Most of the newspaper accounts which I have read do less than justice to the remarkable personality of Edwin Montagu. He was one of those who suffer violent fluctuations of mood, quickly passing from reckless courage and self-assertion to abject panic and dejection—always dramatising life and his part in it, and seeing himself and his own instincts either in the most favourable or in the most unfavourable light, but seldom with a calm and steady view. Thus it was easy for the spiteful to convict him out of his own mouth, and to belittle his name by remembering him only when his face was turned towards the earth. At one moment he would be Emperor of the East riding upon an elephant, clothed in rhetoric and glory, but at the next a beggar in the dust of the road, crying for alms but murmuring under his breath cynical and outrageous wit which pricked into dustier dust the rhetoric and the glory.

That he was an Oriental, equipped, nevertheless, with the intellectual technique and atmosphere of the West, drew him naturally to the political problems of India, and allowed an instinctive, mutual sympathy between him and its peoples. But he was interested in all political problems and not least in the personal side of politics, and was most intensely a politician. Almost everything else bored him. Some memoir-writers have suggested that he was really a scientist, because with nature he could sometimes find escape from the footlights.