letters--among them "hundreds from the Queen"--his library, the park,
and the old keep. As I wrote to my father, his amazing intellectual and
physical vigor, and the alertness with which, leading the way, he
"skipped up the ruins of the keep," were enough "to make a Liberal
Unionist thoughtful." Ulysses was for the time in exile, but the "day of
return" was not far off.

Especially do I remember the animation with which he dwelt on the
horrible story of Damiens, executed with every conceivable torture for
the attempted assassination of Louis Quinze. He ran through the
catalogue of torments so that we all shivered, winding up with a
contemptuous, "And all that for just pricking the skin of that scoundrel
Louis XV."

I was already thinking of some reply both to Mr. Gladstone's article and
to the attack on _Robert Elsmere_ in the _Quarterly_; but it took me
longer than I expected, and it was not till March in the following year
(1889) that I published "The New Reformation," a Dialogue, in the
_Nineteenth Century_. Into that dialogue I was able to throw the reading
and the argument which had been of necessity excluded from the novel.
Mr. Jowett was nervous about it, and came up on purpose from Oxford to
persuade me, if he could, not to write it. His view--and that of Mr.
Stopford Brooke--was that a work of art moves on one plane, and
historical or critical controversy on another, and that a novel cannot
be justified by an essay. But my defense was not an essay; I put it in
the form of a conversation, and made it as living and varied as I could.
By using this particular form, I was able to give the traditional as
well as the critical case with some fullness, and I took great pains
with both. From a recently published letter, I see that Lord Acton wrote
to Mr. Gladstone that the role played by the orthodox anti-rational and