The treatment at first seemed to do him good; but he was in truth
a broken man. So precarious, indeed, was his condition that, passing
through London, the only people he saw were Lord Lansdowne, then Foreign
Minister, and King Edward VII. I was the only exception. He asked me to
come up and see him, telling me that I must not let it be known or he
would be killed with kindness. If I was deeply touched by his thought of
me, I was still more moved to see how extreme was his weakness of body.
His mind, however, was as clear as ever and he talked almost in his old
way. He was the kind of man who was much too sensitive to say in words,
what I knew he felt--that it was good-bye. I came away from that last
talk, with my devotion to the man, high as it was before, greatly
heightened.
* * * * *
Though I did not know the Duke of Devonshire, earlier known as Lord
Hartington, nearly so intimately as the other four, I had for him a
political admiration which was almost unbounded. When a young man as was
only natural--I was twenty-six when I first came into contact with him--
I rather chafed at what I thought was his impenetrability. This,
however, I soon discovered was due to no want of intelligence, but
partly to natural shyness, partly to his education, partly to
temperament, and partly also to a kind of dumbness of the mind, which is
by no means inconsistent with a real profundity of intellect.
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