apparent upon short acquaintance. He would laugh gaily over the jokes of the company like a man in the best of health. When it was suggested that one or two of the Don Quixote drawings were perhaps too realistic to be received in good part by the American audience, especially at "the Hub," the idea seemed to amuse him greatly, but he very willingly made some changes which would make them acceptable to the censor.

After a most cordial leave-taking, and wishes of bon voyage, we turned back to Paris with its kaleidoscopic scenes and symphony of noises.

Last summer Vierge invited me to call upon him at Grosrouvres, where he was visiting his friend M. Tinayre, the artist. We were met at the railway station at Montfort L'Amaury by Vierge's son, who conducted us to a covered station wagon. After a half-hour's drive which took us through one or two little villages, we arrived at the summer home of M.

Tinayre. Here we entered the spacious studio located upon the first floor and were cordially received by M. and Madame Tinayre and M. and Madame Vierge.

Although four years had elapsed since my last visit to Vierge, I could not see that he had changed in the slightest degree, unless it was that he was even more active than when I first saw him.

Our business over, we all, including M. Tinayre's children, retired to a secluded nook under the trees some distance from the house, and on slightly higher ground, from which a fair view of the surroundings could be had. Here tea was served in our honor in quite the English fashion, and after a most enjoyable half hour under the trees, our station wagon arrived and we took leave of the pleasant company. As we drove off we caught a last glimpse of Vierge, hat in hand, smilingly waving us a farewell.

I

HAVE somewhere among my papers a treasured letter from Dr. Edward Everett Hale, written years ago to a then young college president in the West, in which was quoted in excuse of the slight delay of answer, the French proverb, "The better is the enemy of the good." He will not object, I am sure, to my showing this sentence, for it gives me leave to say that the better and beautiful letter which contained it written in his own hand, was a very dear enemy of the "good" letter he might earlier have dictated to his stenographer. Moreover, it gives me opportunity to get the thanks of some debtors in letters for adding to their worn and conventional stock of excuses for tardy answers this new and most excusing excuse (that one delays in order to do the better thing) which is yet not an accusation, though the French, or is it the Spanish, have the blanket proverb: that to excuse is to accuse. Certainly, a more complete defense is not to be made nor a more satisfactory expiation, if the "better" finally prevails-for the excuse is not to be used without a sense of the added responsibility which it puts upon the procrastinator.

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I have quoted this letter of Dr. Hale's however, not to boast of its receipt, nor yet with any altruistic motives toward dilatory and delinquent correspondents, but to introduce a volume of letters* which I have recently read; for the literary production of their author seems to illustrate more accurately and amply the truth of this quoted proverb than that of any one else I chance now to recall. Only in his case the "better" was so formidable an enemy of the "good"

* LORD ACTON'S LETTERS TO MARY GLADSTONE. Edited with Introductory Memoir by Herbert Paul. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1904.

that not only was the "good" frightened from expression but the "better" seldom assumed the offensive.

Lord Acton might have written a good History of Liberty, a history which would have been a real contribution to the subject, but the history was never written. He was waiting to do the better history; for it was not indolence, as the author of the Introductory Memoir says, that prevented, but a "procrastination which resulted from cherishing an impossibly high ideal." One of the reasons for not beginning even this life-planned history was that the whole truth concerning the French Revolution had not yet been discovered." So it came about that he not only did not write this book or series of books (for all that he wrote on this subject dwindled into an essay or two), but that he never wrote a book of any kind, small or great. He did not even republish his Essays. There has therefore been accessible to the general reader not a line of his, except what may have been reflected by the literature of others in their quoting of a few sentences caught in conversation or by the reviews of his day.

All this makes this much too meagre collection of letters the more valuable and the more enjoyable. It is but a garden planted with the conversations of friendship in which one may walk leisurely, rather than a great field whose row on row one must follow for the fruits of deliberate and systematic sowing and cultivation. Here one may pick a flower of speech or taste an apple of opinion and divine what the great acres of his knowledge might have yielded if his thoughts had been planted in printed words to multiply. I have in an earlier article, when speaking of Mr. Bryce's estimate of Lord Acton, raised the ques

tion as to whether the benefit of his chance communication might not after all be as great as the fruit of his deliberate planting, for the media of the transmission of thought are more mysterious and unaccountable and more efficient than the physical common carriers of seed and pollen.

However that may be, we now have access to this garden of his intimate thought, hitherto kept from the public by a private wall which had shut away all sight of it, even if its fragrance had come to some who walked in its neighborhood.

The letters (the first of which, in its first line, gives further intimation of the procrastinating habit of their author's temperament in its reference to an unfinished and unsent letter of a week or two previous) were all written, as the title shows, to Mary Gladstone, and cover the period from 1879 to 1886.

They are full of political incident and comment; and often so much of this is packed into the few pages of a letter that a reader, somewhat remote in time and place from the events and personages described or mentioned, must spend hours upon them if he would get all their information from them. I think that most American readers will need more than the biographical and historical "glossary" which the foot-notes furnish. Yet one who knows at all well the political life of Mr. Gladstone cannot lose his way, for the events and personages gather about him in devotion or hostility.

The ample volumes of Morley would have fit and glowing supplement in this book, if it held no other letter than that of December, 1880, written at Cannes by Lord Acton to Mr. Gladstone's daughter. It is in this letter that, answering an implied wish that her mind might be disengaged from the surroundings of that time and learn the judgment of posterity, he puts his own prophecy

upon the lips of that "democracy which must be consulted," in an estimate that is as noble and as eloquent as has been uttered by any man over that life; for I do not know how a more eloquent tribute could be spoken. I must be content to quote here a sentence or two from a paragraph which begins with the encouraging asseveration that the "progress of democracy, though not constant, is certain and the progress of knowledge is both constant and certain," and which says in continuation that that posterity, which will be more democratic and better instructed than his own generation, "will be more severe in literary judgments, and more generous in political.” Lord Acton imagines that posterity as standing before a "slab not yet laid among the monuments of famous Englishmen," and, recalling Chatham, Fox, Pitt, Canning and Peel, as being impelled to say that the "highest merits. of the five without their drawbacks were united in Mr. Gladstone," and that his that his "only rival in depth and wealth, and force of mind, was neither admitted to the Cabinet nor buried in the Abbey." There is another sentence from a following paragraph which divides his great gifts among his rivals, as the generals of Alexander divided his, with the judgment that, though one may equal Mr. Gladstone "in beauty of composition, another in the art of statement, and a third, perhaps come near him in fluency and fire, he alone possesses all the qualities of an orator."

In still another paragraph Lord Acton, looking abroad, beyond the walls of Westminster, imputes to posterity an even more interesting comparison: for it is made to say that "such as Hamilton and Cavour accomplished work as great as that of Gladstone]; that Turgot and Roon were unsurpassed in administrative craft; that Clay and Thiers were as dexterous in parliamentary management; that Berryer and

Webster resembled him in gifts of speech, Guizot and Radowitz in fullness of thought; but that in the three elements of greatness combined, the man, the power, and the result-character, genius and success-none reached his level."

But there are scores of characterizations and judgments of others than Gladstone, many of them comparative, as those which I have just quoted are. In twice ten lines, ten of the most prominent of Frenchmen of 1879 are named and put each into his relative rank. In one sentence Lord Acton assigns Lowell his high place, surpassing in "easy brightness of mind "all he (Acton) remembers in America. Then there is a paragraph in which all the qualities of St. Hilaire are assessed; another brief one in which Burke's wealth of thought is appraised, in Acton's own estimate,

at so high a value that "great literary fortunes have been made by men who traded on the hundredth part of him." He quotes Malambert's opinion that Burke and Shakespeare were the " two greatest Englishmen."

And mention of Shakespeare brings upon the heels of that paragraph another in which Lord Acton tells his debt to George Eliot, who had died but a few days before. "You cannot think," he says, "how much I owed her." "In problems of life and thought which baffled Shakespeare disgracefully, her touch was unfailing. No writer ever lived who had anything like her power of manifold, but disinterested and impartially observant, sympathy." He puts this estimate more concretely in a letter of the following month: She seemed capable "not only of reading the diverse hearts of men, but of creeping into their skin,

watching the world through their eyes, feeling their latent background of conviction, discerning theory and habit, influences of thought and knowledge, of life and of descent, and having obtained this experience, recovering her independence, slipping off the borrowed shell and exposing scientifically and indifferently the soul of a Vestal, a Crusader, an Anabaptist, a Dervish, a Nihilist, or a Cavalier without attraction, preference or caricature." But the supreme tribute is again expressed, as that to Mr. Gladstone, by a comparison with others: "If Sophocles or Cervantes had lived in the light of our culture, or Dante had prospered like Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival."

George Sand he appraises in the general characterization of a "bad secondsuch as Swinburne is to Shelley, or Heine to Schiller." Carlyle "never did [him] any good," because by accident he read Coleridge first. He thinks Carlyle "the most detestable of historians" excepting Froude. Disraeli was intellectually far inferior to Stahl, the "greatest reasoner that ever served the Conservative

there rise the summits of lofty principle and policy. I have given intimation in earlier quotation, of Lord Acton's attitude toward democracy. Those whose faith may be weak should read his letter of April 24, 1881,—should look to this mountain of his faith. And those who have doubts and waverings as to the imminence of a spiritual world—a world with which relationship is expressed in religion-will find a still higher range of peaks upon which to look for strength. As a historian, he writes: "All understanding of history depends on one's understanding the forces that make it, of which religious forces are the most active and the most definite." And as a responsible citizen of the present he adds: "To develop and perfect and arm conscience is the great achievement of history, the chief business of every life; and the first agent therein is religion or what resembles it."

I have given but meagre intimation of the treasure buried in these letters, or, to go back to my first metaphor, of the beauty and fragrance of this garden whose gate has now been opened to discerning readers. I feel myself somewhat of a vandal to have broken off these twigs with their flowers and fruit to show them outside the wall and tempt others in. But if the temptation they offer is effective, I shall be excused by any one who enters; the more when I tell the wayfarer in books that there are many trees within-such as the Tennyson, Dickens, Scott, and Beaconsfield treesof which I have broken no twig and exposed no flower.

Beside all this is the indefinable charm of the friendship that gives atmosphere to the whole garden and richer color to all that grows in it.