made it difficult for him to entertain for the Holy See that reverence and affection which is felt towards it by many of the faithful. On p. 170 we find the remark: It was an interesting question whether the Pope would definitely and unconditionally condemn murder, whether from religious or political motives. It would have borne untold consequences, as a direct revocation of the Vatican system, which stands or falls with the doctrine that one may murder a Protestant. But I don't believe that so audacious a change of front would have moved a single priest in Ireland. Again on p. 185 occurs the following: The Inquisition is peculiarly the weapon and peculiarly the work of the Popes. It stands out from all those things in which they co-operated, followed, or assented as the distinctive feature of Papal Rome. It was set up, renewed, and perfected by a long series of acts emanating from the supreme authority in the Church. No other institution, no doctrine, no ceremony is so distinctly the individual creation of the Papacy, except the Dispensing Power. It is the principal thing with which the Papacy is identified, and by which it must be judged. The principle of the Inquisition is the Pope's sovereign power over life and death. Whoever disobeys him should be tried and tortured and burnt. If that cannot be done, formalities may be dispensed with, and the culprit may be killed like an outlaw-that is to say, the principle of the Inquisition is murderous, and a man's opinion of the Papacy is regulated and determined by his opinion about religious assassination. If he honestly looks on it as an abomination, he can only accept the Primacy with a drawback, with precaution, suspicion and aversion for its acts. If he accepts the Primacy with confidence, admiration, unconditional obedience, he must have made terms with murder. Therefore, the most awful imputation in the catalogue of crimes rests, according to the measure of their knowledge and their zeal, upon those whom we call Ultramontanes. The controversy, primarily, is not about problems of theology; it is about the spiritual state of a man's soul, who is the defender, the promoter, the accomplice of murder. Every limitation of Papal credit and authority, which effectually dissociates it from that reproach, which breaks off its solidarity with assassins and washes away the guilt of blood, will solve most other problems. At least, it is enough for my present purpose to say that blot is so large and foul that it precedes and eclipses the rest, and claims the first attention. Language like this has been heard hitherto only on ultra-Protestant platforms. In the mouth of a most devout Catholic who, before. 1870, had not the slightest shadow of doubt about any dogma of the Catholic Church,' it is surely one of the strangest of portents. Acton was at once the most Catholic of Catholics and the least papistical of Papists. After all his strong opposition to the proclamation of Infallibility, and after all the hard sayings he was accustomed to use about the Papacy, it is strange to find that he satisfied his bishop.' His bishop must, I think, have been a very sensible man, unwilling to lose, for a formula, the best lamb in his flock. If their communications were conducted vivâ voce, I should much like to have been the mouse behind the curtain. The interview must have closely resembled that historic one described by Byron at the commencement of which . . . betwixt his Darkness and his Brightness There passed a mutual glance of great politeness. In all churches west of the Vistula, a great many pious opinions which were almost unquestioned, save amongst the very learned, fifty years ago, have gone on the wind's wings. If the current which is setting against venerable illusions, even in the Roman Church, is reinforced by a current of anti-papal opinion, the next generation and the one which will come after it will certainly witness some very strange developments. The use of the word Ultramontane in these letters puzzles me. Pretty late in the sixties I had said in an article that Acton and his associates in the Chronicle were not Ultramontanes, but he maintained. that they were. Whether it was that in later life he fell into the ordinary parlance, or whether after the Council of 1870 he deliberately changed the phrase by which he wished to be designated, I am not The word has altered its meaning more than once in the course of history. sure. A great deal is said in various parts of this work about Canon Liddon, of whom the writer thought very highly as a spiritual force,' but distrusted chiefly as not being sufficiently hostile to the Papacy. Incidentally a somewhat startling opinion of the Canon's is quoted to the effect that Forbes, the Bishop of Brechin, was the first divine in the Church.' On p. 195 the opinion is expressed that Odo Russell left a larger gap than he filled. I do not agree. I think that he was peculiarly well suited to be British Ambassador at Berlin all through a most difficult and thoroughly disagreeable time. I could not name anyone, in or out of the diplomatic service, who would have done the same work quite as well, but I could easily name an abler man who in the same capacity, at the same time, would have blown everything to pieces in about six months. It is curious that Acton cared so much for Shakespeare's Sonnets, for his interest in poetry in general was very slight. He seems to have studied them under the guidance of Mr. Simpson, a man of ability, who differed, I apprehend, in some 'nice tenents' (to use Cowley's phrase when speaking of Crashaw) from the usual standard of orthodoxy. At least I remember that when I expressed to him my surprise at the very kindly way in which the author of the Ideal of a Christian Church had spoken to me about Clough, he replied: 'Oh, I dare say he would speak very kindly of you; but he would call me an Atheist.' A good deal of exception has been taken to Acton's unmeasured laudation of Mr. Gladstone, but it is only fair to remember that he was entirely under the glamour of that extraordinary personality; that he most fully agreed with him on many points as to which there was great hesitation even in his own camp; and further that he was writing to a daughter who sympathised in the strongest possible way with her father's views, hopes, and aspirations. No passage in these letters will be more discussed than the pages to which I refer, but whether they agree or disagree with them they will have to be considered by all who may hereafter treat of the same subject, for there can be no doubt that Acton had opportunities of studying one of the most complex of characters, which were shared by very few other men. I have mentioned elsewhere that in early days, when he was member for Carlow, Acton owned a bloodhound which was rather a compromising pet, as it particularly liked biting Irishmen. Some of his friends could have wished that some more authoritative successor of this discriminating animal had remained a permanent and influential member of his household; but it was not so to be. Whether it was that he followed Gladstone, as I used to think, or, as I have been since assured by one who had the fullest opportunity of knowing the truth, Gladstone followed him, he passed along with his leader into the Home Rule camp and the great ruin came. There is a common idea that Acton did not write much, fulfilling Clough's aspiration 'to know his knowledge to the world unknown,' but that is entirely a mistake. He wrote enormously. Anyone who looks at the elaborate Bibliography published by the Royal Historical Society, will see with amazement how much he actually put forth in the shape of articles, long or short, and I doubt whether even that Bibliography, careful as it is, contains everything. An immense number of the papers mentioned in it were quite short, like those in the Literarisches Centralblatt, which he particularly affected, but together they would fill volumes upon volumes. I hope and believe that ere long some of his Cambridge lectures, as well as some of his essays, will be given to the world in book form. The volume under review will, I think, throw light upon them and have light reflected on it. His huge library, which had already in 1860, when he was only six-and-twenty, reached 30,000 volumes, was kept in a large room he built for it at Aldenham, which possessed none of the charms we usually associate with the word. Most of it was collected with a view to writing a book on the History of Liberty. Well did Mrs. Drew call that book, in memory of a beautiful story by Henry James, The Madonna of the Future. Acton thought liberty an end, not a means, but liberty in that sense is a hallucination, which no age and no country has ever seen translated into fact. His too exclusive worship of it in later life was the result of a reaction, for I well remember the time when he was prepared to sacrifice its claims, all too much, to the idea of unity. He might with advantage have remembered the words of Castelar, who knew only too well, by terrible experience, where unrestrained liberty may land a nation, and who said to the Italian Radicals: That which Julius II. could not effect with his cannon, nor Leo X. with his arts, that which Savonarola could not make a reality by giving himself to God, nor Machiavelli by giving himself to the devil, has been done by you. You have made Italy one, you have made Italy free, you have made Italy independent. All this you, who are without doubt the most favoured of the generations, have attained by having reunited to the efforts of previous generations and to their martyrdoms the vital idea par excellence, the powerful idea par excellence, the idea of liberty. But it is not enough to have succeeded. It is necessary at all costs to keep what you have got. A large experience teaches us how much easier it is to found than to consolidate public liberties. For the first, one great but common and rudimentary virtue is sufficient-the virtue of courage. For the second are required wisdom and prudence. Everything may be left in part to the hazards of the unforeseen, everything except the fate of nations. It is strange that a man who had read so much and thought so much as Acton should have been an enthusiast for, as distinguished from a cool-headed friend to, Liberty. That the search after Liberty has improved the world in a thousand ways is unquestionable, but to expect ever to find it is to put oneself on the level of those who believe that the rainbow points to a mighty treasure which it is possible to seize. It is well indeed that the opus magnum was never written. I fear that when we had got to the end of it we should have said with the Scottish statesman, after listening to Lord Belhaven's great speech against the Union, I awoke, and lo! it was a dream.' No! It is not to Acton as a politician or as a political philosopher that we must pay our homage. It is to the accumulator and dispenser of enormous knowledge, to the genial companion, to the good friend, to the man who had seen the cities and known the minds of men in many lands and in many ages. We need not attribute to him merits which he had not. He had enough of his own to throw a shadow over the lives of all who knew him, when he passed away, and to leave a gap in those lives which no one else will fill. M. E. GRANT DUFF. BIRD LIFE AT BINGHAM'S MELCOMBE (Concluding the series) THE neighbourhood of Bingham's Melcombe is not so favoured, as regards either the number of its birds or the variety of their species, as some of those which I have described in previous papers. There is little water or water-meadow, little bog, no heather. The nightingale is common at Melcombe Park, three miles away, but does not visit Melcombe itself. The flint-bestrewn ploughed fields on the uplands and the 'broad backs of the bushless downs' do not afford the kind of cover which attracts, in any number, the sweetest songsters of distant Africa, the blackcaps, the garden warblers, the whitethroats, the willow-wrens, which add so much to the melodies and the charm of our English spring. There is not sedge enough to attract the sedge-warbler with its night-long, rather rasping song, or the reed-warbler with its exquisite little nest suspended within four reeds, or the black-headed bunting, their frequent companion. On the other hand, there is, to begin with, a large rookery; and no true lover of birds can have a rookery in his immediate neighbourhood without finding, during three months of the year at least, ample material for observation, for speculation, for amusement, for delight. We think we know the rook well, and there are few people, living even in the murkiest of towns, who can be wholly ignorant of his general look, who have never seen his nest or heard his caw. But who has ever been able to get to the bottom of his character or can reconcile the many contradictions in it? A bird so friendly and so sociable and yet so litigious; so fearless of man during one quarter of the year, so shy and so suspicious of him during the remainder; so staid, so sober, so solemn, so eminently respectable in appearance, and yet so droll and so unconventional in all his movements; so aristocratic in his tastes and tendencies, and yet so democratic in his polity; so tenderly solicitous for his young, as long as they are in the nest, or perching above and around it, yet so callous to their sufferings, should any one of them happen to flutter or fall to the ground; so sharp-sighted that they always know a gun from a walking-stick and often, it is said, a Sunday from a working-day, and yet so inobservant as often to mistake a hamper tied to a branch for an old |