Identifier: mirrorsofdowning00begb (find matches)
Title: The mirrors of Downing street; some political reflections
Year: 1921 (1920s)
Authors: Begbie, Harold, 1871-1929
Subjects: Statesmen -- Great Britain Great Britain -- Politics and government 1910-1936
Publisher: New York and London : G. P. Putnam's sons
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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Text Appearing Before Image:
Mr. Asquith, both by inheritance and temperament,
was designed for a strenuous life, a strenuous moral life.
He was never intended for anything in the nature of a
flaneur. If he had followed his star, if he had rigorously
pursued the path marked out for him by tradition and
his own earliest propensities, he might have been an
unpleasant person for a young ladies tea-party and an
unsympathetic person to a gathering of decadent artists;
he might indeed have become as heavy as Cromwell and
as inhuman as Milton; but he would never have fallen
from Olympus with the lightness of thistledown.

LORD NORTHCLIFFE

LORD NORTHCLIFFE, FIRST VISCOUNT
(ALFRED CHARLES WILLIAM HARMSWORTH)
Born, 1865, in Dublin. Educ.: in Trade Schools; trained as a book-
seller, and worked in the establishment of George Newnes; LL.D.,
Rochester Univ., U. S. A.; Proprietor of the London Times, Daily
Mail, and a number of other journals; Cr. Bart, in 1904; Viscount, 1917;
Chairman of the British War Mission to the United States, 1917; Di-
rector of the Aerial Transport Committee, 1917; Director of Propaganda
in Enemy Countries, 1918.
Text Appearing After Image:
LORD NORTHCLIFFE

© U. & U.
CHAPTER V
LORD NORTHCLIFFE

... " We cannot say that they have a great nature, or strong, or weak,
or light; it is a swift and imperious imagination which reigns with sovereign
power over all their beings, which subjugates their genius, and which
prescribes for them in turn those fine actions and those faults, those heights
and those littlenesses, those flights of enthusiasm and those fits of disgust,
which we are wrong in charging either with hypocrisy or madness."—
VAUVENARGUES.

A GREAT surgeon tells me he has no doubt that Carlyle
suffered all his life from a duodenal ulcer. " One may
speculate," he says, " on the difference there would
have been in his writings if he had undergone the
operation which to-day is quite common.
This remark occurs to me when I think about Lord
Northcliffe.
There is something wrong with his health. For a
season he is almost boyish in high spirits, not only a
charming and a most considerate host, but a spirit
animated by the kindliest, broadest, and cheerfullest

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