His schemes were disordered and crude; nevertheless the spirit that
informed them was like a new birth in the politics of the whole world. A
friend of mine told me that he had seen pictures of Mr. Lloyd George on
the walls of peasants' houses in the remotest villages of Russia.

But those days have departed and taken with them the fire of Mr. Lloyd
George's passion. The laboured peroration about the hills of his
ancestors, repeated to the point of the ridiculous, is all now left of
that fervid period. He has ceased to be a prophet. Surrounded by
second-rate people, and choosing for his intimate friends mainly the new
rich, and now thoroughly liking the game of politics for its amusing
adventure, he has retained little of his original genius except its
quickness.

His intuitions are amazing. He astonished great soldiers in the war by
his premonstrations. Lord Milner, a cool critic, would sit by the sofa
of the dying Dr. Jameson telling how Mr. Lloyd George was right again
and again when all the soldiers were wrong. Lord Rhondda, who disliked
him greatly and rather despised him, told me how often Mr. Lloyd George
put heart into a Cabinet that was really trembling on the edge of
despair. It seems true that he never once doubted ultimate victory,
and, what is much more remarkable, never once failed to read the
German's mind.

I think that the doom that has fallen upon him comes in some measure
from the amusement he takes in his mental quickness, and the reliance he
is sometimes apt to place upon it. A quick mind may easily be a
disorderly mind. Moreover quickness is not one of the great qualities.
It is indeed seldom a partner with virtue. Morality appears on the whole
to get along better without it. According to Landor, it is the talent