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¶ He said: "We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual and those interests it is our duty to follow." When he spoke like that — and he did quite regularly for 50 years, gouty England became blandly intoxicated and jumped bullishly over the moon.
¶ In the revolutionary year of 1848, he wrote or read 29,000 despatches, and while other monarchs welcomed the shelter of a stable, Queen Victoria was free to have babies. (She had nine.) Did he boast? Of course: "We have shown that liberty is compatible with order," and every cockney gurgled down his beer to a mistranslation of "Civis Romanus sum."
¶ He refused to be Chancellor of Exchequer in 1809. He refused again in 1852. He liked fussing over the despatches in the Foreign Office where, at one time or another, he received war-threats from every nation with a decent army. To all he replied in kind. He even (in religious debates) treated Heaven as a foreign power.
¶ He became Prime Minister at 70. Disraeli, set back for another decade, yelped to a great lady: "An impostor, utterly exhausted, and at the best only ginger-beer, and not champagne, and now an old painted pantaloon, very deaf, very blind and with false teeth, which would fall out of his mouth while speaking, if he did not hesitate and halt so in his talk—here is a man which the country resolves to associate with energy, wisdom and eloquence!"
Lord Palmerston was terrific. Like England when it was supremely English, he infuriated all his customers—and kept on getting their business.
Suppressed
As IT WAS — H. T. — Harper ($2.50). Boston has suppressed this book. It is the intimate, detailed, unashamed account of a living Englishwoman's love-life with a poet (Edward Thomas) now dead. She wrote it so that she might preserve her memories perfectly, completely, from the day she met him to the morning he laid violets on the pillow of her childbed. They were utterly innocent people who took of their bodies, as of their minds, words, books, faces, a joy that was neither sacred nor profane, but simply intense and natural. They were almost abjectly grateful for it.
Editor Middleton Murry published three of the five chapters in his Adelphi (London monthly) because they seemed to him truthful and beautiful and it was to that sort of thing that his magazine was dedicated. It is neither unjust nor unnatural that such literature should be made inaccessible to the indiscriminate buyer. Boston, of course, was merely prurient, yet those readers for whom the book is really meant may feel that it deserves suppressing for its own sake.
Itinerant America