LORD BEACONSFIELD'S MENTAL CONDITION

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 2, Issue 217, 21 July 1879, Page 2

LORD BEACONSFIELD'S MENTAL CONDITION

s The London correspondent of the Liverpool Post thus refers to Lord Beaconsfield's physical and mental condition : There are many reasons for a do-nothing course being pursued this year; some of them, as I shall presently remind my readers, of a pressing public character, But there is also a personal one of considerable practical weight and operation, I refer to Lord Beaconsfield's physical condition and present mental habit, You must not judge of his vigor by his public speeches. One of the greatest and shrewdest of our public men stated that the power of speaking is the last faculty lost by one who has conspicuously possessed it, Lord Beaconsfield has not lost it. Ho can absorb as much information as is necessary for the mill of his ingenious thought to turn out the cunning fabric of his rhotoric. But he can do little else, and the talk iu the best-informed circles is that he does nothing else, I believe this is not literally true. Besides speaking ijow and then, he keeps her Majesty all right—persuades her by daily attentions and communications that he is of all men most essential at present to her comfort and the good of the State. This, however, is a matter that he accomplishes without any aid from his colleagues, and to his colleagues gives no aid whatever, " does nothing," it is said, though I think this means that the lazy old fox just attends to what is necessary and no more. Doubtless, the Queen knows, and so do the Prime Minister's colleagues, that his health is in a condition of senile fragility, He has chronic, or at least frequent"bronchitis. He is a good deal haunted by gout. 11l or well he sees his medical man (Dr Kidd, whose success when the allopaths did not cure nor please his Lordship, is a triumph for homcepathy) every day; and altogether is in that interesting state of valetudinarism which in a witty and fashionable old gentleman of seventyfour secures him from his friends as much indulgence as can possibly be afforded him.