Excerpt from Life, Letters, and Diaries of Sir Stafford Northcote, First Earl of Iddesleigh The intellect of Sir Stafford Northcote may perhaps best be described as ready at every need. It was ad mirably disciplined rather than vivid and original. His powers were always entirely at his command, so that what ever he could do, he could do with ease. His education and his taste gave him a wide command of literature, at once an ornament and a consolation. His education had made him acquainted with the best that has been written and said in the ancient and the modern European lang nages. His love of poetry was at once ardent and refined. Seldom has the same quality of spirit accompanied so much quantity of intellectual force ready to be employed in all the details of business. Perhaps only in Mr Gladstone, at least during our age, have the qualities of the man of letters and of the financier been so combined. As a rule they are divorced. What was peculiar to Sir Stafford, at once his force and his limitation, was the practicalxviii introduction. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.