SIR HORACE R1TMBOLD'S SUPPLEMENTARY REMINISCENCES.* THE statement quietly made in

the briefest of prefaces by Sir Horace Rumbold, "the favourable reception accorded to the • Further Recollections of a Diplomatist. By the Bight Honourable Sir HMCO Bumboid. Bart., G.C.B., G.C.M.G. London: Edward Arnold. Ms. netj

first portion of these Recollections has encouraged me to take them up again where I left them in the spring of 1873," would seem to prove that the author has not been much impressed by the excitement which was occasioned a year ago by the publication of the first two volumes of his reminiscences, which on account of their "revelations," if not their "blazing

indiscretions," led to an " incident " in Parliament and the tightening up of discipline in the Foreign Office. Sir Horace Rumbold does not appear so distinctly the enfant terrible of diplomacy in this volume as he did in its predecessors, and perhaps some of the results of their publication may have

induced him to put a curb upon his pen, if not upon his thoughts. But it is also to be borne in mind that in this volume he tells the story of a comparatively quiet period in his life,—the twelve years between 1873 and 1885, when he was successively Minister at Santiago de Chile, at Berne, at Buenos Ayres, and at Stockholm. It is, therefore, only when Sir Horace is in London waiting to go to a fresh post that we find him telling stories, personal and other, which recall his old vivacity. Some of his " points " are quite up to his best form. Take this extract from his eminently worldly, or at least man-of-the-worldly, diary :—

" A dinner party at Dudley House, where the guests were nearly all people of sixteen quarterings, yet there is a certain stiffness and solemnity, and almost a want of usage de monde, about many of them that strike me almost painfully. The social graces seem to me not to flourish abundantly on English soil."

Again :— " The usual official dinner, at Lord Salisbury's in Arlington Street, in honour of the Queen's birthday, with a big party at the Foreign Office afterwards. A disagreeable incident occurred at dessert, when Schouvaloff, who probably was a little flushed with wine, made a very savage onslaught on White (of Bucharest), who showed perfect temper. Much struck at the Foreign Office party by Miss Sinclair, the daughter of Sir Tollemache, whom I met for the first time, and who has the most lovely complexion and a perfect figure."

Is there not a touch of the "blazing" indiscretion in this repetition of a remark by Schouvaloff P—" The real truth is that we [Russia] have no fixed policy, everything changing from day to day. As you know, everything is arranged at the Palace, and all depends on the digestion of two or three individuals."

The most valuable, in the sense of informing, portion of Sir Horace Rumbold's book is that in which he tells—and tells vividly—the story of his life in Santiago de Chile. Of course he would not have been Sir Horace Rumbold if he had not "had a good time" and made the acquaintance of fascinating ladies. Of Donna Bianca, the daughter of the great tragic actress Madame Ristori, whom he met in the Valparaiso hotel, he writes :—

" Donna Bianca—should these lines ever come under her notice—must forgive me if I permit myself, after these long years, to say that I scarcely remember ever being so struck as I was by this unexpectedly fair apparition in a commonplace inn- parlour in the remote South Pacific. But for the perfect taste and simplicity of her nineteenth-century gown she might have stepped out of the frame of a Bronzino or Lorenzo Lotto, depicting the sweetly serious traits of some high-born biondina belle of a great Italian home."

And then nothing will satisfy him, by way of doing justice to Donna Bianca, but a reproduction of certain of " Petrarch's splendid, stately lines." He has also at least one good story to tell. He came across Blanco Encelada, who had fought in the Chili= War of Independence, bore a resemblance to the Duke of Wellington, and fancied the resemblance to be closer than it actually was. "People tell me I much resemble Wellington," he remarked to Taylor Thomson, who was Sir Horace's predecessor in the Chilian Embassy. "Yes,

indeed," was the answer ; "especially the back view." Sir Horace's verbal photograph of Chile is really more important: "A strip of coast land, ranging over some two thousand miles and nowhere exceeding two hundred miles in breadth, pent in between almost the loftiest mountains and the broadest ocean of the globe. Its shores turned away from all the ancient homes of civilisation and facing the western sea—as yet 'mute and in- glorious,' though at no remote period possibly destined to witness the contentions of new and powerful States. Divided from the Old World by the expanse of the Atlantic and the breadth of a continent, and till recently approachable only by the deterring voyage round the stormy Horn or a wearisome transit through the swamps and jungles of Panama, Chile may well be said to have started on its way as a nation at a great disadvantage. Nor will its history be found to have been more favourable to it than its geographical situation. Of all the vast dependencies ot. Spain, Chile was perhaps the most neglected; a refugium peeeat arum from the metropolis ; a sort of Algeria or Turkestan for the • un- quiet spirits' of the Spanish Colonial Empire ; at best a training ground where the more adventurous earned in obscure, toilsome Araucanian raids a right to rest among the lazy luxuries of Peru."

Equally good is his characterisation of Santiago :—

" Long quiet streets, lined with handsome houses mostly built on the model of the Parisian petit hotel, with a good many of more palatial design—their drowsy repose occasionally broken by the clatter of a well-appointed brougham or barouche that would pass muster in the Bois de Boulogne or Hyde Park ; neatly dressed, refined-looking women gliding along the well-swept pavement ; numerous churches, low white-washed convent walls, and a fair sprinkling of priests and friars ; the absence of stir and bustle caused by the concentration of all business and shopping in a few central thoroughfares. All these combined, at the period I speak of, to give to Santiago the stamp of the residence of some sleepy luxurious Ultramontane Court rather than of the metropolis of a progressive, hard-working, democratic State. To those, however, who know it to be a creation of exclusive class government implanted in one of the main strongholds of South American Catholicity the phenomenon is more readily intelligible."

Sir Horace has not much to say of Switzerland or Sweden that would appear to indicate that his professional sojourn in these countries had yielded other than professional fruit, although what he has to say of the constitutional struggle in the latter country, which he witnessed, is eminently worth reading. Of Argentina he writes :— "What Argentina suffers from is the bane of a Constitution, almost exactly copied from that of the North American Union, which confers on backward, imperfectly developed provinces such as Rioja or Corrientes State rights similar to those enjoyed by great cultured communities like Massachusetts or Illinois. This in reality sham federal system imposes on a relatively small population the burden of fourteen separate provincial Govern- ments composed of an executive, a legislature, a judicature and all the other branches of an independent administration."

One of the best of the recollections Sir Horace has brought with him from Sweden is that of a meeting with the late W. E. Forster :—

" I have a strong recollection of the impression he left on me of absolute rectitude of purpose and of an unflinching sense of duty. Under a somewhat stern and rugged exterior there lay in him a most kindly and generous disposition. He had come straight to Sweden from combating the unscrupulous leaders of the National League, and the village ruffians' and boycotters, who acted under their inspiration ; and nothing it seemed to me could be more cruel and unjust than the epithet 'Buckshot Forster,' with which he had been branded by an unbridled Press."

Sir Horace is no more favourable to Mr. Gladstone as an Imperial statesman than be was in his former volumes. He tells with something like a chuckle an anecdote of Hiibner, the well- known Austrian diplomat, who was a visitor to Raby Castle about the time that Mr. Gladstone made his famous "hands off" speech about Austria. Hiibner being mistaken for Mr. Gladstone, to whom he bore a slight resemblance, set himself to behave in an exceptionally disagreeable manner. When asked to give his motive, he replied : "Well, I hope I have succeeded in making Mr. Gladstone thoroughly unpopular in Darlington." Sir Horace's naive apology for his anti. Gladstone sentiments is also worthy of reproduction :— "In permitting myself these strictures on the spirit in which the eminent statesman was apt to deal with Imperial questions, I am conscious that I am overstepping the bounds I have set myself in these reminiscences of my past career. My excuse for doing so must be the painful experience I shared with others who then had to watch over British interests abroad, of the humiliating effect of Mr. Gladstone's incoherent and nerveless foreign policy, as shown in the palpable decrease of our weight and influence in the affairs of the world."

At his very best Sir Horace can reproduce a really strong character most successfully :— "White's was in every way a striking personality. In some respects he reminded me of Morier, and without the latter's polish was, like him, massive and imperious. His rugged exterior, rough manner, and still rougher loud voice—which was said specially to grate on the Sovereign to whom he was accredited—together with his peculiar foreign accent, grafted on what he claimed to be a native brogue, almost belied, and effectually masked, the great finesse and almost Slav flexibility and adroitness that lay beneath. Most remarkable of all was his flair and his memory for the ante- cedents of persons of any interest he had known in his multifarious service. The self-same dip/ornate double d'un pa/icier became, if not a mat Eltchi on the Stratford de Redcliffe pattern, at least a vigilant, admirably informed, and most loyal guardian of interests to which we then still attached much importance."

Altogether, this volume deserves to be read—and no doubt will be widely read—not only as a sequel to its predecessors, but for its own sake as an excellent miscellany of good stories and useful information.