prosperous except under a republic, Goldwin Smith continued to cling to the ideals and doctrines of his early manhood. Some of those doctrines have been proved to be sound. It would have been well for the British people if they had taken the advice he gave them forty years ago to reconstruct their House of Lords in a deliberate way before a party crisis arrived. But even before old age overtook him he had lost touch with British politics, though he continued to write about them with the old confidence. About seventeen years ago I had from him one letter.after another urging that English Liberals should unite themselves and find a live political issue in a campaign for the disestablishing of the Church of England. That was just the time when every careful observer in England had begun to perceive that the sentiment for disestablishment was becoming weaker, because other questions had begun to fill the public mind, and that to raise the issue would bring no strength to any party that raised it. Aversion to ecclesiastical power had been always among the principles he most cherished. It was the only thing he had in common with Froude, whom he heartily distrusted and disliked. Though he had dropped all dogmas, he was of a profoundly religious temper, and held that religion had suffered and would continue to suffer from any connection with the civil power, whether as ruled or as ruler.

Though two prophets could be hardly more unlike than were he and Carlyle, there was this point of resemblance, that both talked exactly like their books. Carlyle was, to be sure, far more picturesque and vivid, but Goldwin Smith's discourse was more perfect in form. Every sentence might have been printed just as it fell from his lips without needing any correction, yet there was no sense of effort, no straining after effect. He had, indeed, a genius for expression, and a power over language, even more remarkable than his power of thought. Nor was this confined to English. His Latin style was unexceptionally classicali.e. whatever a Roman might have thought of it, no one at Oxford or Cambridge could detect any error. Yet it was not, like the Latin compositions of nearly all modern scholars, imitated from Cicero or Livy or Tacitus. It was his

own style, just as the Latin of Erasmus or Francis Bacon is their own. He handled the language with the same ease and felicity as he did his mother-tongue.

He was one of four men who may be deemed to have been in his time the chief masters of English prose. Two of them everybody will place in the front rank. I mean J. H. Newman and John Ruskin. A third is less known, because he wrote on subjects that do not attract the general public, but those who have studied the collected essays of F. W. H. Myers, a poet who wrote so little that he is almost forgotten except by those who read him when he and they were under thirty, will probably agree with the view that no richer and more melodious prose has been produced in our time. The supreme merit of Goldwin Smith's writing is the union of clearness, strength, and brevity. Its weakness lies not in the diction, for that is hardly to be surpassed, but in the fact that, in his articles or books the argument does not march. Each, be it book or article, is not so much a connected whole as a series of splendid paragraphs. There is no effort, and the epigrams are not dropped in or plastered on to light up the narrative and argument. They seem inevitable, because the most natural as well as exact expression of the writer's thought.

Surely no one in our time has possessed an equal gift for terseness. His history of the United States is a slim volume which can be read through between lunch and dinner, but it contains everything that is essential for a comprehension of the growth of the North American colonies, of the causes and course of the Revolutionary struggle, of the struggle over slavery and the Civil War that followed. Compressed narrative is usually dry narrative. But his skill in selecting the salient facts and his power of setting in the strongest light, by a few touches, a character or a dramatic situation keeps the reader's interest from flagging for a moment.

Froude also wrote well. But one could not trust Froude; for he was a partisan, he was capable of hideous blunders, and he was apt to sacrifice truth to literary effect. Goldwin Smith was as thorough in the substance as he was finished in the execu

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tion of his work. I remember a remark of E. A. Freeman, made when they were both in Oxford: "Where," he said, "does Goldwin get his knowledge? He is not a great reader, he is not what you would call a learned man, like Stubbs, yet he seems never to make mistakes." He was not very learned, but he had that instinct of a trained historical mind which keeps a man out of errors. If he knew a thing, he knew it right. If he did not know it, he knew his own ignorance and avoided the pitfalls into which heedless men stumbled. And he had also a talent for hitting on some small trait or incident characteristic of the man or the time, and enlivening his narrative by it. One of the charms of his talk was the profusion of anecdotes of the famous men of the generation just before his own which he liked to pour forth, as he lay back in his leather armchair beside the fireplace in his stately old house at Toronto, raising and dropping his head as he talked, poising the heel of one foot upon the toe of the other, and slowly swinging both from side to side. Why, with talents which made him the peer of the greatest men of his time in England or in North America, and with the enormous advantage of being able to command his whole time because he never had to work for his living, why did not his untiring industry issue in some historical or philosophical work which would have seized and held the attention of the world and preserved his name for many a year to come? The obvious answer is that his interest in what was passing, and his eagerness to refute errors and denounce evil-doers, lured him into journalism and made it a habit without which he could not live. But one may suspect that his mind was really rather critical than constructive; and that some sort of subconsciousness of this fact prevented him from essaying any very large task in which he would have had to fit many parts into a great whole. Moreover the historian, hardly less than the politician, must be able to go on always learning, following the movements of increasing knowledge and the course of events as they happen, and letting all the breezes of the time blow through his mind. This was not Goldwin Smith's way. His opinions on history, as well as on politics, had crystallized long before he

was fifty, and though he added much to his store of knowledge, his views underwent no development. For thirty years he continued to repeat that party government was a crying evil both in Canada and in Britain, but never did he suggest any other means of working a Parliamentary system. In this glacial fixity of opinion he resembled Disraeli and Bright, who (from causes that need not be here discussed) retained through life, very little modified, the views each held when he entered Parliament, but was unlike Peel and Gladstone, both of whom kept an open, and, as some thought, a too open, mind. But one must remember that Peel and Gladstone lived in the middle of the strenuous and multiform public life of England, where many influences of men equal to them in knowledge if not in power were always playing on them. Goldwin Smith stood isolated in Toronto, in little direct contact with practical politicians, his intellectual primacy so generally recognized that the views of others failed to have their due effect upon him. Better had it been for him to have remained in the midst of the political life of London or of the intellectual life of Oxford. As things turned out, one must regretfully admit that his life work in politics at least was less than might have been expected from such admirable gifts. So far as Canada was concerned, he was the apostle of a lost cause; and perhaps his greatest service, both to the United States and to Great Britain, was rendered in the days of the American Civil War, for at a time when a large part of what called itself "society" in England, and still more in France, had shown itself in sympathy with the Slave States, his writings presented the case for the Union with incomparable earnestness and power.

Those who were struck by his grave and almost stern aspect, no less than those who read his scathing censures of the sins of public men, were apt to mistake his character. Austere indeed it was, making too little indulgence for human weakness, but beneath his austerity there was not only an abundant sense of humor, but a great tenderness and power of sympathy. His many acts of personal kindness to the suffering and needy were known to few, for he carefully concealed them. His willingness

to exert himself and spend his time in the promotion of any good cause was unfailing. He was perfectly disinterested, altogether superior to any of the vulgar ambitions. Though more sensitive than a politician ought to be, he was not vindictive. His strictures on Disraeli were no more severe after Disraeli attacked him than they had been before, and they were due, not to any personal resentment, but to the scorn which he felt for Disraeli's untruthfulness. No imputation could have been more absurd than that which the latter cast on him of being “a social parasite," for he was an intensely proud man who never asked a favor or met any one except on terms of equality. With him, indeed, pride was so great as to exclude vanity. He hardly ever referred to any success he had achieved, and when his Oxford friends wished to present to the University picture gallery in the Bodleian a portrait or bust of him, he declined the compliment. It was a pity, for he had a noble head, with features which well expressed the dignity of his character. Few men have so consistently lived up to the lofty standard of conduct which they set for themselves and exacted from others, and few have shown in their writings as well as in their action a more constant loyalty to truth and to the highest interests of humanity.

The last time I ever saw him in public was in 1907 at a gathering of the Canadian Club in Toronto under the presidency of the Governor of the Province. He attended it, not meaning to speak, though he ultimately said a few words. There was in the large and crowded hall hardly any one, either among the elder men, leaders in local society or of the youth of the city, who agreed with his political views, and many of the younger sort had been brought up to look upon him as the dangerous man who wished to see Canada annexed to the United States. But when he walked slowly through the throng to his seat on the dais, his stately figure still erect in extreme old age, they all remembered how many acts of private benevolence he had done, how sincere, how upright, how courageous his course of life had been, what an example of unselfishness he had set, what lustre his genius had reflected on their city and their country, and a sudden tempest of applause swept over the hall.