the Max Muellers. I can remember the catastrophe it seemed to all his
Oxford friends when he deserted England for America, despairing of the
republic, as my father for a while in his youth had despaired, and sick
of what seemed to him the forces of reaction in English life. I was
eighteen when _Endymion_ came out, with Dizzy's absurd attack on the
"sedentary" professor who was also a "social parasite." It would be
difficult to find two words in the English language more wholly and
ludicrously inappropriate to Goldwin Smith; and the furious letter to
the _Times_ in which he denounced "the stingless insults of a coward"
might well have been left unwritten. But I was living then among Oxford
Liberals, and under the shadow of Goldwin Smith's great reputation as
historian and pamphleteer, and I can see myself listening with an angry
and sympathetic thrill to my father as he read the letter aloud. Then
came the intervening years, in which one learned to look on Goldwin
Smith as _par excellence_ the great man "gone wrong," on that vital
question, above all, of a sane Imperialism. It was difficult, after a
time, to keep patience with the Englishman whose most passionate desire
seemed to be to break up the Empire, to incorporate Canada in the United
States, to relieve us of India, that "splendid curse," to detach from us
Australia and South Africa, and thereby to wreck forever that vision of
a banded commonwealth of free nations which for innumerable minds at
home was fast becoming the romance of English politics.

So it was that I went with some shrinking, yet still under the glamour
of the old Oxford loyalty, to pay my visit at the Grange in 1908,
walking thither from the house of one of the stanchest Imperialists in
Canada, where I had been lunching. "You are going to see Mr. Goldwin
Smith?" my host had said. "I have not crossed his threshold for twenty
years. I abhor his political views. All the same, we are proud of him in
Canada!" When I entered the drawing-room, which was rather dark, though