In the spring of 1890 Mr. Gladstone spent a week at Oxford of which he spoke with immense enthusiasm. He was an honorary fellow of All Souls, and here he went into residence in his own right with all the zest of a virtuous freshman bent upon a first class. Though, I daresay, pretty nearly unanimous against his recent policies, they were all fascinated by his simplicity, his freedom from assumption or parade, his eagerness to know how leading branches of Oxford study fared, his naturalness and pleasant manners. He wrote to Mrs. Gladstone (Feb. 1):—

Here I am safe and sound, and launched anew on my university [pg 421] career, all my days laid out and occupied until the morning of this day week, when I am to return to London. They press me to stay over the Sunday, but this cannot be thought of. I am received with infinite kindness, and the rooms they have given me are delightful. Weather dull, and light a medium between London and Hawarden. I have seen many already, including Liddon and Acland, who goes up to-morrow for a funeral early on Monday. Actually I have engaged to give a kind of Homeric lecture on Wednesday to the members of the union. The warden and his sisters are courteous and hospitable to the last degree. He is a unionist. The living here is very good, perhaps some put on for a guest, but I like the tone of the college; the fellows are men of a high class, and their conversation is that of men with work to do. I had a most special purpose in coming here which will be more than answered. It was to make myself safe so far as might be, in the articles[262] which eighteen months ago I undertook to write about the Old Testament. This, as you know perhaps, is now far more than the New, the battle-ground of belief. There are here most able and instructed men, and I am already deriving great benefit.

Something that fell from him one morning at breakfast in the common room led in due time to the election of Lord Acton to be also an honorary member of this distinguished society. “If my suggestion,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to one of the fellows, “really contributed to this election, then I feel that in the dregs of my life I have at least rendered one service to the college. My ambition is to visit it and Oxford in company with him.”

IV

In 1890 both Newman and Döllinger died.

I have been asked from many quarters, Mr. Gladstone said to Acton, to write about the Cardinal. But I dare not. First, I do not know enough. Secondly, I should be puzzled to use the little knowledge that I have. I was not a friend of his, but only an [pg 422] acquaintance treated with extraordinary kindness whom it would ill become to note what he thinks defects, while the great powers and qualities have been and will be described far better by others. Ever since he published his University Sermons in 1843, I have thought him unsafe in philosophy, and no Butlerian though a warm admirer of Butler. No; it was before 1843, in 1841 when he published Tract XC. The general argument of that tract was unquestionable; but he put in sophistical matter without the smallest necessity. What I recollect is about General Councils: where in treating the declaration that they may err he virtually says, “No doubt they may—unless the Holy Ghost prevents them.” But he was a wonderful man, a holy man, a very refined man, and (to me) a most kindly man.

Of Dr. Döllinger he contributed a charming account to a weekly print,[263] and to Acton he wrote:—

I have the fear that my Döllinger letters will disappoint you. When I was with him, he spoke to me with the utmost freedom; and so I think he wrote, but our correspondence was only occasional. I think nine-tenths of my intercourse with him was oral; with Cardinal Newman nothing like one-tenth. But with neither was the mere corpus of my intercourse great, though in D.'s case it was very precious, most of all the very first of it in 1845.... With my inferior faculty and means of observation, I have long adopted your main proposition. His attitude of mind was more historical than theological. When I first knew him in 1845, and he honoured me with very long and interesting conversations, they turned very much upon theology, and I derived from him what I thought very valuable and steadying knowledge. Again in 1874 during a long walk, when we spoke of the shocks and agitation of our time, he told me how the Vatican decrees had required him to reperuse and retry the whole circle of his thought. He did not make known to me any general result; but he had by that time found himself wholly detached from the Council of Trent, which was indeed a logical necessity from his preceding action. The Bonn Conference appeared to show him nearly at the standing-point of anglican theology. I thought him more liberal as a [pg 423] theologian than as a politician. On the point of church establishment he was as impenetrable as if he had been a Newdegate. He would not see that there were two sides to the question. I long earnestly to know what progress he had made at the last towards redeeming the pledge given in one of his letters to me, that the evening of his life was to be devoted to a great theological construction.... I should have called him an anti-Jesuit, but in no other sense, that is in no sense, a Jansenist. I never saw the least sign of leaning in that direction.

V

Here the reader may care to have a note or two of talk with him in these days:—