The few recollections of William Forster that I have put together in the
preceding volume lead naturally, perhaps, to some account of my
friendship and working relations at this time with Forster's most
formidable critic in the political press--Mr. John Morley, now Lord
Morley. It was in the late 'seventies, I think, that I first saw Mr.
Morley. I sat next him at the Master's dinner-table, and the impression
he made upon me was immediate and lasting. I trust that a great man, to
whom I owed much, will forgive me for dwelling on some of the incidents
of literary comradeship which followed!

My husband and I, on the way home, compared notes. We felt that we had
just been in contact with a singular personal power combined with a
moral atmosphere which had in it both the bracing and the charm that,
physically, are the gift of the heights. The "austere" Radical, indeed,
was there. With regard to certain vices and corruptions of our life and
politics, my uncle might as well have used Mr. Morley's name as that of
Mr. Frederick Harrison, when he presented us, in "Friendship's Garland,"
with Mr. Harrison setting up a guillotine in his back garden. There was
something--there always has been something--of the somber intensity of
the prophet in Mr. Morley. Burke drew, as we all remember, an
ineffaceable picture of Marie Antoinette's young beauty as he saw it in
1774, contrasting it with the "abominable scenes" amid which she
perished. Mr. Morley's comment is:

But did not the protracted agonies of a nation deserve the tribute
of a tear? As Paine asked, were men to weep over the plumage and
forget the dying bird? ... It was no idle abstraction, no
metaphysical right of man for which the French cried, but only the