ing part, was the Law of Limited Liability, which was introduced by the Government of which he was a member. This again was a change of first-rate importance; and although some of its effects were not foreseen at the time, has been approved by the commercial experience of the last thirty years. It was a measure which was entirely in accordance with Mr. Lowe's economical convictions. He would have asked, Why should we impose greater restrictions on the free circulation of capital than the lender of it demands? The onus probandi was on the other side. The benefit conferred by the change in the law has not been sufficiently recognised, because the limitations which it has removed are forgotten.

The story of his opposition to the Reform Bills, first, of Mr. Gladstone, and secondly, of Mr. Disraeli, is narrated elsewhere in these volumes. It was a magnificent effort, in which he stood almost alone against both parties. Never did he show such talents for debate, or such a deep conviction. The last expiring voice of Conservatism seemed to be concentrated in the words of one who, during the first half of his life, had been a vehement Liberal. But it was a forlorn hope that he was leading; the cause was already lost-the course of events was hardly affected by his gallant endeavour. On the one side was London society; on the other, the leaders of both parties, and a large majority of the English people. He was anxious, as a safeguard, to preserve the rights of minorities; and this proposal received a good deal of support, but it was not suited to the temper of the times, and it is doubtful whether, if carried, it would have produced any considerable effect.

There was no public man for whom Mr. Lowe, in the latter part of his life, entertained a deeper or more sincere admiration than Mr. Bright. He grew personally to like and admire him, although he had been his stoutest foe on the question of Parliamentary Reform. He respected his character, and having been a Free Trader himself from the days of his

youth, he never lost his faith in the principles which they held in common. The last relic of Protection, the small duty on foreign wheat, he himself, while Chancellor of the Exchequer, swept away, rather, it would seem, from the wish to carry out a principle than with a view to any important practical result. There were other questions of principle on which Mr. Lowe more nearly agreed with Mr. Bright than with many of those on his own side. He was not a lover of war, or of great armaments, or of interference with the affairs of foreign countries. Once or twice, as in the Abyssinian War, he came into conflict with the Civis Romanus sum prejudices of his countrymen. He was a great believer in the virtue of economy, and was always anxious to put the right man in the right place. He was an enemy to sacerdotalism, and while at the Council Office he had many encounters with the clerical party. In all this he had points of contact with Mr. Bright. He was also a great admirer of his eloquence. He thought Mr. Bright the first orator in the House of Commons; he dwelt on the felicity of his illustrations, on his beautiful applications of Scripture, his excellent, though rare, displays of humour; he had the sympathy for him which one man of genius has for another. I remember his speaking to me with especial commendation of a quotation of Mr. Bright's, from the Old Testament, which went to his heart. On the occasion of a dinner given in his honour, Mr. Bright, in reply to the toast of his health, compared himself to the Shunamite woman in the Book of Kings, who, when she was asked by the Prophet: 'What is to be done for thee? Wouldest thou be spoken for to the King, or to the Captain of the Host?' made answer: 'I dwell among mine own people.' The beauty of this application was not lost on Mr. Lowe.

For Mr. Cobden he also came to have a very high esteem, although in the Palmerstonian era he had gravely differed from him. No one, he thought, had a better manner of speaking, or was more attentively listened to; his speeches he

compared to an exquisitely wrought chain, of which the parts exactly fitted into one another. Having a very clear head, Cobden, he said, easily found his way through the difficult problems of Political Economy. Mr. Lowe used to describe his style as possessing no literary qualities, except the highest of all-simplicity and good sense. With him, too, he had more points of agreement than of difference. He often spoke of Cobden and Bright, and never with any bitterness or jealousy. Their training had been different from his own. At the time of the Crimean War and in the Reform struggle they had been in opposite camps; but in later years he strongly sympathised with them, and was very ready to recognise their great qualities.

There was another person for whom Mr. Lowe entertained not only admiration, but affection and reverence; this was Mr. Grote, who, when living at Barrow Green, in Kent, was within a ride or drive of him at Caterham. He treated Mr. Grote as a superior being, whom he would never have thought of contradicting, any more than Johnson would have contradicted a Bishop, and with whom he did not think it decorous to enter into argument. The bonhomie of that remarkable lady, Mrs. Grote, charmed him. Other friends living in the neighbourhood whom he visited were Sir John and the late Lady Lubbock, and, occasionally, Mr. Charles Darwin.

Of his colleagues in the Cabinet, probably the one on whose judgment he would have set the greatest value was Sir George Lewis. There was also a deep sympathy and congeniality of tastes by which they were united. They were two of the most intellectual men of their time, both excellent classical scholars, and both retaining the capacity for acquiring knowledge of all sorts at any age of life. They had, therefore, endless topics of conversation in common. One was the liveliest and brightest and most charming of mankind; the other had what Cicero has called comitate condita gravitas— the courtesy of a man of the world, repressed, or perhaps a

little weighed down, by his extraordinary attainments. Although so different, they were extremely well suited to one another, having what is the best basis of friendship-a great mutual respect. Mr. Lowe would have attended carefully to any opinion expressed by Sir George Lewis, and Sir George Lewis, in his modesty, would have readily acknowledged the superiority of his friend.

Another friend of Mr. Lowe's, whom I often met at his house, and of whom he entertained the highest opinion, was Sir John Simon, Medical Officer of Health to the Privy Council. They had worked together at the Council Office in the cause of sanitary reform. For in this, too, Mr. Lowe had been 'before his age.' He often spoke of the inestimable services which Sir John had rendered to the country, and of the manner in which he had sacrificed his professional prospects for the good of the public.

Mr. Lowe's name has been most conspicuously before the public as Minister of Education. In this department his merits have never been duly estimated, because the measures which he initiated are no longer in harmony with more recent public opinion. To him, more than to anyone, may be attributed the payment by results,' the special requirement of the three R's,' the transfer of the Government grant from the Council Office to the managers of schools, the examination of individual scholars. He may be said to have done more than anyone to organise education in the second generation, and to have filled up the interval between the first beginnings of Sir James Shuttleworth, and the comprehensive measure of Mr. Forster. His opinions in the present day would appear antiquated; but the experienced persons who are now entrusted with the direction of education are aware how much of the efficiency of the present system is due to him, though he and Lord Lingen-of whose loyalty and constancy in the many battles which they had fought side by side about education he always spoke with the greatest enthusiasm-incurred a good

deal of obloquy in their own day, in consequence of the necessary changes which they introduced. He was, or would have been, opposed to the abolition of fees as a waste, and equally to the aiding of secondary education out of the rates, for the same reason, because he would have thought that it was unjust to assist out of the national funds those who could afford to pay for themselves.

He was, notwithstanding his defect of sight, one of the few persons who are constantly reading. Seldom has any professed scholar coursed over so wide a range. He had read through the Hebrew Bible five times, and was always inclined to linger over the prophet Isaiah. At one time in his life he had studied German philosophy, which he by no means despised or condemned; he thought it a wonderful creation of the human mind, though his own ways of thinking inclined towards the opposite pole. The most difficult of Hegel's writings-Die Phänomenologie des Geistes-was the work which most attracted his attention. Then again he would return to old recollections of Sanskrit, or he would occupy himself with Thucydides or Lucian. A friend dedicated to him a translation of Thucydides; an attention by which he was greatly touched, and he remarked sadly, when acknowledging the compliment, that 'he had not been over-praised in life.' He was not a regular student, but, like Dr. Johnson, he tore the bowels out of books,' and retained a vivid impression of them long after he had read them. He was very willing to repeat poetry; once he recited to me, when walking in Hyde Park, the patriotic Irish

1 'To the

Right Honourable Viscount Sherbrooke,
one of the

best Greek scholars in England,
whose

genuine love of ancient classical literature
(though sometimes dissembled),

is as well known to his friends,
as the kindness of his heart,

and the charm of his conversation.'