Primrose Shaken

Every morning at seven, the Weather permitting, His Grace the Earl of Rosebery, Baron Primrose, Baron Epsom of Epsom, rides out over Epsom Downs in what the Times has declared to be "perhaps the only private carriage in England which is still guided by postilions.*

Archibald Philip Primrose is now in his 78th year. He was Prime Minister from 1894 to 1895. He is the last surviving Earl to have held the Premiership before Britain's gradual democratization rendered that office practically reserved to commoners. He was the first Briton ever to own a horse which won the Derby while its owner was Prime Minister, an altitude of bliss which only British sovereigns who have tried to "win the Derby" and failed can fully appreciate. In 1878 the Times and many another British newspaper listed in slightly over two columns "the more notable wedding presents" which poured in when his immense wealth was rendered fabulous by his marriage* to Hannah, only daughter and heiress of Baron Meyer Amschel de Rothschild, in the presence of the Prince of Wales and many another. Mr. Gladstone passed on the torch of Liberalism to Lord Rosebery as perhaps his chief henchman, and from him it descended via Mr. Asquith to David Lloyd George. By way of picturesque funereal climax, the Earl of Rosebery served as pallbearer to Mr. Gladstone, to poet Tennyson, to painter Millais.

Accordingly it was but natural that a sensation was produced last week when Lord Rosebery's early morning drive over Epsom Downs was suddenly cut short by the instantaneous and unexplained death of one of the horses attached to his carriage. The postilion who was riding the horse sprawled upon the road. The other horses snorted, plunged, backed, tangled up the harness. Aghast at the possible consequences to their aged master, the other postilions quieted the horses as soon as possible, rushed to assist the white-haired Victorian statesman from his carriage, bundled him safely into a motor, sighed with relief at the news that he seemed "none the worse for being badly shaken."

Lord Rosebery's flashing wit has long operated as a stimulant upon the minds of all English knights of the pen who have written about him. Two of Sir James Barrie's observations are justly famous: "The first time I ever saw Lord Rosebery was in Edinburgh when I was a student, and I flung a clod of earth at him. He was a peer; those were my politics....

"The uncrowned 'King of Scotland' is a title that has been made for Lord Rosebery, whose country has had faith in him from the beginning. Mr. Gladstone was the only other man who could make so many Scotsmen take politics as if it were the Highland Fling. Once when Lord Rosebery was firing an Edinburgh audience to the delirium point, an old man in the hall shouted out: 'I dinna hear a word he says, but it's grand, it's grand!' "

Mr. Philip Guedalla recently prefaced a paper on Lord Rosebery with the cruel but "Primrosean" observation: "There are three kinds of statesmen, dead, living and elder."

*The horses which draw the carriage are not driven by a coachman but by mounted postilions.

*On the occasion when young Primrose was expelled from Oxford for keeping a racing stud, he arrogantly prophesied his future accomplishments with surprising accuracy: "I shall marry the richest woman in England; I shall become Prime Minister; and I shall win the Derby." One year younger than Chauncy M. Depew, Lord Rosebery holds a position in England not unlike that held by Senator Depew in the U. S. Recently the Earl realized that his last hours are drawing near, and paid a visit to his tenants in Buckinghamshire, during which he bade them goodbye: "We shall never meet again."