My Acquaintance With Mr. Gladstone

( Originally Published 1912 )

EARLY in the eighties, when he lived in Harley Street, Mr. Gladstone often walked from his house to Westminster by the way of Regent Street and Pall Mall, and it was on one of these occasions in the yellow dusk of a wintry afternoon that I saw him for the first time. Even the few in the crowd who did not know him were arrested by the rare distinction of his appearance, which suggested both power and benevolence. Apparently in the prime of life, though actually beyond it, and with a figure of supple strength and more than common height — his face pallid but luminous he bore himself with that dignity and grace which nobles and princes do not always inherit and the leaders of men cannot always acquire. There was in him "a combination and a form indeed to give the world assurance of a man." Other distinguished people might be mistaken for something less than they are Lord Rosebery for instance but it was impossible to see Mr. Gladstone, whether one knew him or not, without recognizing in him a man both unusual and paramount. Those among the passers who did not know him gazed and wondered; the others whispered his name, and many of them after passing him once turned in their path and doubled on it for the sake of passing him again.

Soon after this it was my privilege to become acquainted with him personally, and a frequent correspondence between us ensued, leading to occasional visits to Hawarden, which I need not say made red-letter days for me, and were looked forward to with no less appreciation than the memory of them justified when they were over.

Hawarden is not properly a castle, but a comparatively modern castellated mansion of yellowish-gray stone set in a formal garden, with loose gravel paths and gorgeous flower beds that glow like banners. A high stone wall separates the house and grounds from the village, but in the opposite direction they open upon a rolling and heavily timbered park and distant views of the Welsh hills. The path is always open to the public, but the garden and the approaches to the house are fenced off, as are the ruins of an ancient castle standing on a hill close by. That castle was one of the chain of fortresses built by Edward I and Edward II to overawe Wales, and nothing remains of it but the crumbling, moss-grown keep, from the parapet of which you can see the Dee crawling to the sea, and the low peninsula of Cheshire, and the darkened skies hanging over Liverpool.

When visitors came to Hawarden as guests of the house (and such visitors came from all over the world), the host would often take them up to the parapet, and as he gazed meditatively toward the brown cloud enveloping the bustling seaport which gave him birth, the mind of the spectator was drawn sympathetically down the long vista of years lying between the child in Rodney Street and the veteran standing by, who had so gallantly weathered the political storms of more than sixty years. We all remember Macaulay's characterization of Gladstone, who at twenty-five had become an under-secretary of state -- "the hope of the stern and unbending Tories." Never did a pre-diction so miscarry. "I was a Conservative in respect to ecclesiastical questions, but not in all things," he declared to me, "though I did not then understand the value of liberty for its own sake as a principle of human action and as a necessary condition of all political excellence." Before this he had created definitions of the Liberal and Conservative parties — "Liberalism is trust in the people, qualified by prudence; Conservatism is mistrust of the people, qualified by fear."

His urbanity had an old-world quality of courtliness without the chill of ceremoniousness, and the visitor was quickly made to feel that he was an object of friendly interest and consideration rather than the recipient of honours and privileges, ready as he properly might be to see himself only on that footing.

The life at Hawarden could not have been simpler than it was in Mr. Gladstone's closing years. The house is not one of the great ones — not a "show place" in the sense that Chatsworth, Hatfield, and Eaton Hall are, though it was so long the Mecca. of British Radicals, who all through the summer thronged the park and spouted Liberal doctrines as copiously as their kettles spouted tea. "The absence of superfluity," Mr. Richard Whiteing says, "is negative beauty," and no superfluity was visible at Hawarden, except in the library, which from time to time overflowed into the new hostel for theological students, founded by Mr. Gladstone in the village.

"As long as I kept my books down to twenty thousand I could remember them all, but now" he touched with his foot a row of them that had been removed from the library of the house to the hostel — "but now, with thirty thousand and more, I find myself getting duplicates."

All things — all persons — in the household were governed by simplicity and precision — so many hours were allowed for work, and so many for play. To the end Mr. Gladstone lived by a time-table, and the days were rare when he made any variation from it. Immediately after lunchen he retired to his library for about an hour, not to work, read, or rest himself, but to humour Mrs. Gladstone while she took her nap, which she could not do when he was absent. The incident speaks for itself, and I mention it for the light it throws on the affection and mutual dependence visible at all times between them.

He was nearing his eighty-eighth year at the time of which I am writing, but even then it was his habit to rise by eight and not retire till eleven or later. Tree-chopping had been forbidden, and his recreations were limited to walks and drives in the afternoon and back-gammon (of which he was very fond) after dinner. Here I am using "recreation" in its conventional sense of amusement. Mr. Gladstone often declared that he had always been able to find recreation in its proper sense by turning from one kind of work to another --that when wearied of politics he could refresh himself by literature, and vice versa. He attributed his longevity and health to this versatility, by which he could recuperate his energies, not by suspending them, but by merely diverting them. More remarkable than that, however, was the gift which enabled him to shut out for the night, at least, all cares of the day, even in the great political crises when the fate of nations depended on his decision. When the day's work was done — and it might be a very long and anxious day — he never carried any remnants of it to bed with him, but drew about him an impenetrable curtain, behind which repose prepared him and fortified him for tomorrow. I believe the ability to compel sleep whenever it was due or desired never failed him.

He was extraordinarily methodical in his work and correspondence, and looked after many details which might well have been delegated to a private secretary. Hundreds of letters from strangers were withheld from him, but he kept matters which were of interest and importance to him in his own hands. All the letters and all the manuscripts — not a few — which I received from him from 1887 to 1898 were holographic — not excepting the post-cards, which he liked for their economy of space, time, and material, using them with an edge of black specially printed on the margin by his own order when he was in mourning. He strongly objected to typewriting on the ground that not only was it more difficult for him to read than any fair hand, but also because it interposed, as he claimed, a mechanical veil between the sender and the receiver of a letter. His amazing precision revealed itself even in matters that another man in a similar position would have slighted. The little that could be crowded on to the face of a post-card was often divided into sections "I.," "II.," "III.," and then subdivided by A, B, C, and so on.

I have a note from him before me in which he says: "Your letter of May 12th has aroused in me a sense of guilt and stirred me to the performance of my duty. My excuse is not only in the heavy pressure of other calls; it is also in this, that my eyes are steadily losing power, and that typewriting (so kindly meant) tries them much more than good manuscript."

I have another letter of his which covers four closely written pages, and is divided like others into sections and sub-sections by numerals and alphabetical, distinctions. In this, written soon after President Cleveland's Venezuelan message, he says: "In my view it was impossible for us to admit that the United States had a locus standi in the case; and, as I understand, with its usual perspicacity, your government does not press this point if the question be properly handled; i.e., referred to arbitration. On the other hand, if Lord Salisbury insisted on the acknowledgment of the Schomburg line as a preliminary, he was wrong and gravely wrong. Unless that line has been acknowledged by Venezuela, it is of no authority whatever as against her. What claims may arise in our favour out of silence, uses, prescription, and the like, an arbitrator would consider."

It was through Mr. Gladstone that I was introduced to Cardinal Manning, whom I sought as a contributor to a discussion of Christianity, which Mr. Gladstone and Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll were already carrying on in the pages of the North American Review. The cardinal was to review both of them, and sum up and adjudicate in the controversy. I was invited to the gloomy palace at Westminster to meet him, and as much to my surprise as to my satisfaction, he appeared to like the idea as I explained it to him and to be even eager to add his word to what had already been said. I particularly wondered how he would deal with the violent heresies of "the colonel," and what he would have to say of his life-long friend as defender of the faith. His view of them was what I desired.

A few days later I was again bidden to the palace and the cardinal glided was wafted, one might say into the bare, high-ceiled room, lined with the dusty portraits of dead hierarchs, looking less like a man than a spirit in his emaciation. His tread was noiseless, his eyes glowed like stars under his smooth, white brow, and his fingers were long, pointed, and as sensitive as a woman's. Could this ever have been the youth at Harrow who sported Hessian boots with tassels, and was described as a "buck of the first water?" Ascetic as his appearance was, reminding one of medioeval saints (and perhaps inquisitions), his manner had a human warmth and friendly ease. He had with him a large folio manuscript, written from beginning to end in his own legible and beautiful hand, with scarcely an erasure or an interlineation in it.

"There, there it is," he said, beaming as he handed the manuscript to me. "I have given you something better than what you asked for. I have not said a word about Mr. Gladstone!"

I am afraid my countenance fell, for what I had been after was to some extent the argumentum ad hominem something personal as well as controversial.

"And not a word about Mr. Ingersoll," he continued with a triumphant air, looking for signs of gratification which may have been dissembled in my face if they did not exist.

"I have not referred to them, nor to what they have said. On the contrary I have let the Church speak for itself. Here it is," and he handed me a dogmatic essay under the head of "The Church Its Own Witness,"

which, so far as he was concerned, left him entirely aloof from the controversy. Great as was the disappointment, in one way his prudence compelled recognition, smiling though sad.

Some time afterward Mr. Gladstone said to me: "I wish I had not written that article on Mr. Ingersoll. I feel as if I had had a tussle with a chimney-sweep. I understand that he has been sent to gaol for sending improper books through the mails."

I hastened to correct him, and to assure him of "the colonel's" blameless moral character. He listened and with a sweep of emphatic magnanimity which was amusing declared: "Then I shall never say another word about it."

Much was whispered, and hardly less asserted, during his closing years in reference to what was sometimes called his craftiness and sometimes — by those who were friendly — his sagacity. Not a Grand Old Man, but a very shifty, beguiling old man, was the definition of the antagonists who closed around him in captious and jarring factions after the Home Rule schism. He was fully conscious of his own political astuteness, and chuckled as he spoke to me of the extraordinary vogue which carried a chance description of himself as "an old parlimentary hand" around the world.

A delegation of Irish Nationalists once went to Hawarden to ascertain his position in reference to their projects, and after spending a delightful day there they found on reaching Chester on their way back to London that instead of getting him to define himself he had evaded them at every point with a suavity which had quite blinded them while they were in his presence to the circumvention of their purpose.

But practised as he was in diplomacy, in argument, and in debate — in all the tactics and strategies of politics — it was not difficult to move him and surprise him into flares of passion. He believed in righteous indignation, and when he manifested it there was an impaling fierceness in his eyes and an impetuosity of speech that made a startling contrast to his customary urbanity and self-control. The intensity of his feelings and his convictions extended to many things, even apparent trifles. "He will talk about a bit of old china as if he were pleading before the judgment seat of God," a friend said of him, and in his endeavour to persuade and convince he exerted much the same compelling charm and solemnity of manner in relation to a fragment of bric-ΰ-brac as in the conversion of a theological or political adversary.

He was capable of rather violent antipathies undoubtedly. Mr. Tollemache reports how, when he suggested that Mr. Parnell was a pigmy compared with Lord Palmerston, Mr. Gladstone replied sharply: "He was nothing of the sort! He had statesman-like qualities, and I found him a wonderfully good man to do business with, until I discovered him to be a consummate liar."

Nor was Mr. Gladstone less explicit when on a certain occasion I repeated something which Mr. Chamberlain had said in reference to a matter of politics —a colleague who had been one of the first to secede from him in the great schism, which led to the formation of the Liberal Unionist party. Mr. Chamberlain had been in Mr. Gladstone's cabinet, and while there had been one of the most radical and devoted of his coadjutors — he has been one of the most conspicuous members of other cabinets since.

Frowning and with a sudden deepening and hardening of the voice, Mr. Gladstone turned and said: "Does he say that? What does it matter? Can there be ten men left in England who believe anything he says?"

Those were days of disruption and almost inconceivable hate. Many of those who had been staunch Gladstonians Birmingham Radicals and North Country nonconformists as well as moderate Whigs — found themselves arrayed under Tory banners across the way, and the Duke of Westminster with uncontrollable impatience turned the portrait of his former leader to the wall to begin with and later on turned it out of his house. Probably political feeling never ran higher or more rancorously in England than it did then, and there was an attempt to ostracize Mr. Gladstone, not only politically, but socially. Men and women of rank and power refused to go to parties at which it was understood he would be present, and could they have had their way and put the clock back a few centuries he would have been marched into the palace yard and with as much celerity as possible hanged or be-headed without compunction and without regard to the constitution.

Undoubtedly when the provocation was adequate, especially toward the end of his life, Mr. Gladstone came to be a good hater, though his magnanimity with foes was one of his most striking characteristics. When one of his bitterest critics in parliament died, it was he who rose to bear testimony to the excellence of the departed, and this was done in the most touching way, and with evident sincerity. The caustic scoffing of Disraeli never goaded him into reprisals. In his later campaigns, however, he sometimes lost his temper, as when making a speech in Midlothian an inconsiderate auditor "heckled" him, as they say there — that is, interrupted him with needless questions intended to confuse. He bore it patiently for a while and then suddenly paused in his argument to swoop down on his tormentor like an eagle on its quarry.

I remember another occasion, at a dinner party, when, besides Mr. Gladstone, a certain bumptious editor was present. "I received a note from you a few days ago," said the great man pleasantly. "From me? Not from me. I am sure you didn't! You may have had one from my secretary." Mr. Gladstone, though clearly hurt, nodded his head gently in acquiescence, and as the dinner progressed, became, as was natural, the "predominant partner" in the conversation. All the guests turned to him and all listened, and to all of them he spoke in turn — all except Mr. Editor, who strove in vain to get a word in edgewise for the rest of the evening. Mr. Gladstone would neither see him nor hear him, and, except to himself, he was non-existent.

Another scene I recall when a Conservative member of the House of Commons, with savage indelicacy, attributed some alleged inaccuracy of Mr. Gladstone's to the infirmity of years. "I am unable to determine to what exact degree I am suffering from the infirmities of age," he replied, glowing with heat, "but I will venture to say that, while sensible that the lapse of time is undoubtedly extremely formidable, and affects me in more than one particular, yet I hope for a little while, at any rate, I may not be wholly unable to cope with antagonists of the calibre of the right honourable gentle-man opposite."

Those were days, too, that gave many opportunities to the editor whose pages Tros Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimine agetur were open to debate. Foremost in the revolt was the late Duke of Argyll, and the bitterness of his protest was in proportion to the love he had hitherto borne the great leader of the united Liberal party to which they had both belonged and whose responsibilities they had shared. It was not difficult to induce him to write on the matter, for, as is well known, he was not only a man of no less intense feelings than Mr. Gladstone himself, but also a facile and industrious writer.

Let me warn Americans of another thing to be kept in mind — wrote his grace. They must not trust the accuracy of Mr. Gladstone's assertions about the past history of Ireland. All his utterances have been at least one-sided and partisan in character. Very often they have been in absolute defiance of the facts. The same tone of inflated fable about Irish history colours every speech he makes, and if it were possible to say that it represents even an approximation to the truth it would leave us in bewilderment as to how he never discovered all this till he was past seventy-five years of age, and how he, even up to that age, denounced those Irishmen who held similar language as the excuse for their violent and revolutionary remedies. It is vain to go back to Irish history to establish any real connection between the long miseries of the country and the English invasion or the later English colonizations. The Celtic Church was as tribal as the Celtic clans. It joined and stimulated all their barbarous intertribal wars, the monastic bodies fought with each other, and slaughtered each other, and wasted each other's lands continually. It is the grossest of all historical delusions that the miseries of Ireland have been due to external causes. They were due to the utter absence of civilizing institutions; and that again was due to the fact that Ireland was never conquered as England was conquered. No race superior in organization ever made itself complete master of the country. In England we are now all proud of the "conquest." It was a great step in our progress. The poorer Irish longed to be admitted to the benefits of English law. But the Celtic chiefs and the half-Celticized Norman lords preferred their own tribal usages, because these gave them more complete power over the people.

I have written this currente calamo. But I wish my American friends to understand that it is on principles well understood among them, and which they considered in their own constitution, that so many here are determined to resist and oppose to the uttermost the anarchical attempt to disintegrate the United Kingdom — just as they resisted the attempt to break up the United Republic in the interests of slavery and secession.

No doubt Many readers can recall Tenniel's cartoon based on a popular picture of a little terrier, aroused from his sleep by the mention of "rats," the terrier appearing in the caricature with Mr. Gladstone's head instead of its own, and awaking to challenge and alertness the moment "atrocities" are whispered. "Who said rats" is the name of the original. "Who said atrocities?" the name of the parody. No other portrait of him is so successful in giving that expression of bristling indignation and vehemence; the hawk-like preparedness to swoop; the electrification of muscle and nerve, and the imminence of reprisal alarming, even be-fore it struck, which appeared when he was unexpectedly stung by an unforeseen adversary.

Thus he looked when I showed him "proofs" of the duke's article. Would he answer it? I confess that the question was asked with little expectation of an affirmative reply, but to my surprise he consented at once and within a few days his rejoinder was in my hands. A paragraph or two may be qoted to show the temper of it.

Those who wish for arguments on the subject must look elsewhere [than in the duke's article]. It is best to separate altogether this paper from the personality of its eloquent and distinguished author, and regarding it in the abstract as we regard a proposition .of Euclid, to take our measure of it simply as an example of the highest heights and the longest lengths to which assertion can be pushed apart from citation, from reference, from authority, from that examination of either the facts or the literature of the case, to which the writer does not condescend. Of this he becomes sensibly aware toward the close of his paper and he informs the reader accordingly that he has written it currente calamo. A truly singular announcement. The currens calamus is an instrument well adapted for the journalist who in the small hours of the night has to render for the morning papers, in a few minutes, the pith or the froth, as the case may be, of the debate scarcely ended, or the telegram just arrived, but surely is less appropriate for a states-man who dates his birth as a cabinet minister from forty years back, and who has now been spending many of those years in leisure, and it is a most equivocal compliment to the American nation, which has taken its stand on the side of Ireland through its legislators, its governors, its very highest organs, as well as its countless masses, to suppose it will execute its volte-face at a moment's wavering in obedience to a currens calamus.

And it is a currens calamus indeed; for the article affords no indication that its author has ever reined in the gallop of his pen for a moment to study any book or any speech or pamphlet about Ireland. There is one wonderful exception: the duke has been reading, and has cited, Montalembert's "Monks of the West," from which he learns that Ireland had its golden age "some thirteen hundred years ago"; that even then the Celtic Church had "incurable vices of constitution," and that there was no law in the country except the English law "in the smaller area of the Pale" — which Pale and which English law had no existence in Ireland until more than six centuries afterward. Such is the working of the currens calamus when the article accidentally stumbles into the domain of fact.

It should be remembered that at this time Mr. Gladstone was still prime minister, and that i was an unprecedented thing for a prime minister while in office to discuss his own policy in a public print, more especially in a foreign review. I am sorry to say his doing so exposed him to much criticism from the press of both his opponents and his partisans, but I have mentioned the incident to show his impetuosity and his inability to restrain his rage when he was sufficiently moved. Had it been written by another person the duke's article would no doubt have gone unnoticed, but coming from so old a friend and colleague it had to be answered, and even the traditions of his high position, circumspect and fastidious as his habit was in such matters, were not enough to silence him under the extreme provocation. It is pleasant also to remember that the friendship, lifelong but for this interruption, between him and the duke was soon afterward restored, and that the reconciliation was the subject of another of Tenniel's wonderful cartoons.

As Mr. James Bryce has said, one of the strange contrasts which Mr. Gladstone's character presented was his excitability on small occasions and his perfect composure on great ones. He would sometimes, in a debate which had arisen suddenly, say imprudent things owing to the strength of his emotions, and give a dangerous opening to his adversaries, while at another time when the crisis was much more serious he would be perfectly tranquil, and give no sign, either at the decisive moment or afterward, that he had been holding his feelings in the strictest control and straining all his powers to go exactly as far as it was safe to go, and no farther.

His prejudices were undoubtedly strong and in some instances even insuperable, but I find it hard to believe what Dean Farrar, now dead, once said of him to me. "He has always stood between me and preferment. And do, you know why? Simply because, meeting him once at dinner, I could not agree with him as to some of his opinions of Homer."

Willing to talk about and listen to many subjects with extraordinary inquisitiveness and patience, there were others that it was not safe to mention to him, and an example of this may be quoted here from Mr. Lionel Tollemache's "Conversations":

"If the righteous are to be severed from the wicked immediately after death, what need will there be for a day of judgment?" Mr. Tollemache asked him. "Would it not be a strange anomaly that the dying thief and Dives should be called upon at the last day to make their defence before the Tribunal of God, if each of them, the former in Paradise and the latter in torments, has already learnt by experience what; the final sentence on him is to be? Would not the condemned be entitled to say of such a proceeding? ''Tis like a trial after execution.'"

"I really cannot answer such questions," Mr. Gladstone replied, with unusual heat. "The Almighty never took me into His confidence as to why there is to be a day of judgment."

"I felt that it was impossible to press the matter further," says Mr. Tollemache, and thus in his "Boswellizing" as he properly calls his report and as these fragments of mine may be called, he records without shirking or shrinking a very characteristic attitude of Mr. Gladstone's. There were several subjects on which it was wise to "not press the matter further."

Enough remained to impress any one admitted to his companionship with the breadth and variety of his interests, though his attitude of deference and patience in seeking knowledge was often embarrassing to a visitor who had every reason to feel that it was more becoming and more profitable to listen than to talk. In the course of a walk through the garden at Hawarden, or a drive through the park, or a climb to the top of the gray, ivy-mantled tower, the only fragment of the original castle that remains — in the course of one afternoon — I have heard him speak of such diverse subjects as the responsibilities of wealth, the indifference to which he regarded as the greatest danger confronting the United States; of Samuel Butler, whom he regarded as the best guide through perplexities of thought and conduct in moral life; of changes in political life in England, which he thought was deteriorating; of changes in the public schools such as Eton and Harrow, which for all their imperfections he considered of incalculable advantage to the national character; of his old friend Tennyson; of his idolized Homer, and of the extravagance of American humour! He carried in his memory a varied stock of examples of the latter, and laughed like a boy over them as he repeated them, especially over the story of the Bostonian who, when asked what he thought of Shakespeare, said: "He was a great man. I don't suppose there are more than ten men even in Boston who could have written Shakespeare's works." And over the boastful clerk who, when told by the employee of another firm that its correspondence involved an expenditure of five thousand dollars a year for ink, replied: "That's nothing. Last year we stopped dotting our `i's,' and saved ten thousand dollars by that alone."

Once singularly erect and majestic in bearing, he became before the end but a shadow of his former self. His shoulders could barely support the weight of his massive head, and the whole figure had shrunk and grown tremulous. It was a very old man who greeted me in the hall when, within a year of his death I again had the honour of being invited to Hawarden an old man in a loose gray suit with a flower in the buttonhole, a "billycock" hat, and one of the famous high collars cutting into a grizzled fringe of beard. But so far as could be discovered, the deterioration was wholly of the body; no diminution of force was visible in the eagerness with which he attacked every subject that came up for conversation, or in his vivacity, or in his memory, which recalled even minor incidents of years before. The once sonorous voice was huskier, the once flashing eye paler, and his locomotion feebler, but otherwise he was unchanged — as courtly as ever, as graciously solicitous for his guests, as omnivorous for information, as universal in his interests. But his life had become simpler and more retired, and his activities curtailed. Sundry naps were necessary to carry him through from eight in the morning till eleven at night. Still he was "putting in" between reading and writing six or seven hours of work a day, and this without any amanuensis or secretverdana assistance.

International copyright was another topic and of a clause in the act he said: "What should it matter where a book is printed? A book is made in it; author's head." Free trade was another. "England commands the sea now," he said. "The United States could command it if she were a free trade country." The wastefulness of the ever-increasing armaments of Europe was then spoken of, and then the English cathedrals. "Our cathedrals are the best inheritance we have from the Middle Ages. There are a few houses in England that have true antiquity, only a few, but the best possession England has, is her cathedrals." The relation; between Doctor Dφllinger and Cardinal Manning were touched upon and then the American accent. "Many Americans do not say American, but Amurcan," he E aid.

Even in those days he was a very lively companion at the luncheon table, and Mrs. Gladstone did not escape his banter, though it was touching to see the looks of mutual adoration which passed between them. He was usually far too serious to be epigrammatic, but his criticism of Jane Austen (he read many novels) — "she neither dives nor soars" — was an illustration of the pointed brevity with which he sometimes expressed himself. For all his cheerfulness it was possible to discover some misgiving of the kind old men usually have as to the competence of those who succeed them in power. His detestation of the most prominent politician in England then was undisguised and unqualified — I have already revealed how outspoken it was. He mentioned Lord Salisbury with an expressive shrug, though he had both admiration and affection for Mr. Balfour, and 'there were others bound to him by old associations and political ties of whom he spoke with obvious toleration and indulgence as well-meaning but dubious apprentices. He protested vehemently against extravagance in national expenditure. "There is only one thing for Which I could give them an appropriation," he said, "and that would be an appropriation for the enlargement of Bedlam." He gurgled with laughter as he said this and quickly added, "And I know what they would say: 'And you are the first man we shall put in it.

I urged him to write his autobiography, but the proposition had no attractions for him, backed though it was by the assurance of uncommon pecuniary results. He had resolved to limit his literary activity to the two subjects which had a supreme interest for him Olympian religion and Butler. But later on when he was in his eighty-eighth year I succeeded in persuading him to give the Youth's Companion in his recollections of Hallam the A. H. Hallam of "In Memoriam" what at all events was a fragment, of autobiography, and that I believe was the last thing (penned, as all his manuscripts were, in his own hand from beginning to end, with scarcely an erasure or an interlineation) he ever wrote for publication.

"Far back in the distance of my early life, and upon a surface not yet ruffled by contention, there lies the memory of a friendship surpassing every other that has ever been enjoyed by one greatly blessed both in the number and in the excellence of his friends.

It is the simple truth that Arthur Henry Hallam was a spirit so exceptional that everything with which he was brought into relation during his shortened passage through this world came to be, through this contact, glorified by a touch of the ideal. Among his contemporaries at Eton, that queen of visible homes for the ideal schoolboy, he stood supreme among all his fellows; and the long life through which I have since wound my way, and which has brought me into contact with so many men of rich endowments, leaves him where he then stood, as to natural gifts, so far as my estimation is concerned.

Looking back seventy odd years he recalled his school days with that spiritualized personality in language both pathetic and exalted, which, if no other evidence existed, would illuminate his natural nobility and that enthusiasm for perfection which animated him to the end of his days.

How shall I apologize for these dissolving views, so trivial and so insubstantial? I can imagine the people of whom I have written offering in their own behalf a similar disclaimer to that behind which Henry James hedged himself from a biographer. "What is written about me has nothing to do with me, my me," he said. "It is only the other person's equivalent for that mystery, whatever it may be. Thereby if you have found anything to say about our apparently blameless little time together, it is your little affair exclusively." So of my subjects; the responsibility is mine and not theirs.