CORRESPONDENCE.

THE LITE LORD ACTON.

[To Till EDITOR OP TIM "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—You say truly in the Spectator of Jane 28th that "the death of Lord Acton has removed from the sphere of human mental activity a man of prodigious learning and of abnormal gifts." He stood alone amongst his English contemporaries, in a class by himself. He may have had his equals in learning within the four seas. Lord Houghton used to put Thirlwall above him ; but that was a long time ago, before the younger man had even reached middle life. I have heard Gladstone, who knew them both well, compare Macaulay with him as a man of encyclopaedic knowledge, much to Acton's advantage ; but, after all, his learning was only a part of him. To make Acton you had to add, inter alia, his lightness of touch in conversation, his half-cynical playfulness, his power of making himself at home in all circles from the Court to the college, his curiously interesting range of European relations, and a certain glamour which many must have felt, but which none, I imagine, could define.

His immediate ancestor was a cadet of an ancient Shrop- shire family, who went abroad as travelling doctor with Gibbon's father when he made the grand tour. Young Acton married at Besancon, and at that place there was born to him a son, who entered the Tuscan Naval Service, and was then employed in reorganising, or rather creating, the Neapolitan Marine. Thence he rose to be Prime Minister, and died at Palermo in 1811. In 1791, through the death of a cousin, he succeeded to the property hitherto held by the elder branch, became Sir John Acton, and married in 1800 by Papal dispensation his niece, Mary Anne Acton, daughter of his younger brother, who was also in the Neapolitan service. Their son was Sir Richard Acton, who died at an early age very suddenly. Readers of the " Recit d'une Scour" will remember the circumstances, which pro- duced a great impression on the La Ferronays, so long and so closely connected with whatever was best—and there was not at all too much of it—in the society of Naples. His widow, a daughter of the great German house of Dalberg, had the entire charge of her son's education. She sent him, while still very young, to St. Nicholas du Chardonnet, that wonderiul school which is described in some of the most interesting portions of Renan's "Souvenirs." Acton remained there only eight months, learnt French, but was far too young to profit much by the peculiar merits of the place, or to suffer from its shortcomings. From Paris he went to Oscott, where he remained some years while Wiseman was its head. He happened to be there when O'Connell died, and Mr. Wilfrid Ward tells in his Life of Cardinal Wiseman, on Acton's anthority, a story of a worthy Italian who, having been brought from Monte Cassino to improve things in the library, was so much interrupted in his work by the honours paid to, and masses said for, "the Liberator," that he asked "why

they could not leave istum vanum hominem a little longer in Purgatory." From Oscott Acton was transferred to the charge of a Scotch tutor famous for his knowledge of Greek, but I do not think he profited much, for he told me that at sixteen he did not think he knew more than five hundred words of that language. A great change, however, was soon to come to him. He was sent to Munich, and put under the care of Dr. Dollinger, already famous, and on his way to become illustrious. Here be was attacked by a sudden passion for reading, more like a physical craving than anything else, which resulted in his beginning the serious studies of his life by reading the "Biographie Universelle" - through in a few weeks, and he continued to read in the same way as long as life and health continued. I recol- lect his saying many years later that his usual rate of book-consumption, when he was in the country, was a German octavo per diem, and he had one of those faultless memories on which everything imprinted itself at once and remained for ever; not but that he aided it by a system of note-taking and note-preserving such as I have never elsewhere met with.

It was in Paris in the January of 1860, about ten years, that is, after the commencement of the reading I have been speaking of, that I first heard his name. Montalembert mentioned him to me, asking a number of questions about him which excited lily curiosity in the highest degree. Shortly afterwards I returned to London for my Parliamentary duties, and was soon intro- duced to him. I think our first conversation took place in the " Aye " lobby of the House of Commons, and in the course of it he mentioned that he had already collected thirty thousand volumes, a remarkable feat for a man of six-and-twenty. From that time forward we met oftenest, perhaps, at the break- fasts which took place in my house, in those days on which Arthur Russell, who had brought us together, also constantly came, for they were both devoted adherents of that admirable way of meeting, which has almost disappeared in the present generation. Long afterwards I privately printed, at Acton's suggestion, a record of the names of those who attended these functions, and distributed them to those who still survived in the early "nineties." He delighted in small parties where general conversation was possible, and was one of the founders of the Breakfast Club, which, growing out of the breakfasts I have mentioned and those of Sir James Lacaita, still lives in great prosperity.. I found its history, by the way, mixed up by a newspaper, generally well informed, in the grotesquest manner with that of the institution known as "The Club," which is a hundred and two years older, and of which Acton was also a member, as he was of Grillion's, the Literary Society, and, for a short time, of the Dilettanti.

Acton never took an active part, or, I may say, any part at all, in the House of Commons, though I remember his once asking a question. When I talked to him about this (I suppose it was in 1863), he replied that he agreed with nobody, and nobody agreed with him. He first sat for Carlow, and used to complain sadly of a bloodhound be possessed which had a passion for biting Irishmen. Later he came in for Bridgnorth, very near his own home of Alden- ham, where he lived a good deal at this time, and went on collecting his library. He acknowledged to about eighty thousand volumes, but I have heard it put by one who had ample opportunities for judging at a much higher figure. The room in which it was kept had none of the charms of a library. It was rather a gigantic book-store, in which its owner could always find what he wanted, but which would never have suggested to the ordinary man the idea of studious leisure. It had cost very large sums, but it was a mere collection of good and useful books, which are of scant value in an age which only estimates at high prices books of curiosity. The (esthetic element was not strong in Acton, and at one time he had most of his books bound by contract at eighteenpence a volume. The House of Commons, society abroad and at home, and the piling up of his gigantic erudi- tion occupied most of his time until 1865, when he married Countess Marie Arco ; but it was to that period that belonged his ownership and editorship of the Home and Foreign Review, a most remarkable periodical, of which four thick volumes appeared, but the publication of which he thought it wise to suspend on account of the umbrage which its support of Liberal Catholicism gave to the highest authorities at Rome. It was a good deal later that he became connected with two other periodicals,—with the North British Review, which started as mi organ of the Free Kirk in Scotland, and must have been surprised to find itself, after various changes and chances, in -Roman Catholic hands ; and with the Chronicle, a weekly newspaper very unlike anything else which has appeared either

• before or since.

Acton's mother married for the second time Lord Granville, who was for so long a member of Liberal Administrations. In- finitely less merit than he possessed would accordingly have made it the most natural thing in the world that, after being unseated for Bridgnorth, he should have been raised to the Peerage, and this was done in 1869; but the same reasons which prevented his distinguishing himself in the House of Commons stood no less in his way in the Upper Chamber. During the Council 'of 1870 he exerted all his abilities and brought into play all the connections he possessed in the Roman Catholic world to prevent the majority committing the Church to conclusions which can hardly be to its advantage in the coming years. The best men and women then collected in Rome were with him, -but it was all in vain, and they were crushed by the far stronger forces with which they ha,1 to ' contend. In the striking words of Lord de Trfbley- " To far Canadian Meres of ice-bound silence, To cities lost in continents of sand,

- To shoaling belts around Pacific islands, The Pontiff raised his hand.

Then with one mind they came, the Bishop leaders, The outpost captains of the Church at fight, From uplands clothed with Lebanonian cedars, From realms of Arctic night :—

Lo ! we are ready at thy summons, father;

Loose and we loosen, bind and we will bind; The conclave princes at thy blast shall gather As red leaves after wind."

The immense majority of those who had sympathised with Acton in 1870 submitted as completely as is usually the case when a great question is settled in our own Parliament, and Acton "satisfied his Bishop." I think that is the proper phrase ; but I never even approached the subject with him, and I do not know what his precise attitude was. Years before, when the Home and Foreign Review had given • much offence to the authorities of his Communion, he said to me, "I am not conscious that I ever in my life had the slightest shadow of doubt about any dogma of the Catholic Church." That statement, coming as it did from a man who had read everything worth reading in the remotest way bearing upon the controversies between his own and other forms of faith, who was a profound theologian as well as a profound historian and philosopher, was the most remarkable ever made to me by a human being. Of its absolute sincerity, however, I am as certain as I could be of anything. His mind worked in a way totally incomprehensible to me, and I was content to enjoy and profit by what I under- stood rather than to plunge into labyrinths to which I had no clue. I once asked him, "If you wanted to convert — or me to the Catholic faith," naming a very intimate friend of both of us, whose opinions were in essentials the same as mine, "what would you do F!' "I would give you," he replied, "some books and leave you to yourselves." "What would the first be P "I said. " Rothe's Ethik,' "he replied. Richard Rothe, I need not say to those who take an interest in such matters, was not a Roman Catholic but a Protestant divine.

I have often heard it said that Acton made very little use in writing of his vast acquisitions. I think this is an overstatement, and am persuaded that if any one would collect all the articles he wrote, beginning, say, with the criticism of Buckle in the Rambler, he would find that he had under his hand enough to make a good many volumes. As a writer Acton had one grave fault. Whenever he wished to do his very best and to appeal to a comparatively small and competent audience he almost always became obscure. If he "remembered that his hearers were dust," as I recollect he did in a lecture about the Mexican tragedy of 1867 delivered at Bridgnorth, he was as clear as could be wished. I fancy he must have

been so in his ordinary lectures at Cambridge, but I never heard any of them. Surely they, will be published. During

the latter part of his life he lived a great deal abroad, very much at Cannes, very, much at Tegernsee in Bavaria, managing to make use of his great library at Aldenham, although so far away, by the kind help of a Roman Qatholio and an

Anglican priest who were his neighbours in Shropshire. Mr. Gladstone made him a Lord-in-Waiting, which sounds an odd post for such a man, but in which he was supremely happy, with the Royal Library at Windsor to spend long hours in and a, great deal of pleasant society. No one understood better how to hive up the honey of good talk wherever he met with it. The late Queen, it has always been said, appreciated him very highly.

He went with Gladstone when the shipvireck of the Liberal party took place chiefly. I think, from the fear he bad of the violent hatred excited against this country by the Irish immigrants in America, a quite insufficient reason ; but it was not as a politician that he either was or deserved to be an object of admiration. It was as a delightful companion, as a man of noble character, a sympathetic friend as well as a very prodigy of learning, borne as easily and with as little ostenta- tion as a child might carry a feather, that I and others I could name were quite devoted to him. If I had the power I would place upon his monument the words which he wrote as a pre- face to a list of ninety-eight books he drew up, and about which he still hoped to read a paper at Cambridge when he wrote to me on the subject last autumn :—" This list is sub- mitted with a view to assisting an English youth, whose education is finished, who knows common things, and is not training for a profession ; to perfect his mind and open windows in every direction ; to raise him to the level of his age, so that he may know the (twenty or thirty) forces that have made our world what it is, and still reign over it ; to guard him against surprises and against the constant sources of errors within ; to supply him both with the strongest stimulants and the surest guides; to give force and fulness and clearness and sincerity and independence and elevation and generosity and serenity to his mind, that he may know the method and 'a v of the process by which error is con- quered and truth is won, discerning knowledge from probability and prejudice from belief; that he may learn to master what he rejects as fully as what he adopts ; that he may understand the origin as well as the strength and vitality of systems and the better motive of men who are wrong; to steel him against the charm of literary beauty and talent, so that each book thoroughly taken in shall be the beginning of a new life, and shall make a new man of am, Sir, &c., M. E. GRANT DUFF.