government of Lord Salisbury. He died, after a brief and unexpected illness, on December 10, 1899, within a year from his retirement.

Sir Henry Jenkyns was little known to the world at large. The record of his work is inscribed on the arid, anonymous, and ungrateful pages of the statute-book, and in the sixty and more folio volumes of confidential papers-drafts, notes, minutes, memoranda, and the like-which testify to his conscientious and unflagging industry.

The period which his official life covered was one of great legislative activity in the British Parliament, and among the many important legislative measures which he drafted, or helped to draft, may be mentioned Mr. Forster's Education Act and Ballot Act, the Army Act of 1881, Mr. Gladstone's Irish Church Act, Irish Land Act and Home Rule Bills, the Acts which transformed the system of Local Government in England and Ireland, and Sir William Harcourt's Finance Act. To make the list complete would be to write the history of Eng-、 lish legislation for thirty years. It must not be supposed, nor will it be supposed by any one who is acquainted with the nature of English legislative machinery, that work of this kind was of a mechanical character, or even that it involved nothing more than putting into shape the suggestions of others. The sixty or seventy volumes to which I have referred, if their confidential contents could be disclosed, would tell a very different story. But, from their nature, they cannot be used as materials

for a biography, nor will any biography be attempted here. All that is attempted is to give the impression produced by a very remarkable man on some of those who knew him best.

It was at the beginning of the year 1870 that I was first brought into close relations with Jenkyns. Mr. Henry Thring, as he then was, wanted a young barrister to give him assistance at his office, and at the suggestion of Jenkyns, whom I knew slightly, I undertook the work experimentally. The experiment, in that particular form, only lasted six months, but during the remainder of the twelve years which elapsed before I went to India I continued to do a great deal of drafting work for the Parliamentary Counsel's Office, and naturally had much to do with the Assistant Parliamentary Counsel. After my return from India in 1886 to take up the post which he had vacated, I was intimately associated with him in all his official work.

In personal appearance Sir Henry Jenkyns was a noticeably handsome man, above the ordinary stature, with a powerful frame, strong but clearly chiselled features, and large, dark, expressive, brown eyes. His manners were reserved and sometimes brusque. He had a small circle of intimate friends by whom he was regarded with deep affection. To Ministers and ex-Ministers of the Crown, and in the precincts of Parliament, he was a familiar figure. Among the heads of the Civil Service there was no one who was more frequently consulted, whose opinion carried greater weight, whose

character commanded more sincere and affectionate respect. But to the world at large he was little known. For this there were many reasons. He was constitutionally shy. He lived the quietest of lives. Even his most intimate friends could not persuade him to dine out. He abhorred functions. He was the hardest and most indefatigable of workers, and found that he could not reconcile the claims of public duty with the charms of society. Social engagements were incompatible with his method of work, which was to take his papers in the evening to his house in the country, and think out, steadily and quietly, the conclusions which he dictated next morning in the form of memoranda, minutes, or Bills. And lastly, in spite of his robust physique, he had always, from his college days, felt the importance of being careful about his health. His favourite form of recreation was a holiday in the Alps.

For his reluctance to attend public dinners and similar gatherings there was another reason beside that referred to above. He always maintained that a civil servant, especially if engaged on confidential work, should keep in the background, and that the less he spoke in public and wrote for the press the better. It was probably for this reason that during his time of office he made no literary use of the vast mass of materials which he had collected in the course of his official labours. It may be that he was over strict in his self-imposed reticence. But if he erred it was on the side of virtue. The rules which he laid down for his own guidance in these

matters were the outcome of the stern, lofty, unswerving, austere conscientiousness which was the keynote of his character. No one had a higher standard of public duty. No one lived so conscientiously up to his standard. Private interests, amusements, convenience were, with him, always subordinate and subservient to public duty. If he had a complicated legislative task on hand it absorbed the whole of his time and energies, irrespectively of office hours and vacations. And the level of work which he expected from others never equalled his own.

Probably the first thing that would strike any one who was brought into contact with Sir Henry Jenkyns in his official capacity would be the extent, accuracy, and minuteness of his acquaintance with legislative and administrative machinery. He knew the machine by heart. So far as this knowledge was derived from book-learning it was to be explained by his habits of work. When he was called upon to prepare a Bill on any important subject he would begin by endeavouring to make himself a complete master of the subject in all its bearings. For this purpose he would spare himself no pains in ransacking the contents of statutes, law reports, text-books, blue-books, volumes of Hansard, and the like. The results would be embodied in an exhaustive memorandum, which would describe the existing state of the law, the mode in which, and the sources from which, it had grown up, the authorities by which it was administered, the difficulties which had occurred in its administration, the

attempts which had been made, in Parliament and elsewhere, to amend it, and the fate which these attempts had encountered, and would end by sug gesting practical conclusions for adoption, and indicating the arguments for and against each alternative course. The Bill based on these materials would be accompanied by full notes, showing the mode in which, and the reasons for which, each clause would alter the law, and the arguments which might be used and would have to be met. The folio volumes to which reference has been made abound in memoranda and notes of this kind. The number of legislative problems with which Parliament has to deal, though great, is not infinite, and the same problems are apt to recur in varying forms. Under these circumstances his years of patient, thorough, and methodical study made him a walking encyclopædia of legislative information, and equipped him for grappling, at a moment's notice, with almost any subject on which legislation might be required, and for offering searching criticisms and useful suggestions on almost any legislative topic. And his knowledge was not derived from books alone. During his long term of office he had mixed with the staff, and become familiar with the actual working, of ' all the great Government departments; he had enjoyed exceptional opportunities of studying from the inside the ways of Ministers and of Parliament; he knew what legislative experiments had been tried and suggested, why some of them had failed and others had never come to the birth; and he could