper has descended to more normal levels.

* “ The Days Before Yesterday.” By Lord Frederick Hamilton. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Dunedin: Whitcombe and Tombs. (12s Cd net.)