The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume II Part 46

I feel like a boy who is to preach with his father to listen to him. I shall try not to know that you are there at all, but just preach to my poor people the simple word which has held them by their thousands these twenty-eight years. You do not know how those of us regard you, who feel it a joy to live when a premier believes in righteousness. We believe in no man's infallibility, but _it is restful to be sure of one man's integrity_.

That admirable sentence marks the secret.

All the religious agitations of the time come before us. Eminent foreign converts from the Roman church still find comfort in warning this most unshaken of believers against "a superficial and sceptical liberalism."

Others, again, condemned for heresy hail him as "dear and ill.u.s.trious master"-with no cordial response, we may surmise. Relying on Mr.

Gladstone's character for human-heartedness and love of justice, people submit to him some of the hard domestic problems then and so often forced upon the world by the quarrels of the churches. One lady lays before him (1879) with superabundant detail a case where guardians insisted on the child of a mixed marriage being brought up as a protestant, against the fervid wishes of the surviving parent, a catholic. Mr. Gladstone masters the circ.u.mstances, forms his judgment, elaborates it in a closely argued memorandum, and does not evade the responsibility of advising. In another of these instances the tragedy is reversed; the horrid oppression is perpetrated on the protestant mother by the catholic father, and here too it is Mr. Gladstone to whom the sufferer appeals for intercession.

His correspondents have not always so much substance in them. One lady of evangelical strain, well known in her time, writes to him about turbulence in Ireland on the last day of 1880. The private secretary dockets: "Wishes you a blessed new year; but goes on in a very impertinent strain attributing your 'inaction' in Ireland to unprincipled colleagues, and to want of heavenly guidance. Encloses suggestions for prayer." In such instances, even when the appeal came near to raving, Mr. Gladstone whenever he thought the writer's motives sincere, seems to have replied with patience, and at a length very different from the pithy brevity of the Iron Duke upon the like occasions. Sometimes we may a.s.sume that the secretary's phlegmatic docket sufficed, as on an epistle thus described: "1. Sends review in -- on his book. 2. Would like you to read -- and -- (his poems). 3. Will send you soon his prose on --. 4. Hopes you will not overwork yourself. 5. His children call you St. William." Sometimes we know not whether it is simplicity or irony that inspires the grave politeness of his replies. He seems to be in all sincerity surprised at the view taken by somebody "of the reluctance of public men to hold interviews for unexplained and indefinite purposes, and their preference for written communications." Somebody writes a pamphlet on points of the ministerial policy, and suggests that each member of the government might order and distribute a competent number of copies. Mr. Gladstone immediately indicates two serious difficulties, first that the ministers would then make themselves responsible for the writer's opinion in detail no less than in ma.s.s, and second their intervention would greatly detract from its weight. Even importunity for a subscription never makes him curt: "I am sure you will not misconstrue me, when I beg respectfully to state that your efforts will stand better without my personal co-operation."

(M170) The correspondence is polyglot. In one little bundle, Cavour writes in Italian and French; the Archbishop of Cephalonia congratulates him in Greek on the first Irish Land bill; and in the same tongue the Archbishop of Chios gives him a book on the union of the Armenian with the Anatolian communion; Huber regales him with the luxury of German _cursivschrift_.

The archimandrite Myrianthes forwards him objects from the Holy Land. The patriarch of Constantinople (1896) sends greetings and blessings, and testifies to the bonds of fellows.h.i.+p between the eastern and anglican churches undisturbed since the days of Cyril Lukaris. Dupanloup, the famous Bishop of Orleans (1869), applauds the plan of _Juventus Mundi_, its grandeur, its beauty, its moral elevation; and proceeds to ask how he can procure copies of the articles on _Ecce h.o.m.o_, as to which his curiosity has been aroused. A couple of notes (1864 and 1871) from Garibaldi, the great revolutionist, are neighbours to letters (1851-74) from Guizot, the great conservative. Three or four lines in French from Garibaldi were given to Mr. Gladstone the day before leaving Cliveden and England (April 24, 1864): "In leaving you pray accept a word of recognition for all the kindness you have heaped upon me, and for the generous interest you have at all times shown for the cause of my country.-Your devoted G. GARIBALDI." The other shorter still (1871) begs him to do something for a French refugee. Minghetti, Ricasoli, and others of that celebrated group commemorate his faithful and effective good will to Italy. Daniel Manin the Venetian thanks him in admirable English for some books, as well as for his energetic and courageous act in drawing a perfidious king (Naples) before the bar of public opinion. Manzoni gives to a friend a letter of introduction (1845), and with Italian warmth of phrase expresses his lively recollection of the day on which he made Mr.

Gladstone's acquaintance, and the admiration with which his name is followed. Merimee, the polished and fastidious genius, presents to him a French consul at Corfu (1858) who in his quality of philh.e.l.lene and h.e.l.lenist desires ardently to make the acquaintance of Homer's learned and eloquent commentator. Lesseps, whose hand gave so tremendous and impressive a turn to forces, policies, currents of trade, promises (1870) to keep an appointment, when he will have the double honour of being presented to the Princess Louise by a man so universally respected for the high services he has rendered to the Queen, to his country, and to the progress of the world.

If the language is polyglot, the topics are encyclopaedic. Bishops send him their charges; if a divine translates a hymn, he submits it; if he hits upon an argument on the mysteries of the faith, or the vexed themes of theological debate, he despatches pages and pages to Hawarden, and receives page upon page in reply. Young authors, and especially young auth.o.r.esses pestered him to review their books, though his patience and good nature make 'pester' seem an inapplicable word. A Scotch professor for some reason or another copies out and forwards to him one of Goethe's reflections and maxims:-

How may a man attain to self-knowledge? By Contemplation?

certainly not: but by Action. Try to do your Duty and you will find what you are fit for. But what is your Duty? The Demand of the Hour.

As if of all men then living on our planet, Mr. Gladstone were not he to whom such counsel was most superfluous. He replies (Oct. 9, 1880), "I feel the immense, the overmastering power of Goethe, but with such limited knowledge as I have of his works, I am unable to answer the question whether he has or has not been an evil genius of humanity."

(M171) In 1839 Spedding, the Baconian, to whom years later the prime minister proposed that he should fill the chair of history at Cambridge, wrote to him that John Sterling, of whom Mr. Gladstone already knew something, was prevented by health from living in London, and so by way of meeting his friends on his occasional visits, had proposed that certain of them should agree to dine together cheaply once a month at some stated place. As yet Sterling had only spoken to Carlyle, John Mill, Maurice, and Bingham Baring. "I hope," says Spedding, "that your devotion to the more general interests of mankind will not prevent your a.s.sisting in this little job." Mr. Gladstone seems not to have a.s.sisted, though his friend Bishop Wilberforce did, and fell into some hot water in consequence. A veteran and proclaimed freethinker sets out to Mr. Gladstone his own recognition of what ought to be a truism, that he is for every man being faithful to his faith; that his aggressive denial of the inspiration of the Bible did not prevent him from sending a copy in large type to his old mother to read when her eyes were dim; that he respected consolations congenial to the conscience. "I hope," he says to Mr. Gladstone, "there is a future life, and if so, my not being sure of it will not prevent it, and I know of no better way of deserving it than by conscious service of humanity. The Universe never filled me with such wonder and awe as when I knew I could not account for it. _I admit ignorance is a privation. But to submit not to know where knowledge is withheld, seems but one of the sacrifices that reverence for truth imposes on us._" The same correspondent speaks (1881) of "the n.o.ble toleration which you have personally shown me, notwithstanding what you must think seriously erroneous views of mine, and upon which I do not keep silence." Mr.

Gladstone had written to him six years before (1875): "Differing from you, I do not believe that secular motives are adequate either to propel or to restrain the children of our race, but I earnestly desire to hear the other side, and I appreciate the advantage of having it stated by sincere and high-minded men." There is a letter too from the son of another conspicuous preacher of negation, replying to some words of Mr. Gladstone which he took to be disparaging of his parent, and begging him, "a lifelong idealist yourself," to think more worthily and sympathetically of one whom if he had known he would have appreciated and admired.

A considerable correspondence is here from the learned Bishop Stubbs (1888) on the character of Bishop Fisher of Rochester, the fellow-sufferer of More; on the Convocation Act of 1531 and the other Convocation Acts of Elizabeth; on Father Walsh's letters, and other matters of the sixteenth century. In fact, it is safe to a.s.sume that Mr. Gladstone has always some ecclesiastical, historical, theological controversy running alongside of the political and party business of the day. n.o.body that ever lived tried to ride so many horses abreast. Another prelate puts a point that is worth remembering by every English school of foreign policy. "In 1879," writes Bishop Creighton (Feb. 15, 1887), "when foreign affairs were much before the public, I suggested to a publisher a series of books dealing quite shortly and clearly with the political history and const.i.tution of the chief states of Europe from 1815. I designed them for popular instruction, thinking it of great importance that people in general should know what they were talking about, when they spoke of France or Russia.... The result of my attempt was to convince me that our ignorance of the last sixty years is colossal."

Lord Stanhope has been reading (1858) the "Tusculan Questions," and confides to Mr. Gladstone's sympathetic ear Cicero's shockingly faulty recollection of Homer,-mistaking Euryclea for Anticlea, the nurse for the mother, and giving to Polyphemus a speech that Polyphemus never spoke. A bishop says Macaulay told him that one of the most eloquent pa.s.sages in the English language is in Barrow's Seventy-Fifth Sermon, on the Nativity-"Let us consider that the Nativity doth import the completion of many ancient promises...."(329) Letters abound and over-abound on that most movable of topics-"the present state of the Homeric controversy."

Scott, the lexicographer, sends him Greek epigrams on events too fugitive to be now worth recalling-discusses Homeric points, and while not surrendering at discretion, admits them worthy of much consideration.

There are many pages from Thirlwall, that great scholar and enlightened man, upon points of Homeric ethnology, Homeric geography, and such questions as whether a line in the _Iliad_ (xiv. 321) makes the mother of Minos to be a Phnician damsel or the daughter of Phnix, or whether it is possible to attach a meaning to ???????? that would represent Minos as beginning his reign when nine years old-a thing, the grave bishop adds, even more strange than the pa.s.sion of Dante for Beatrice at the same age.

(M172) Huxley sends him t.i.tles of books on the origin of the domestic horse; Sir Joseph Hooker supplies figures of the girth of giant trees; the number of annual rings in a fallen stump which would seem to give it 6420 years; tells him how the wood of another was as sound after 380 years as if just felled. Somebody else interests him in Helmholtz's experiments on the progression of the vibrations of the true vowel sounds. Letters pa.s.s between him and Darwin (1879) on colours and names for colours. Darwin suggests the question whether savages have names for shades of colours: "I should expect that they have not, and this would be remarkable, for the Indians of Chili and Tierra del Fuego have names for every slight promontory and hill to a marvellous degree." Mr. Gladstone proposes to nominate him a trustee of the British Museum (April 1881), and Darwin replies, "I would gladly have accepted, had my strength been sufficient for anything like regular attendance at the meetings." Professor Owen thanks him for the honour of Knight of the Bath, and expresses his true sense of the aid and encouragement that he has uniformly received from Mr.

Gladstone throughout the course of the labours from which he is now retiring.

He corresponds with a learned French statesman, not on the insoluble Newfoundland problem, turning so much on the nice issue whether a lobster is a fish, and not on the vexed Egyptian question, but on the curious prohibition of pork as an article of food-a strange contradiction between the probable practice of the Phnicians and that of the Jews, perpetuated in our times through all Mussulman countries, and a prohibition not to be explained on sanitary grounds, because to the present day Christians in the East all indulge in pork and are none the worse for it. A young member of parliament one night fell into conversation with him, as a branch from the subject of the eating of bovine flesh by the Greeks, on the eating of horseflesh, and the next day writes to mention to him that at a council in 785 with the Bishop of Ostia as president, it was decreed, "Many among you eat horses, which is not done by any Christians in the East: avoid this;"

and he asks Mr. Gladstone whether he believed that by reason of the high estimation in which the Greeks held the horse, they abstained from his flesh. Mr. Gladstone (August 1889) replies that while on his guard against speaking with confidence about the historic period, he thought he was safe in saying that the Greeks did not eat the horse in the heroic period, and he refers to pa.s.sages in this book and the other. "It was only a conjecture, however, on my part that the near relation of the horse to human feeling and life may probably have been the cause that prevented the consumption of horse-flesh." In a further letter he refers his correspondent to the closing part of the _Englishman in Paris_ for some curious particulars on hippophagy. Then he seems to have interested himself in a delicate question as to the personal claims of Socrates in the light of a moral reformer, and the sage's accommodation of moral sentiment to certain existing fas.h.i.+ons in Athenian manners. But as I have not his side of the correspondence, I can only guess that his point was the inferiority of the moral ideals of Socrates to those of Christ.

Gustave d'Eichthal, one of the celebrated group of Saint-Simonians who mingled so much of what was chimerical with much that was practical and fruitful, draws the attention of Mr. Gladstone, statesman, philosopher, and h.e.l.lenist, to writings of his own on the practical use of Greek, as destined to be the great national language of humanity, perhaps even within the s.p.a.ce of two or three generations. Guizot begs him to accept his book on Peel; and thanking him for his article on the "Royal Supremacy" (Feb. 9, 1864), says further what must have given Mr. Gladstone lively satisfaction:-

Like you, I could wish that the anglican church had more independence and self-government; but such as it is, and taking all its history into account, I believe that of all the Christian churches, it is that in which the spiritual regime is best reconciled with the political, and the rights of divine tradition with those of human liberty.... I shall probably send you in the course of this year some meditations on the essence and history of the Christian religion. Europe is in an anti-Christian crisis; and having come near the term of life, I have it much at heart to mark my place in this struggle.

(M173) For some reason Henry Taylor encloses him (April 5, 1837) "a letter written by Southey the other day to _a wild girl_ who sent him some rhapsodies of her writing, and told him she should be in an agony till she should receive his opinion of them." This recalls a curious literary incident, for the "wild girl" was Charlotte Bronte, and Southey warned her that "literature cannot be the business of a woman's life and ought not to be," and yet his letter was both sensible and kind, though as time showed it was a bad shot.(330) Thackeray has been asked to breakfast but "I only got your note at 2 o'clock this afternoon, when the tea would have been quite cold; and next Thursday am engaged to lecture at Exeter, so that I can't hope to breakfast with you. I shall be absent from town some three weeks, and hope Mrs. Gladstone will permit me to come to see her on my return." Froude, who was often at his breakfasts, gives him a book (year doubtful): "I took the liberty of sending it you merely as an expression of the respect and admiration that I have felt towards you for many years,"-sentiments that hardly stood the wear and tear of time and circ.u.mstance.

In 1850 what Macaulay styles a most absurd committee was appointed to devise inscriptions for medals to be given to the exhibitors at the great world-show of next year. Its members were, besides Macaulay himself and Gladstone, Milman, Liddell, Lyttelton, Charles Merivale. Milman bethought him of looking into Claudian, and sent to Mr. Gladstone three or four alternative lines fished out from the last of the poets of Roman paganism.

Macaulay had another idea;-

MY DEAR GLADSTONE,-I am afraid that we must wait till Thursday. I do not much, like taking words from a pa.s.sage certainly obscure and probably corrupt. Could we not do better ourselves? I have made no Latin verses these many years. But I will venture. I send you three attempts:-

Pulcher et ille labor, pulchros ornare labores.

Pulchrum etiam, pulchros palma donare labores.

Pulchrum etiam, pulchris meritam decernere palmam.

You will easily make better. If we can produce a tolerable line among us, we may pretend, as Lardner did, that it is in Haphorstrus or Masenius.-Yours ever, T. B. MACAULAY.

Francis Newman, the cardinal's high-minded and accomplished brother, writes to Mr. Gladstone (1878) in a strain of exalted recognition of his services to the nation, and quotes (a little oddly perhaps) the beautiful lines in Euripides, foretelling the approaching triumph of Dionysus over his mortal foe.(331)

The poets are not absent. Wordsworth, as we have already seen (i. p. 269 _n._), sends to him at the board of trade his remonstrance and his sonnet on the railway into Windermere. Tennyson addresses to him for his personal behoof the sonnet upon the Redistribution bill of 1884-

"Steersman, be not precipitate in thine act Of steering ..."

and on a sheet of note-paper at a later date when Irish self-government was the theme, he copies the Greek lines from Pindar, "how easy a thing it is even for men of light weight to shake a state, how hard to build it up again."(332) Rogers (1844) insists that, "if one may judge from experience, perhaps the best vehicle in our language for a translator of verse is prose. He who doubts it has only to open his Bible.... Who could wish the stories of Joseph and of Ruth to be otherwise than they are? Or who but would rejoice if the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ were so translated?

I once asked Porson to attempt it, and he seemed to like the idea, but said that it would be a labour of ten or twelve years."

(M174) There was one true poet, and not only a poet but a man, as we now see, with far truer insight into the intellectual needs of his countrymen than any other writer of the closing quarter of the century, who is sometimes supposed to have been overlooked by Mr. Gladstone. And here in the Octagon is Matthew Arnold's letter soliciting his recommendation (1867) for the strictly prosaic post of librarian of the House of Commons, which happily he did not obtain. The year before, Arnold had wished to be made a commissioner under the Endowed Schools Act, but a lawyer was rightly thought necessary by Lord Russell or his advisers, and there is no good reason to suppose that Mr. Gladstone meddled either way. He was responsible in 1882 for a third disappointment, but here again it has been truly said that to appoint to the charity commission a man of sixty, who had no intimate knowledge of charity law, and who had recently in his articles irritated all the nonconformists in England by his ironical references to dissent and dissenters, would not have been conducive to the efficient transaction of public business. A year later Mr. Gladstone proffered him, and his friends made him accept, a civil list pension of two hundred and fifty pounds a year, "in public recognition of service to the poetry and literature of England." Arnold in a letter here tries to soften Mr. Gladstone's heart on the subject of copyright, on which, as I often made bold to tell him, he held some rather flagrant heresies. Here the poet begs the minister to consider whether an English author ought not to have property in his work for a longer time than he has now. "For many books the sale begins late, the author has to create, as Wordsworth said, the taste by which he is to be enjoyed. Such an author is surely the very man one would wish to protect." I fear he made no convert.

Another poet, with no eye on patronage or pension, hopes to be permitted to say (1869), "how very many of your countrymen whom you have forgotten or never saw, follow your n.o.ble and courageous development of legislation with the same personal devotion, grat.i.tude, and gladness that I feel."

Then five years later he still a.s.sures him that among men of letters he may have antagonists but he cannot have enemies-rather a fine distinction, with painfully little truth in it as things happened.

To Miss Martineau, who had done hard work in more than one good cause, he proposes a pension, which she honourably declines: "The work of my busy years has supplied the needs of a quiet old age. On the former occasions of my declining a pension I was poor, and it was a case of scruple (possibly cowardice). Now I have a competence, and there would be no excuse for my touching the public money. You will need no a.s.surance that I am as grateful for your considerate offer, as if it had relieved me of a wearing anxiety."

In 1885 he wrote to Mr. Watts, the ill.u.s.trious painter, to request, with the sanction of the Queen, that he would allow himself to be enrolled among the baronets of the United Kingdom. "It gives me lively pleasure,"

he said, "to have the means of thus doing honour to art in the person of so distinguished a representative of the n.o.ble pursuit." Mr. Watts, in words that I am permitted to transcribe, declined; as he did also a second time in 1894 when the proposal was repeated.

While I feel very strongly, and acknowledge with sincere grat.i.tude, that you have honoured in my person, making me a sort of standard bearer, the pursuit of art for its own sake, and have so afforded an enduring encouragement to those who, like myself, may be willing to relinquish many good and tangible things for purposes believed to be good, but not likely to meet with general sympathy, still, I feel it would be something like a real disgrace to accept for work merely attempted, reward and payment only due to work achieved.... I should have the ghost of the Lycian chief reproaching me in my dreams! Also the objects to which I wish to dedicate the rest of my life will best be carried out in quiet and obscurity, so please do not be vexed with me if I again beg respectfully and gratefully to decline.... Sarpedon's words(333) always ring in my ears, and so I think you will understand the things I cannot attempt to say.... I am so far from undervaluing distinctions that I should like to be a Duke, and deserve the t.i.tle.... Still, it is true that, living mainly in a world of my own, my views are narrowed (I hope I may also say simplified), till a sense of the four great conditions which to my mind comprise all that can be demonstrated of our existence, Life and Death, Light and Darkness, so dominate my mental vision that they almost become material ent.i.ties and take material forms, dwarfing and casting into shadow ordinary considerations. Over the two first, human efforts broadly speaking avail nothing; but we have it in our power to modify the two last (of course I include in the terms all that belongs to good and bad, beauty and ugliness).

Labouring by the side of the poet and the statesman, the artist may deal with those great issues, and here I think the art of England has been at fault.... Your overestimate of my work has hastened the execution of an intention I have long had, and which indeed amounts to retirement from the ranks of professional men. I have concluded, dating from June, to undertake no portraits and accept no commissions, but, contented with the little I have to live upon, work only with the idea of making my efforts worthy, at least as efforts, of the nation's acceptance alike before and after my death.

"You have adopted a resolution," said Mr. Gladstone in his reply, "of the kind that makes the nineteenth century stare or blink, as those blink who stand in a great brightness and have not eyes for it. The course that you purpose is indeed a self-denying, an unworldly, and a n.o.ble one."

(M175) One packet touches a matter that at the moment did Mr. Gladstone some harm in the judgment of men whose good opinion was worth having. In 1873 John Stuart Mill died, and a public memorial was proposed. Mr.

Gladstone intimated that he was willing to co-operate. Then a liberal clergyman attacked the obituary notice in the _Times_ as too frigid, and the author of the notice retorted by tales of Mill's early views on the question of population. He was well acquainted with Mr. Gladstone, and set busily to work to persuade him that Mill in his book on political economy advocated obnoxious checks, that he was vaguely a.s.sociated with American publications on the matter, and that he did not believe in G.o.d, which was not to the point. Mr. Gladstone pa.s.sed on this tissue of innuendo to the Duke of Argyll. The Duke reported that he had consulted men thoroughly conversant both with Mill and his writings; that he was a.s.sured no pa.s.sage could bear the construction imputed, and that the places which he had himself looked into, clearly referred to prudential restraints on marriage. Certainly a school of social economy that deals only with foreign exchanges and rent and values and the virtues of direct taxes and indirect, and draws the curtain around the question of population, must be a singularly shallow affair. The Duke of Argyll manfully brushed wasps aside, and sent his subscription. So did men as orthodox as Lord Salisbury, and as cautious as Lord Derby. Mr. Gladstone on the other hand wrote to the promoters of the memorial: "In my view this painful controversy still exists. I feel that it is not possible for me, situated as I am at the present time, to decide it or to examine it with a view to decision. The only course open to me is to do no act involving a judgment either way, and, therefore, while I desire to avoid any public step whatever, I withdraw from co-operation, and request that my name may be no further mentioned." Unfortunately, the withdrawal of such a name could not be other than a public step. To say, moreover, that the controversy still existed, was to go a longish way in public opinion towards deciding it.

The curious thing is that Mr. Gladstone had known Mill so well-his singleminded love of truth, his humanity, his pa.s.sion for justice-as to call him by the excellent name of "the Saint of Rationalism." A saint of any sort is surely uncommon enough in our fallen world, to claim an equity that is not refused to sinners. Yet fifteen years later he wrote a letter doing Mill more justice. "Of all the motives, stings, and stimulants," he wrote, "that reach men through their egoism in parliament, no part could move or even touch him. His conduct and his language were in this respect a sermon. Again, though he was a philosopher he was not, I think, a man of crotchets. He had the good sense and practical tact of politics, together with the high independent thought of a recluse."(334)

A learned Unitarian (Beard) sends him a volume of Hibbert lectures. "All systems," Mr. Gladstone writes in acknowledging it, "have their _slang_, but what I find in almost every page of your book is that you have none."

He complains, however, of finding Augustine put into a leash with Luther and Calvin. "Augustine's doctrine of human nature is substantially that of Bishop Butler; and he converted me about forty-five years ago to Butler's doctrine." Of far earlier date than this (1839) is an interesting letter from Montalembert:-

_London, July 4, 1839._-It seems to me that amidst many _dissentimens_, and although you pa.s.s generally in this country for an enemy to my faith and my church, there is a link between us; since admitting every superiority of talent and influence on your side, we stand on the same ground in public life-that of the inalienable rights of spiritual power. I have, therefore, received your book with grat.i.tude, and read it with the sincerest interest.

I now take the liberty of offering you a portion of the work I have published, not on matter of actual controversy, but on an unknown and delightful subject of religious history. If you ever find leisure enough to throw a glance on the _History of St.

Elizabeth_, and more particularly on the _Introduction_, which is a rapid _resume_ of the thirteenth century, you will perhaps gain some slight information on what the Rev. Hugh McNeile so appropriately called "the filth and falsehood of the middle ages,"

in his splendid speech on church extension, at Freemasons' Hall a few days ago. And allow me to add, my dear sir, with the utter frankness which I cannot divest myself of, that what you seem to me to stand the most in need of at present, is a deeper and more original knowledge of the laws and events of Catholic Europe.