Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol 7.djvu/336

 292 THE WINTER TROUBLES. CHAP, anybody — crept humbly into the sheet of a ' merely private letter. We shall presently have to see that, as regards questions of right and wrong, and questions of what might he fitting and what might be unseemly, Lord runmure, on the 12 th of February, chose to govern his acts by a standard much lower than the one most in use ; and it might be said that to a Secretary of State thus strangely offending one ought to apply some hard word without more ado. But there is an air of simple candour in the man's avowal of motive which almost compels one to believe that he had the approval of his own misleading conscience ; and that, wild and rash as Ins deviations were, he sincerely regarded them as warrantable and even useful excursions from the straight path. It is right besides to acknowledge that his wild attack on Lord Raglan was perpetrated by a single despatch, and that from several portions of his correspondence, no less than from the testimony of many wlio knew him well, there may be gathered fair reasons for believing him to have been a man of other and better quality than could be inferred from the course he adopted at the time of acceding to office. In the eyes of his friends, unrepelled by the faults of demean- our that liedged round his genuine nature, he was always, they gladly declare, of the quality belonging to those wlio have in them nothing ignoble ;(^^) but I must own that — not having their means of piercing through the liusk of his character — X can only keep down the repug-