THE FIGHTING FIFTIES 149

There was so much to love in England—those wonderful oaks
and green lawns, the sleek, lowing cattle, the smoke curling up
from cottage chimneys in a mysterious and blended sea of tender
verdure, the strong, kindly men and women who were so at
home among its familiar scenes—that there was no room for
criticism. One just took this strong-founded, dynamic island of
contradictions for granted and accepted it as a whole.

It seemed fitting that the chosen leader of such a land should
be Lord Palmerston. With his jaunty mien, his sturdy common
sense, his straw between his lips and his sobriquet of Cupid, the
game old man was the idol of mid-Victorian England and the
embodiment of everything for which it stood. From 1855 until
his death at the age of 81 in 1865 he was continuously Prime
Minister, with one short break in 1858-9 when the discredited
protectionists under Lord Derby and Disraeli had a brief spell of
minority office.

The last of the aristocratic Whigs of the tradition of the
* Glorious Revolution,9* he represented the Liberals in his con-
tempt for obscurantist mysticism and the Tories in his hatred
of doctrinaire reform. For ten years he kept a fast-changing
Britain in a political back-water of time and ruled not by the
magnetism of ideals nor by the machinery of party organisation
—for he had neither—but by sheer personal popularity. Nothing
could shake his hold on the British people. They loved him for
his brisk contempt for foreign ways and threats, for his English
balance, for his unshakable individualism, for his courage and
assurance—ttan old admiral cut out of oak, the figure-head of
a 74-gun ship in a Biscay squall.-* They delighted in his sporting
tastes, his little jokes—"it is impossible to give the Shah the
garter: he deserves the halterP—even his little scrapes: a
rumoured affair at the age of 78 with a clergyman's wife on
the eve of an election brought from the lips of his opponent,
Disraeli, who had learnt to know his countrymen, a hollow,
"For God's sake don't let the people of England know, or he'll
sweep the country!" That familiar figure—the tilted white hat,
tight-buttoned coat, cane, dyed whiskers—riding down Picca-
dilly before breakfast or rising to jest or bluff away an awkward
situation in the House, gave the English confidence in them-
selves. It was just so that they liked to think of themselves,
standing boldly before a world of which they had somehow
become lords.

E.S. i.