had seen M. Solomon's hotel next door, you would think our house was only the stables attached to it.' The dazzling effects of Nathan Rothschild's Paris drawingroom were combined during this period with the exercise of a wholesome influence for peace in his bureau. In 1830 the July revolution in Paris was followed by the Belgian declaration of independence. The King of the Netherlands refused his assent; and the mutual rivalries of the neighbouring Powers threatened danger to the peace of Europe. All the European States wanted money, and dreaded war chiefly on account of the consequent fall in funds. The preservation of European peace rested with Rothschild, whose first condition in granting a loan to the Brussels Government was that the new kingdom should renounce anything in itself provocative of war.

Very shortly after these transactions, a pigeon, fluttering in through the open window of the St Swithin's Lane premises, brought the news of its owner's death. A few days later, the whole corps diplomatique attached to the English Court witnessed the funeral ceremony in the Jewish East End burial-ground. The departed Croesus had left four sons. Of these the third, Nathaniel, did not follow his father's English footsteps but settled in France, while one at least of his uncles looked after the family interests in Germany. The London house passed entirely to Nathan's firstborn, Lionel, and the two other sons Antony and Mayer. Nothing is more noticeable in the record of this remarkable line than the uniformity with which, in each generation, the family instinct and genius descended from father to son. Nathan's strong brains and illimitable resources had made him a national institution in his adopted country. In 1854 that position was emphasised by a sixteen million loan which the Crimean War forced on the English Government, and which the banking house in St Swithin's Lane provided. In short, during the greater part of the 19th century, from the Liverpool Government onward to that of Disraeli, the house of Rothschild remained continuously in closer relations with the British Cabinet than those ever occupied by any private business house before or since.

Meanwhile they had been making for themselves a place in society only less important than that which they had won in politics. When Nathan Rothschild's

knowledge of polite London began, Holland House was in the plenitude of the various interests described by Macaulay; it occurred to the first English Rothschild that he might as well acquire a suburban residence of the same sort. At no great distance from the Kensington mansion, Gunnersbury fell vacant and was bought, as the first Lord Rothschild himself told me, by his grandfather about the year 1834. Immediately on its purchase its hospitalities began to obtain the same kind of reputation that they enjoyed more fully and prominently when dispensed by Nathan's elder son and successor, Baron Lionel Rothschild. During the thirties, the disturbing effects of the first Reform Bill at every stage of its progress made themselves felt in every quarter of the aristocratic or fashionable world. Their seconds in command, if not the actual leaders on both sides, occasionally met each other in the Gunnersbury grounds, whose garden parties, however, did not reach their greatest distinction till the period, some years later, chosen by Lord Beaconsfield for describing them in his last novel. Then it was that Disraeli himself, as the suburban guest of Baron Lionel, the 'Adrian Neuchatel' of 'Endymion,' chatted amicably with Lord Palmerston, whose turbulent' statesmanship, only a day or two before, he had been denouncing from the Opposition benches. Hither the future Emperor of the French, during his London exile, drove down in his friend Count Alfred D'Orsay's cabriolet. The climax of Baron Lionel's career as host was reached on March 4, 1857, when his eldest daughter Leonora married her cousin Alphonse. On that occasion, Greys and Stanhopes, after a spell of some mutual bitterness, were surprised to find themselves in the same company. Among the guests were the best-known representatives of the 19th-century cosmopolitan fashion and intellect, Sir John Acton, Ranke the historian, Lord Macaulay, Mrs Norton, the George Grotes, Lady Molesworth, and a few others who, like that Victorian hostess, lived to the eve of our own era, such as Alfred Montgomery, C. P. Villiers, and Henry Calcraft.

Among the tastes common to Lionel and Mayer was an interest in the Turf. Mayer's Mentmore stables became famous during the early fifties. Like Lionel, he

had as good an eye for the points of a horse as for the capacities of a man. Each of the brothers was a baron; and there seems to be some doubt which of the two was always pre-eminently indicated by that title on the racecourse. Baron Lionel's New Court innings (18361879) exceeded the length of his father's by five years, while immeasurably surpassing it in the magnitude of his transactions. Thus the Rothschild advances to different States on both sides of the Atlantic had reached the sum of 200,000,000l. by 1875. At that date there began those later operations in the land of the Pharaohs uniting, as it seemed to all Englishmen, more closely than ever the riches of a family with the well-being of an empire. The Quarterly Review' (Vol. CXLII) contained a full account of the purchase of the Suez Canal shares with the four millions forthcoming at the shortest notice from the great house in St Swithin's Lane, at two and a half per cent., or a total profit of 100,000l. as interest. It may be mentioned, however, on the first Lord Rothschild's authority, that soon after Disraeli's return to power in 1873 the possibility of acquiring the shares for this country had suggested itself in the Sunday talks of the Prime Minister with the master of Gunnersbury.

Later ventures in Egyptian finance were reserved for Baron Lionel's immediate successors, with whom the 19th and the early 20th century were best acquainted. Of that generation none is now left; the first Lord Rothschild died on March 31, 1915; his younger brother Leopold passed away two years later, on May 29, 1917; the last survivor of the brothers, Alfred, the second son, lived until January 1918. This was the trio whose resources and foresight enabled two successive administrations to avert from Egypt the doom of bankruptcy and ruin. This help came from New Court in the shape of monthly advances on no legal security, but on the strength of a private note written by Mr Gladstone's Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville. The first Lord St Aldwyn followed Mr Gladstone at the Exchequer in 1885 and bore the same testimony as Lord Granville to the courageous and absolutely essential services rendered during the longdrawn Anglo-Egyptian crisis by the great firm.

Nathan Rothschild had given his sons the best intellectual training within his reach, selecting for them

the most thoroughly equipped of German universities, and after that a shrewdly planned course of travel through the European homes of beauty and art. Baron Lionel paid the same attention to whatever might enrich and strengthen the brain-power of his boys. The three brothers constituting the English firm down to 1915 were all at Cambridge and distinguished themselves in mathematics. His uncle, James, the earliest of the Paris branch, was the first of the family whose pungent conversational wit won European fame; and some of Sidonia's most sententious epigrams in Disraeli's great novel were the echo of the French Rothschild's bons mots or repartees. During the revolutionary months of 1830 a little band of socialists made a hostile demonstration outside James Rothschild's house. The master invited two spokesmen of the crowd into his room for a friendly talk. Gentlemen,' he said, 'you are, I believe, for an equal distribution of property. I have therefore prepared some figures that may interest you. The population of France is so and so; my available money amounts to Divide that total among your fellow countrymen and yourselves, and you will see that it works out at precisely half a franc per head. Allow me to present each of you with your share and to wish you good morning.' Something of the Paris uncle's humorous cynicism descended to the chief and ablest of the London nephews. Towards the close of his life the first Lord Rothschild heard, at the third Lord Orford's, a golden youth who had made his way into the City speak with all Mr Mantalini's contempt for the 'demnition coppers.' 'That young man,' quietly observed the Plutus of St Swithin's Lane, 'does not seem to know much of large transactions.'

During the summer of 1869 Queen Victoria had expressed herself very strongly against certain peerages whose creation the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary were supposed to desire; they included the advance to a barony of the baronetcy already inherited from his uncle Anthony by the head of the English Rothschilds. The honour was delayed until 1885;* by that date the first Lord Rothschild had found more than one opportunity for rendering the government a purely political service.

Lord Fitzmaurice's Granville,' ii, 17.

In 1870 a short interval passed between Lord Clarendon's death and the appointment of Lord Granville as his successor at the Foreign Office. Before the new Secretary of State had kissed hands, Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern's candidature for the Spanish throne had filled Europe with apprehension. In his perplexity the French Emperor, then staying at St Cloud, sent for Baron Rothschild (of Paris); for the moment,' he said, 'the English Foreign Office was without a head. Would not, therefore, the French Baron impart direct to Mr Gladstone the dangers of the suggested candidature.' Accordingly, without delay, a telegram in cipher was sent to Baron Lionel. The task of deciphering the despatch fell to the Baron's eldest son, the future peer. He, too, it was who, after much consultation with his father, took the telegram on the morning of July 6 to the Prime Minister, then living in Carlton House Terrace. The negotiations that followed during the next few days are described in Lord Morley's biography of his old chief.* At each stage the heads of the Rothschild firm were as closely au courant with all that passed in Downing Street as its founder had been with the policy of Lord Liverpool when financing the Duke's soldiers in Spain or clearing his paper elsewhere.

The social organisation of New Court had been carried as far as the time allowed by Nathan; his son invested it with most of the features which were to be still further developed by Baron Lionel's posterity in the next generation, and are pleasantly remembered to-day by those whose experience of the Rothschild hospitalities extended from the palace in Piccadilly to the luncheon room in St Swithin's Lane, where a cut off the famous Gunnersbury or Tring saddle of mutton formed part of the welcome awaiting the properly accredited visitor. So in the 15th century the Kingmaker's London house in what is now Warwick Lane remained open every forenoon, that any citizen so disposed might enter and cut a juicy slice or carry off on his dagger as much as the blade could hold from one of the six oxen that supplied the Nevill breakfast table.

The three brothers who played the host on such

*Life of Gladstone,' vol. ii, pp. 324-5.