Edgar Vincent, who became Viscount D ’Abernon, was born on 18 August 1857. He was the seventh son, by a second marriage, of the Rev. Sir Frederick Vincent, Bt., Rector of Slinfold, Sussex, and Canon of Chichester. He was educated at Eton, and in 1877 passed, first in the list, the examination for Student Dragoman at Constantinople. He did not take up the appointment, however, joining the Coldstream Guards in the same year. While still holding his commission in that regiment he found opportunity to begin his experience in the Middle East, as private secretary and assistant, respectively, to the Commissioners for Eastern Roumelia and for the evacuation of the territory ceded by Turkey to Greece. At this early stage he gave evidence of his exceptional ability by publishing a grammar of Modern Greek, in 1879. In later life Lord D’Abernon took legitimate pride in the fact that this grammar—surely, in any case, an unusual achievement for a subaltern in the Guards at the age of twentytwo—had been adopted by the University of Athens as a standard text-book. At the same early period he must already have given signs of his distinguished gifts for finance and administration; for, having retired from the Guards in 1882, at the age of twenty-five, he became President of the Council of the Ottoman Public Debt. Two years later he became Financial Adviser to the Egyptian Government, and in 1889, now K.C.M.G., he returned to Constantinople as Governor of the Imperial Ottoman Bank. There follows a period in which Sir Edgar Vincent seems to have waited many years for further opportunity of public service. He had married in 1890, and he and his brilliant wife, Lady Helen Vincent, were well known and popular figures in late Victorian and Edwardian society. He had been one of the coterie known as ‘The Souls’, and Lady Oxford, in her reminiscences, recalls him as one of the two handsomest young men of those days. He owned race-horses, and he entered Parliament; but he was no keen party man and had no special gift of oratory, so that politics offered him no career. There seemed little likelihood, indeed, in these middle years, that the great abilities of which he had so early given proof would become known to the world at large, or find adequate use in the service of his country or of the world.