Throughout his life Milnes approached public events with a singular sobriety of judgment. He was never led away by popular clamour, but formed his opinions, on principle, after mature deliberation. It is almost needless to add that he generally found himself on the unpopular side. When England went mad over the Crimean war, Milnes wrote calmly: ‘For my own part I like neither of the combatants, though I prefer a feeble and superannuated despotism as less noxious to mankind than one young and vigorous, and assisted by the appliances of modern intelligence.’ During the American civil war, he ‘broke away from his own class, and ranged himself on the side of the friends of the North, with an earnestness not inferior to that of Mr Bright and Mr Forster.’ Mr Reid tell us that this conduct won for Milnes that popularity with the masses, especially in Yorkshire and Lancashire, which all his previous efforts had failed to obtain, and that he found himself, to his great surprise, one of the popular idols. In 1870, again, he was on the unpopular side: ‘I am Prussian to the backbone,’ he wrote, ‘which is a pure homage to principle, as they are the least agreeable people in the world.’
We have been at pains to set forth Milnes’s political acts and convictions in some detail, because he has been frequently represented as a gay _farceur_, who took up politics as a pastime. It is not, however, as a politician that he will be remembered, but as a man of letters. In his younger days he achieved distinction as a writer of verse, and Landor hailed him as ‘the greatest poet now living in England.’ This judgment may nowadays provoke a smile; but, though it is not to be expected that his poems will recover their former popularity, they hardly deserve to have fallen into complete neglect. As Mr Reid says:
‘A great singer he may not have been; a sweet singer with a charm of his own he undoubtedly was; nor did his charm consist alone in the melody of which he was a master. In many of his poems real poetic thought is linked with musical words; whilst in everything that he wrote, whether in verse or in prose, one may discern the brightest characteristics of the man himself: the catholicity of his spirit; the tenderness of his sympathy with weakness, suffering, mortal frailty in all its forms; the ardour of his faith in something that should break down the artificial barriers by which classes are divided, and bring into the lives of all a measure of that light and happiness which he relished so highly for himself’ (vol. ii. p. 438).