a joy untouched by advancing years. But indeed he had in him the heart of
the spring. I think it was largely this simple love of nature which kept
him always strong and sweet even after the deep blow of his wife's death
in 1904.

Wherever he was, life took on warmth and colour. Travel with him was a
revelation, trodden and hackneyed though the road might be. In his vivid
narrative the past lived again. Once more troops fought and manoeuvred as
we passed through stretches of peaceful country which were the
battlefields of France; Provence broke on us out of a mist of legendary
lore, the enchantment deepening as we reached the little-traversed
highlands near the coast--those Mountains of the Moors where in past days,
_connu comme le loup blanc_ among the people, he had wandered on foot with
his old Provencal servant before motors and light railways were.

His care for the _Athenaeum_, inspired by the more than filial love he
bore his grandfather, its earlier proprietor, led to continual reading and
reviewing, and he would note with interest those few Parliamentarians who,
keeping themselves fresh for their work of routine by some touch with the
world of Literature, thereby, as he phrased it, "saved their souls."

Of the events which cut his public life asunder it is sufficient to say
here that those nearest him never believed in the truth of the charges
brought, finding it almost inconceivable that they should have been made;
while the letters and records in my hands bear testimony to that great
outer circle of friends, known and unknown, who have expressed by spoken
or by written word, in public and in private, their share in that absolute
belief in him which was a cardinal fact of our work and life.

The fortitude which gave to his country, after the crash of 1886, twenty-