THE posthumous penalty for very long life is that
those who knew a man when he was active in the
world have long passed away when his biography
or memoir comes to be written. When at last it
appears, it belongs not to the realm of quasi-con-
temporary happenings but to the realm of history.
Yet for some, history, too, has its charms. My
father lived until 1928, but his first literary successes
as a Cambridge undergraduate had been won before
the American Civil War broke out, and moreover
he had given up politics and retired into the country
thirty years before he died. He belongs, therefore,
to the generation of the late or even of the middle
Victorians. If he had written his own memoirs,
he would have made the London society of the
'sixties and 'seventies as actual to the reader as he
made the equally brilliant society in which Charles
Fox passed his youth.

Unhappily he neglected to do so, and it is useless
for another to attempt to write his' Life and Times.'
Many years ago he told me that he did not wish his
Life to be written. Later he said that I could do
as I thought fit in the matter. In any case he
disliked long biographies, and I have followed what

-v-