portrait especially invites one to do so: the quietude of it ironically tempts one to outrage it: one feels it would close again over the panel, like water, as if nothing had happened. That portrait of Spedding, for instance, which Laurence has given me: not swords, nor cannon, nor all the Bulls of Bashan butting at it, could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No wonder that no hair can grow at such an altitude: no wonder his view of Bacon's virtue is so rarefied that the common consciences of men cannot endure it. Thack

eray and I occasionally amuse ourselves with the idea of Spedding's forehead: we find it somehow or other in all things, just peering out of all things: you see it in a milestone, Thackeray says. He also draws the forehead rising with a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the lake of Geneva. We have great laughing over this. The forehead is at present in Pembroke shire, I believe: or Glamorganshire: or Monmouthshire: it is hard to say which. It has gone to spend its Christmas there.-FITZGERALD, EDWARD, 1841, To Frederick Tennyson, Jan. 16; Letters, ed. Wright, vol. 1, p. 64. His success both in his own college and in the University examinations would have been more brilliant if he had possessed the gift of rapid composition and translation. It was his nature to be in all things deliberate; and he was neither willing nor able to struggle against his characteristic temperament. At a later period of his life he gave as a reason for declining a high appointment in the public service, that he should have found it intolerable to turn his attention to ten or twenty unconnected matters in the course of a single day. His power of sustained labour has rarely been surpassed, but in his intellect and his temperament there was no versatility. . . . No member of the well-known society of Cambridge apostles was more heartily respected and beloved by his many friends within and without that body. The manner which faithfully represented his disposition was already formed, and it never afterwards varied. Calm and unimpassioned, he contributed his full share to conversation in a musical voice which never rose above its ordinary pitch. The ready smile with which he welcomed humorous or amusing remarks was singularly winning. His imperturbable good temper might have seemed more meritorious, if it had been possible to test

his equanimity by treating him with negligence or harshness. The just impression of wisdom which was produced by his voice, his manner, and the substance of his conversation, was well described in the form of humorous exaggeration by one of the acutest and most brilliant women of his time, Harriet, the second Lady Ashburton. Lord Houghton, in his "Monographs,

quotes

her as saying, "I always feel a kind of average between myself and any other person I am talking with-between us two, I mean; so that when I am talking to Spedding I am unutterably foolish-beyond permission."-VENABLES, G. S., 1881, ed. Evenings With a Reviewer, Preface, vol. 1, p. vi.

He was the wisest man I have known: not the less so for plenty of the Boy in him; a great sense of Humour, a Socrates in Life and in Death, which he faced with all Seren

ity so long as Consciousness lasted.-FITZGERALD, EDWARD, 1881, To C. E. Norton, March 13; Letters, ed. Wright, vol. I, p. 464.

The admirable Spedding, who drew all good and great men unto him, but to converse with whom, in consequence of his deliberate utterance, required an ampler leisure than even I, who am neither good nor great, found always practicable.LOCKER-LAMPSON, FREDERICK, 1895, My Confidences, p. 164.

LIFE AND WORKS OF BACON

1848-76

I am delighted and interested in a most high degree by the vindication of Bacon. It seems to me no less admirable for the principles of moral discrimination and truth and accuracy of statement, especially where character is concerned, which it brings out and elucidates by particular instances, which, as it were, substantiate and vitalize the abstract propositions, than for the glorious sunny light which it casts on the character of Bacon. Then how ably does it show up, not Macaulay's character individually and personally, so much as the

class of thinkers of which he is the mouthpiece and representative. - COLERIDGE, SARA, 1848, To Aubrey DeVere; Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, ed. her Daughter, p. 347.

The lie, it may be hoped, is about to pass away. An editor worthy of Bacon has risen to purge his fame. Such labors as those undertaken by Mr. Spedding demand

a life, and he has not scrupled to devote the best years of an active and learned manhood to the preliminary toil. . . . The instinct, strong as virtue, to reject the spume of satire and falsehood, has sprung at the voice of Mr. Spedding into lusty life.DIXON, WILLIAM HEPWORTH, 1861, Personal History of Lord Bacon from Unpublished Papers, pp. 11, 12.

It is not merely that his contribution to English history has no rival for accuracy of judgment, and for industry carried to the extreme point; or that he has taught us to know in his true character one of the greatest statesmen of a land fertile in statesmenship. His book is more than a history, more than a biography. It is a moral school, teaching historical writers to combat the sin which most easily besets them, the tendency to put their own interpretation upon doubtful facts, and their own thoughts into the minds of men of other ages. GARDINER, SAMUEL R., 1874, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, Academy, vol. 6, p. 394.

Mr. Spedding says his object was to enable posterity to form a true conception of the kind of man Bacon was," and accordingly he gives an unusually full record of a more than unusually full life. The question of legal guilt Bacon himself admitted. The moral culpability Mr. Spedding does not consider so clear, considering the corrupt practices of the age, and the philosopher's carelessness as to money and household management.-CHAMBERS, ROBERT, 1876, Cyclopaia of English Literature, ed. Carruthers.

In the opinion of competent judges, Mr. Spedding was second to none of his contemporaries in power of reasoning, in critical sagacity, or in graceful purity of style; nor had he any superior in conscientious industry. No one has hitherto possessed so complete a knowledge of the subject to which his life was chiefly devoted; and it is improbable that future students should throw additional light on the career and character of Bacon. In the course of his indefatigable researches, Mr. Spedding deduced many independent and original conclusions from the profound familiarity which he had acquired with the history of the time. . . . No more conscientious, no more sagacious critic has employed on a not unworthy task the labour of a life. It will be well, rather for students of history and of character than for himself, if his just

fame is rescued from the neglect which he regarded with unaffected indifference.VENABLES, G. S., 1881, ed. Evenings With a Reviewer, Preface, vol. 1, pp. v, xxvi.

To re-edit his Works, which did not want any such re-edition, and to vindicate his Character which could not be cleared, did this Spedding sacrifice forty years which he might well have given to accomplish much greater things.-FITZGERALD, EDWARD, 1881, To C. E. Norton, March 13; Letters, ed. Wright, vol. I, p. 464.

The work to which he gave his life is a work of great labor, a work of great love, and a work which will be a lantern unto the feet and a light unto the paths of many generations of mankind-of as many as shall care to look back to the greatest secondary cause of their being what, in the progress of science and discovery, they shall have become.-TAYLOR, SIR HENRY, 1885, Autobiography, vol. I, p. 198.

Spedding's great work, the result of a life's devoted research, remains the source from which all commentators must draw their information; but few will wade through such a mass of material set forth with so little art. Mr. Spedding's plan of arranging events, as in an annual register, under the years in which they happened, detracts from the interest if not from the value of his labours. He has left a quarry from which others must hew.-NICHOL, JOHN, 1888, Francis Bacon, His Life and Philosophy Part I, p. vi.

The work is an unsurpassable model of thorough and scholar-like editing. Taylor reports that about 1863 Spedding showed signs of declining interest in his task, but recovered after a long rest. His unflagging industry had made him familiar with every possible source of information, and his own writing is everywhere marked by slow but sure-footed judgment, and most careful balancing of evidence. Spedding's qualities are in curious contrast with Macaulay's brilliant audacity, and yet the trenchant exposure of Macaulay's misrepresentations is accompanied by a quiet humour and a shrewd critical faculty which, to a careful reader, make the book more interesting than its rival. Critics have thought Spedding's judgment of his hero. too favourable, but on one doubts that his views require the most respectful consideration.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1898, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. LIII, p. 315.

320

PERSONAL

It fell to the present writer at one time to have one or two bouts of public controversy with Mr. Greg. In these dialects Mr. Greg was never vehement and never pressed, but he was inclined to be-or, at least, was felt by an opponent to be -dry, mordant, and almost harsh. The disagreeable prepossessions were instantly dissipated, as so often happens, by personal acquaintance. He had not only the courtesy of the good type of the man of the world, but an air of moral suavity, when one came near enough to him, that was infinitely attractive and engaging. He was urbane, essentially modest, and readily interested in ideas and subjects other than his own. There was in his manner and address something of what the French call liant. When the chances of residence made me his neighbour, an evening in his drawing-room, or half an hour's talk in casual meetings in afternoon walks on Wimbledon Common was always a particularly agreeable incident. Some men and women have the quality of atmosphere. The egotism of the natural man is surrounded by an elastic medium. Mr. Greg was one of these personalities with an atmosphere, elastic, stimulating, elevating, and yet composing.-MORLEY, JOHN, 1883, W. R. Greg: A Sketch, Macmillan's Magazine vol. 48, p. 109.

GENERAL

I do respect Greg the manufacturer, though not the reviewer.-MAURICE, FREDERICK DENISON, 1851, Letter to Charles Kingsley, March 23; Lije, ed. his Son, vol. II, p. 60.

The essays of Mr. W. R. Greg are, in our opinion, pre-eminently distinguished by their great good sense; they are replete with judicious observations-observations which, if they may not be characterized as profound, are certainly not such as lie on the surface, within the reach of every hand; the cul

tivated reader cannot rise from the perusal of his writings without the consciousness of having derived profit and instruction from them.... We commend them most cordially to every one who is in search of clear and sound guidance, or who can appreciate manly unaffected good sense, and distinct and impartial statements, for in reading the essays of Mr. Greg, we feel we have left the narrow boundaries of party-we are neither Whig nor Tory; we are conservative in the most philosophical sense of the term, and we are liberal and progressive in the safest of all methods, being invited to advance only where there is light upon our path, and solid ground beneath our feet.SMITH, WILLIAM, 1872, Mr. W. R. Greg's Political Essays, Contemporary Review, vol. 20, p. 211.

Though unorthodox in opinion, he is sound at heart, religious in feeling, and a sincere well-wisher of humanity. He is most popular on directly practical questions, with a philanthropic turn.-CHAMBERS, ROBERT, 1876, Cyclopædia of English Literature, ed. Carruthers, p. 247.

What gave Mr. Greg his peculiar position. among journalists, was the singular lucidity and incisiveness with which he expressed culties and dangers with which he dealt, and expounded that aspect of the diffiappealing most strongly to the imagination of practical men, and especially of practical men belonging to the upper section of the middle class. For the miseries of the working class Mr. Greg's pity was profound and almost passionate, but his moral and intellectual sympathy was not with them, and was often inaccessible from their points of view. Again, as to style, Mr. Greg was never in any depreciatory sense rhetorical; for verbiage of any kind he had no taste. But he was a keen logician, and took what I may call almost a rhetorical pleasure in plunging cold steel into the heart of what he

regarded as a mischievious fallacy. And this he did after a fashion which especially went home to practical men. His intellectual logic was keen enough, but still keener was the logic which the late Emperor of the French called "the logic of facts." Mr. Greg loved to look facts clearly in the face, to realise as vividly as he could exactly what they meant, before he even cared to consider whether they were capable of any agreeable or even tolerable interpretation. -HUTTON, RICHARD HOLT, 1881, William Rathbone Greg, Criticisms on Contemporary Thoughts and Thinkers, vol. II, p. 137.

It is no small tribute that we pay to an habitual controversialist when we assert, as we do with great confidence, that the result of his labors has been to induce thousands of his countrymen to examine the burning questions of religion with the calmness, the fairness, and the good sense which most persons find it far easier to bring to the consideration of political or social problems than to the solution of theological perplexities.-DICEY, A. V., 1882, W. R. Greg, The Nation, vol. 34, p. 81.

Though he took great delight in the enchanted land of pure literature, apart from all utility, yet he was of those, the fibres of whose nature makes it impossible for them to find real intellectual interest outside of what is of actual and present concern to their fellows. Composition, again, had to him none of the pain and travail that it brings to most writers. The expression came with the thought. His ideas were never vague, and needed no laborious translation. Along with them came apt words and the finished sentence. Yet his fluency never ran off into the fatal channels of verbosity. Ease, clearness, precision, and a certain smooth and sure-paced consecutiveness, made his written style for all purposes of statement and exposition one of the most telling and effective of his day. This gift of expression helped him always to appear intellectually at his best. It really came from a complete grasp of his own side of the case, and that always produces the best style next after a complete grasp of both sides.-MORLEY, JOHN, 1883, W. R. Greg: A Sketch, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 48, p. 122.

If an author's special faculties cut their image most sharply on his political estimates and social speculations, his nature as a whole finds its largest expression in his re

ligion. Even if it be merely an undisturbed tradition, the fact that this suffices for him is far from insignificant. And if it be selfformed, whether spontaneously given or deliberately thought out, it not only carries in it all the traits of the personality, but presents them in magnified scale and true proportion. Hence Mr. Greg's "Creed of Christendom," quite apart from its merits as a theological treatise, possesses a high biographical interest; for it is a transparently sincere book, and lays bare the interior dealings of an eminently veracious, exact, and reverent mind with the supreme problems of numan belief. In order to give it its true value as a chapter in history, it should be taken into view not as an isolated product, but in connection with the earlier state of mind from which it recedes, and the latter which speaks in the Preface to the third edition (1873). This Preface-perhaps the finest of his essayscontains his last word of doubt and faith, and probably marks the resting-place of his mind in its best vigour; for, though we have since heard from him both brighter and sadder things, they seemed to be, the one the sunshine of a passing mood, the other the expression of a growing languor and weariness of life.-MARTINEAU, JAMES, 1883, The Creed of Christendom, Nineteenth Century, vol. 13, p. 199.

In Greg ardent philanthropy and disinterested love of truth were curiously allied to an almost epicurean fastidiousness, which made him unduly distrustful of the popular element in politics. He would have wished to see public affairs controlled by an enlightened oligarchy, and did not perceive that such an oligarchy was incompatible with the principles which he had himself admitted. Little practical aid towards legislation, therefore, is to be obtained from his writings. It was Greg's especial function to discourage unreasonable expectations from political or even social reforms, to impress his readers with the infinite complexity of modern problems and in general to caution democracy against the abuse of its power. His apprehensions may sometimes appear visionary, and sometimes exaggerated, but are in general the previsions of a far-seeing man, acute in observing the tendencies of the age, though perhaps too ready to identify tendencies with accomplished facts. His style is clear and cogent, but his persuasiveness and

impressiveness rather arise from moral qualities, his absolute disinterestedness, and the absence of class feeling, even when he may seem to be advocating the cause of a class.-GARNETT, RICHARD, 1890, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XXIII, p. 88.

He was one of the chief assailants of the Christian faith in his day, and, in a work entitled the "Creed of Christendom," did what was in him to make an end of that persistent doctrine which survives so many attacks. This work is another example of the tendency of such books to drop aside into corners and be no more seen, after having,

for a moment, affrighted the timid believer. Another work, "Enigmas of Life," published in 1872, had a powerful human interest in one or two occasional passages, in which the writer let his imagination go, for instance, into speculations as to what might be a logical and reasonable Hell, with curious power, and a strange, unintentional, and very striking approach to that picture of the place of despair, which represents it as a place where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.-OLIPHANT, MARGARET, O. W., 1892, The Victorian Age of English Literature, p. 577.

PERSONAL

Mr. O'Shaughnessy was a rapid, nervous talker, with an American earnestness of manner. He seemed quite sure of his ground, and not one to be easily diverted from it by criticism, but was an impulsive, kind-hearted gentleman, and conscientious in the treatment of his lightest work.STEDMAN, EDMUND CLARENCE, 1882, Some London Poets, Harper's Magazine, vol. 64, p. 883.

Again returns this day, and still, my friend, I listen for a step that comes not near, And hearken for a voice I may not hear Save in my dreams, where many memories blend.

Two years have passed, and still the days extend,

Void day on day. He, too, has gone away
Who loved thy lyric work; his praise a bay
For which all songs most gladly might contend.
April, that came and found him with us yet,
And took him hence, makes sad the heart of
Spring,

And January days shall not forget

That then it was thy sweet lips ceased to sing, And we, who loved thee, knew our feet were set In paths where thine were no more journeying. -MARSTON, PHILIP BOURKE, 1883, To Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Jan. 30; WindVoices, p. 174.

With his handsome, sensitive, clearly cut face, his bright, earnest eyes, behind the glasses which gave him a student-like as

pect, his rather slight but well-knit figure, with the noticeably small feet and hands, so well-shod and gloved, in which he took an innocent pride. He was full of enthusiasm, and I think, had length of days been given him, he would always have been the youngest man in every company. What pleasure he had in things small and great! He was as simply frank in his appreciation of his own work as in that of other people, and I shall never forget the quick "Like it, eh?" and the sudden light in his eyes when he perceived that something he was reading or reciting had found its way to his listener's interest. He was half a Frenchman in his love for and mastery of the French language; and many of his closest affiliations were with the younger school of French poets.-MOULTON, LOUISE CHANDLER, 1894, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, His Life and His Work with Selections from His Poems, p. 18.

GENERAL

As regards the invention and use of metres the author is particularly happy. Those of his own originating are at the same time simple, musical, and individual; and it is not very often that metric ease and beauty are sacrificed to crotchets of diction and roughness of cadence throughout his book. The main fault one has to find in the miscellaneous poems is a vagueness, not of form, but of thought or sentiment: the poet is