Balfour

“ I agreed to join Balfour at the rooms an hour before we started, in order to prepare a dissection which we had been unable to get ready before, and which it was necessary to complete for the morning lecture. Balfour was the son of a dissenting minister in the town, and had been carefully brought up. He was a hardworking, attentive student, but of a reserved and gloomy disposition. He seldom joined in the amusements of young men of his age, and consequently, though generally respected, he was not popular with his comrades. ”

“ While she looked at the ivy I opened for the first time for many weeks an English newspaper, and I read a speech of Mr. Balfour in which he said that the House of Lords ought to be preserved because it represented something in the nature of permanent public opinion of England, above the ebb and flow of the parties. Now Mr. Balfour is a perfectly sincere patriot, a man who, from his own point of view, thinks long and seriously about the public needs, and he is, moreover, a man of entirely exceptionable intellectual power. ”

“ With a fearful shriek—the more startling from his habitual composure—Balfour sprung to his feet, like Richard in the tent-scene; with hair erect, blanched face, and large drops of perspiration gathering on his brow, he staggered back, shouting:
“Oh, God! the man’s alive!”
I dashed at him, horror-struck myself, not at what had occurred—for I saw how it had happened—but at the abject terror of my companion, appalling to the last degree. Clasped together we hustled each other into a corner of the room, giving, in our passing struggles, a sharp gyration to the suspended skeletons. ”

“ Balfour took in the boy, and had begun to suspect that he entertained intentions which would deprive the camp of one of its chief sources of pleasure.
One day when the lawyer and his guide were quietly eating their lunch in the forest, Mr. Balfour went to work, in his quiet, lawyer-like way, to ascertain the details of Benedict's history; and he heard them all. When he heard who had benefited by his guide's inventions, and learned just how matters stood with regard to the Belcher rifle, he became, for the first time since he had been in the woods, thoroughly excited. ”

“ Balfour was a crackpot, and it was his job to take care of other crackpots—a job he enjoyed immensely and wholeheartedly, feeling, as he did, that that sort of thing was the only reason for the Society's existence. Of course, Mr. Balfour never considered himself or the others in the least bit crackpottish, in which he was just as much in error as he was in his assumption of the Society's raison d'être.
Ninety per cent of the members of the Society for Mystical and Metaphysical Research were just what you would expect them to be. ”

“ Mr. Balfour, a lawyer of faultless character and undoubted courage, held his secret. He could not bend him or buy him. He was the one man in all the world whom he was afraid of. He was the one man in New York who knew whether Benedict was alive or not. He had Benedict's heir in his house, and he knew that by him the law would lay its hand on him and his possessions. He only wondered that the action was delayed. Why was it delayed? Was he, Mr. Belcher, ready for it? ”

“ Balfour," said he, in a coaxing voice, "come and look at your treasure. It sparkles in the light of my lantern like gold, and you shall have it all if you please; I do not wish to share it with you."
"So you take me for a madman, do you? Look again; look fixedly upon me, Solomon Coe. You do not recognize me even yet? I do not wonder. It is not you that are dull, but I that am so changed by wrong and misery. My own mother does not know me, nor the woman of whom you robbed me nineteen years ago. Yes, you know me now. I am Richard Yorke!" ”

“ I was in two minds whether to run away; but anger got the upper hand, and I began instead to rain kicks and buffets on the door, and to shout out aloud for Mr. Balfour. I was in full career, when I heard the cough right overhead, and, jumping back and looking up, beheld a man’s head in a tall nightcap, and the bell mouth of a blunderbuss, at one of the first-story windows.
“It’s loaded,” said a voice.
“I have come here with a letter,” I said, “to Mr. Ebenezer Balfour of Shaws. Is he here?”
“From whom is it?” asked the man with the blunderbuss. ”

“ Few men could have borne without hurt such a stream of honorable distinctions, but in young Balfour genius and independence of thought were happily blended with industry and personal modesty; these won for him the friendship, esteem, and admiration of all who knew him. ”

“ And years after, as the struggle still raged—to see him, almost blind and deaf, looking like so much vitalized parchment rather than a figure of flesh and blood, as night after night he stood up to the agility of a Chamberlain, and the subtlety of a Balfour—each perfected to a fine art—surely never gamer, grander sight ever challenged the imagination of poet, patriot, or historian. ”

“ Far more able and far more interesting in every way is his accomplished kinsman, Mr. Balfour, who, a few days later, was appointed Prime Minister. He is a tall, ruddy, handsome Scotchman, with a rare grace and charm of manner, and an exceptional air of high breeding, who speaks in a manly, straightforward way, with no trace of the bitterness, or even the heat so common in political discussions. When one notes the clearness of his mind, and the attractiveness of his address, it gives a keener edge to the regret that such a man should be on the wrong side of a great question like this. ”

“ Balfour had a surprisingly numerous audience for his discourse on the League of Nations. His enumeration and analysis of the League's various enemies were in his happiest vein of philosophical humour. His conclusion was that the League had much less to fear from its avowed foes than from its fanatical friends, who were already attempting to put upon it tasks for which it was unfitted, and even to supply it with an International Police Force. ”

“ I am Sir Dagonet Balfour, of Balfour Hall; and if thou art willing I will make thee my lady."
Now, I was struck dumb as though my tongue had jumped forth o' my mouth, and never a blessed thing could I do saving stare, comrade. But that lass o' mine—that lass o' mine, comrade—she stands and looks at him, and never so much as a glint o' red in her face. And saith she, "My lord," saith she, "if that thou meanest what thou hast said, thou hast forgotten thine estate and not remembered mine. Since God hath not made me a lady, methinks it is not in the power o' one o' His creatures so to do. ”

“ Yet the male line is now extinct, and, with the exception of the two subjects of Sibbald's memoir and their brother David, who became a judge, they do not seem to have been men of note. After a good education at home Balfour was sent to travel on the continent, and after his return, although he had shown some inclination for poetry in his youth, when he translated the 'Panthea' of Johannes Leochæus (John Leech) into Scottish verse, he devoted himself to the study of the history and antiquities of Scotland. ”

“ In all matters of business I always go straight to the point at once."
"As in the present instance, for example," remarked the guest, with an imperturbable smile.
"I am coming to the point, Mr. Balfour—once for all. I will give you a thousand pounds down for that Crompton lot—twice the money that you gave for it within a month; that's twelve hundred per cent, per annum."
Balfour shook his head. "I am not a religious man, my dear Sir—far from it. But I believe, like Miss Joanna yonder, in inspirations: all my whims are inspirations, and therefore sacred. ”

“ That little speech gave one a clearer sense of what through all these years Arthur Balfour has been doing than anything that ever has before come to me. There is something supremely brave about a man of such 136fine understanding, such humorous and distinguished cynicism, standing by through all of the disillusions, disgust, deceptions, forced evil choices of public life, never quitting whatever the temptation. ”

“ The instinct of defense and protection to everything weak and dependent was strong within the lawyer; and Benedict affected him like a woman. It was easy for the two to become friends, and as Mr. Balfour grew familiar with the real excellences of his new acquaintance, with his intelligence in certain directions, and his wonderful mechanical ingenuity, he conceived just as high a degree of respect for him as he could entertain for one who was entirely unfurnished with those weapons with which the battles of life are fought. ”

“ Balfour made a great mistake. He had listened to the speech of Mr. Chamberlain, and had been one of those who had joined in the cheers at the exposure of Mr. Dillon's accidental mistake. There he should have left it, but, carried away by the hope of driving the point home against a political enemy, he needs must add something to what Mr. Chamberlain had said. Now Mr. Balfour is in many points very superior to Joe. He should leave personal vituperation to him: he is more active, defter, and more willing to do such dirty work. ”

“ It was lucky for Mr. Balfour that Sir Hector had not been present when he made the speech, for at every other line he ejaculated: "Rot! Unmitigated rot! Rubbish! The man doesn't know what he's talking about! What an absurd statement! Read that again, will you, my dear? I never heard such piffle!"
In spite of Sir Hector's interruptions, Jasmine stumbled through Mr. Balfour's speech, and she was just going to begin Mr. Asquith's reply when the door of the bedroom opened and Uncle Matthew walked in. ”

“ Balfour's brother, Francis. His early death, and W.K. Clifford's (Huxley said) , had been the greatest loss to science—not only in England, but in the world—in our time.] "Half a dozen of us old fogies could have been better spared." [He remembered Frank Balfour as a boy at [Harrow] and saw his unusual talent there.] "Then my friend, Michael Foster, took him up at Cambridge, and found out that he had real genius for biology. I used to say there was science in the blood, but this new book of his brother's," [he added, smiling] , "shows I was wrong." ”

“ Among the occasional great ones of earth whom I have met there is hardly anyone who stands out more clearly than Arthur Balfour, with his willowy figure, his gentle intellectual face, and, as I read it, his soul of steel. ”

“ Balfour was even worse. It is seldom that the House of Commons has seen a more remarkable or more effective retort than the happy, dexterous, delightful—from the literary point of view, unsurpassable—parody which Mr. Asquith made of Mr. Balfour's flagitious incitements to the men of Belfast. Mr. Asquith put the case of Mr. Morley going down to a crowd in Cork, and using the same kind of language. Mr. Balfour, in his speech, had over and over again used the name of the Deity. "I pray God," said the pious leader of the Tory party, as he addressed the Orangemen. ”

“ The memory of his father made him popular in the country: he himself had been at first courted, afterwards neglected by the government of the Stuarts, and seemed to have some claim against them. The ease with which the Parliamentary army was levied was ascribed to his name and zeal: he chose as his subordinates men conspicuous in the dominant party. Balfour served as lieutenant-general; among the colonels of foot we find Brooke, Mandeville, Hollis, Hampden: among the captains of horse Cromwell, Fiennes, and Haslerig. ”

“ John Balfour of Kinloch, commonly called Burly, was one of the fiercest of the proscribed sect. A gentleman by birth, he was, says his biographer, "zealous and honest-hearted, courageous in every enterprise, and a brave soldier, seldom any escaping that came in his hands." Life of John Balfour. Creichton says, that he was once chamberlain to Archbishop Sharpe, and, by negligence, or dishonesty, had incurred a large arrear, which occasioned his being active in his master's assassination. ”

“ For forty years now Arthur Balfour has stood by. He is, I believe, 73 years old. He has never had so much reason in all his long political career to believe that the good will of men can be mobilized for the world’s service. ”

“ BALFOUR, ROBERT (known also as Balforeus) (1550?–1625?) , Scottish philosopher, was educated at St Andrews and the university of Paris. He was for many years principal of the Guienne College at Bordeaux. His great work is his Commentarii in Organum Logicum Aristotelis (Bordeaux, 1618) ; the copy in the British Museum contains a number of highly-eulogistic poems in honour of Balfour, who is described as Graium aemulus acer. Balfour was one of the scholars who contributed to spread over Europe the fame of the praefervidum ingenium Scotorum. ”

“ Balfour glanced scathingly at those politicians of the baser sort who seek to confuse great issues by dragging to the front petty or irrelevant questions, and the breath of whose nostrils is the disturbance of the harmony which should subsist between class and class of the community. ”

“ Balfour keeps steadily away from the House. He never was a good attendant, even in his best of days, and now that he is relieved of responsibility, he naturally seeks to take advantage of it. But he doesn't take so much advantage as one would expect. ”

“ But it was Balfour who completed work. As Tim frankly admits, cannot sit opposite Balfour, smirking on Treasury Bench, without losing control of himself.
"I know it's wrong, Toby," he said to me after, in the Lobby, "but there is only one way to prevent it. I must quit the House, and go out for a walk on Terrace. To see Balfour sitting over there on the small of his back, sneering whilst we are trying to do our best for Ireland, is too much for me."
Having had back put up by Balfour, Conservatives below Gangway opposite completed transformation of Tim from peaceable citizen into an infuriate. ”