of Christianity. Churches are still being everywhere built, money is
freely subscribed, young men are pressing into the clerical
profession, and religion shows every sign of vitality. I cannot help
suspecting, however, that a change is not far off. If it comes, it
will come with a vengeance; for over the intellectual dead level of
this democracy opinion courses like the tide running in over a flat.

As the end of life draws near I feel like the Scotchman who, being
on his death-bed when the trial of O'Connell was going on, desired
his Minister to pray for him that he might just live to see what
came of O'Connell. A wonderful period of transition in all things,
however, has begun, and I should like very much to see the result.
However, it is too likely that very rough times may be coming and
that one will be just as well out of the way.

* * * * *

Yours most truly, GOLDWIN SMITH.

Exactly twenty years from the date of this letter I was in Toronto for
the first time, and paid my homage to the veteran fighter who, living as
he did amid a younger generation, hotly resenting his separatist and
anti-Imperial views and his contempt for their own ideal of an equal and
permanent union of free states under the British flag, was yet
generously honored throughout the Dominion for his services to
literature and education. He had been my father's friend at
Oxford--where he succeeded to Arthur Stanley's tutorship at University
College--and in Dublin. And when I first began to live in Oxford he was
still Regius Professor, inhabiting a house very near that of my parents,
which was well known to me afterward through many years as the house of