240 
HARPER’S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. 
T HE political deeds and misdeeds of the 
veteran statesman whose name heads this 
paper and his personal character were intimately 
associated. There may not at first sight seem 
much connection between the stalwart octogena¬ 
rian, wrapped in an old morning-coat, stalking 
over his lands in the early gray of the morning— 
directing which trees shall be felled, what fences 
repaired, suggesting an improvement here, an 
alteration there—and the powerful Minister to 
whose words, only the day before, all Europe 
listened; but the two were inseparably allied. 
Lord Palmerston’s personal habits influenced 
his statesmanship infinitely more than his states¬ 
manship affected his personal habits. The vigor 
he derived from his healthy, athletic life he car¬ 
ried into his administration of public affairs ; and 
much of the trust which the English nation re¬ 
posed in their aged, self-willed Prime Minister 
was attributable to his hearty participation in 
all their sports, his identification with all their 
prejudices. 
Palmerston, in fact, was a representative 
Englishman. Whatever his opinions were on 
a given/Subject, those opinions were pretty sure 
to be the opinions of the great bulk of the En¬ 
glish nation. Whether he led the country, or, 
as is more reasonable to suppose, followed his 
instinctive notions of what the will of the people 
Would be, this much is certain, that throughout 
his long career—extending from the time of the 
“Son of St. Louis” and the First Napoleon 
down to the present day — whichever way he 
went the English nation went with him. It is 
hard to say whether his prodigious vitality was 
the cause of his mode of life or the effect of it. 
Perhaps a little of both. Up to within a very 
few months of his death he entered into every 
manly amusement with the zest of a youth of 
twenty. He watched the annual cricket-match 
between the public schools of Eton and Harrow 
with as much interest as if only yesterday he 
was a boy among the Harrovians. In the year¬ 
ly Oxford and Cambridge University rowing- 
matches, the town in which his undergraduate 
days were passed could always claim him as the 
most devoted of its partisans. 
On the race-course his beaming face and 
jaunty form were known and welcomed by ev¬ 
ery sporting man ; and to have won the “ blue 
ribbon of the turf” would have pleased the aged 
statesman better than half a dozen Parliament¬ 
ary victories. He was very near doing it once 
with his horse “ Mainstone,” but at the last mo¬ 
ment the “crack” broke down (not without sus¬ 
picion of foul play), and Palmerston was des¬ 
tined never to gain the wish of his heart. 
Though, like his great political opponent, Lord 
Derby—with whom in private life he was on 
the best of terms—he never betted upon his 
