Compared with the two men who have preceded him in this selection, the life and achievements of Robert Lowe (1811–1892) present a distinction with a difference. On any public question there could be little doubt where O’Connell would stand, or, for that matter, Lord Palmerston. But of Lowe, in some ways more individual than either, the exact position could hardly be predicated. In short, he was truer to himself than to any cause or party; and his chief title to fame he won as a recalcitrant Liberal.

He was an Oxford man, who took a B.A. in 1833 as a good classic, and thereupon became for a time an University coach. Meanwhile he studied law, and finding no field at home for his undoubted talents, went out to Australia, where he laid the foundation of his fortunes. He soon gained a seat in the Legislative Council for New South Wales, and having become generally prominent in colonial affairs, in 1850 judged that the time had come for his return to England. Almost immediately he was engaged as a writer of leading articles for the Times newspaper. In 1852, as Member of Parliament for Kidderminster, he began his twenty years of public service. Particularly in connection with educational matters, Lowe was soon well known in the House, one of many useful but not distinguished public men.

It was in the year 1866 that Lord John Russell introduced a bill for the extension of the suffrage, a measure mild enough in view of more recent enactments, but a measure that aroused in Lowe all the opposition of his peculiar nature. For the moment he became more Tory than the Tories; and in the debates over the bill developed powers perhaps unsuspected by himself,—certainly so by his colleagues. The one voice that was heard above all others was that of Lowe, a voice emphatic, sincere, and, as the event proved, dominant. The bill was rejected.

The National Biographer says: “Lowe’s triumph at the time was complete.... He had the success which attends those who believe all they are saying. At no other time did he attain to such a high level of perfection in speaking.... Mr. Gladstone and he vied with each other in aptness of classical quotation, and the keenest partisan on the ministerial side could not fail to admire Lowe’s courage and sincerity of purpose.”

It was his annus mirabilis. It is whimsical now to read that contemporaries thought they saw in Lowe a superior to Gladstone; more whimsical to learn that the very next year the Conservatives, switched skilfully about by Disraeli, passed a much more sweeping extension of the franchise than the one Lowe had so successfully opposed. For the moment, however, his reputation was secure.

In 1868, he was chosen Chancellor of the Exchequer, apparently a step upward, in reality the beginning of his decline. For he soon became unpopular, personally by his brusque manner, officially because his conception of his duty would not allow him to apply the public moneys to such purposes as the purchase of Epping Forest for a public park, and the installation of gardens along the Thames Embankment. This office he eventually resigned. Although, in 1873, he was made Home Secretary, he had already passed not so much out of the public eye as out of the public mind. The next year, with the defeat of the Gladstone Ministry, he made his definitive departure from political life. The further honor of the peerage awaited Lowe,—from 1880 he was Viscount Sherbrooke,—but the last twenty years of his life were those of anti-climax and decay. The peculiar malignancy of fate that latterly seemed to pursue him was shown in the accidental publication in 1884 of the inconsiderable booklet, Poems of a Life, which he had privately printed for private circulation. He died in 1892, at the age of eighty-one. The world had almost forgotten him.

Such, briefly, are the facts of Lowe’s history, a record of honorable achievement surely, but not the record which others—and probably the man himself—had dreamed of. It may be asked how the career of a man who from modest beginnings attained cabinet rank could be in any sense a failure. But when the supreme episode of his life—the brief hour of glory, followed by the gradual reversal from almost universal laudation to wide-spread unpopularity—is remembered the question should be answered. The causes of Lowe’s failure to justify his own promise were perhaps largely personal. The temper of the man was brusque, independent, imperious. In his love for invective and satire as weapons of oratory, there was something Swiftian; Swiftian, too, was his general disregard for the feelings of others. This did not arise from any native insensibility—it is the sensitive who can inflict the keenest wounds—but from a pride of intellect that made him despise the slow-minded and the ill-informed. He was not so much tactless as disdaining tact. Some of the projects he favored were signally progressive: in 1856 he introduced an unsuccessful bill for the conversion of partnerships comprising more than twenty persons into incorporated companies; he was an advocate of public libraries, of undenominational education; as Chancellor he devised ingenious budgets and proposed a revenue stamp on match-boxes, a tax which had already been levied in America; and Mr. A. Patchett Martin claims for him the original project of Imperial Federation. He was also one of the earliest enthusiasts over the bicycle. On the other hand, he was personally opposed to the democratic idea, especially as represented by universal suffrage. He was never strictly a party man. It is a tribute to him that the Liberals, under whose banners he nominally fought, acquiesced in the free play that his erratic temperament demanded. Something of a cynic, he could laugh about himself or his own classical attainments; but it is agreed that, with all his satire and asperity, Lowe was free from that mean joy in another’s misfortunes—Aristotle’s ?p??a??e?a??a—that so often accompanies the masters of epigram and of scorn.