174 TRANSACTIONS CHAP, confidence. Lord Fitzroy, instead of receiving ' • him in solemn form and ceremony, had walked forward to meet him, had put his hand kindly on the boy's shoulder, and had said a few words so cheering, so interesting, and so free from the vice of being commonplace, that the impression clung to the lad, shaping his career for years, and helped to make him the man he was when he was out with his battalion in the winter of the first campaign.* From the same presence the fore- most statesman of the time once came away saying, that the man in England most fitted by nature to be at the head of the Government was Lord Fitzroy Somerset; and he who so judged was himself a Prime Minister. Marshal St The euemies of the Imperial Government in Lord" Raglan Fraucc had loug made it a reproach against the brought to- ... . 1 ,,. getheratthe En^Hsli that they wcrc loinm" ni close alliance Tuileries. ° ./ ii o with the midnight destroyers of law and freedom ; but when Lord liaglan came to Paris — when he went to the Tuileries— when he was presented by the Emperor to INIarslial St Arnaud, — the notion that such things could be was a very torment to those of the Parisian malcontents who chanced to know something of the English General : — 'You English are a robust, stirring people, and ' perhaps every man of you imagines that he ' covers himself with dignity and grandeur by ' trampling upon the feelings of the rest of • The young ofiicer licre iilliuU'd to is no more, and I may venture to name liim — Alexander Mitelidl of Stow, who served iu the Grcnndier fJuards.
