al and
inward life intact.... And most largely has human, as well as
divine compassion, flowed in upon us, from none more conspicuously
than from yourself, whom we hope to count among near friends for
the short remainder of our lives.

To another correspondent who did not share his own religious beliefs, he
said (July 5):--

When I received your last kind note, I fully intended to write to
you with freedom on the subject of _The Agnostic Island_. But
since then I have been at close quarters, so to speak, with the
dispensations of God, for yesterday morning my dearly beloved
eldest son was taken from the sight of our eyes. At this moment of
bleeding hearts, I will only say what I hope you will in
consideration of the motives take without offence, namely this: I
would from the bottom of my heart that whenever the hour of
bereavement shall befall you or those whom you love, you and they
may enjoy the immeasurable consolation of believing, with all the
mind and all the heart, that the beloved one is gone into eternal
rest, and that those who remain behind may through the same mighty
Deliverer hope at their appointed time to rejoin him.

All this language on the great occasions of human life was not
with him the tone of convention. Whatever the synthesis, as they
call it,--whatever the form, whatever the creed and faith may be,
he was one of that high and favoured household who, in Emerson's
noble phrase, "live from a great depth of being."

Earlier in the year Lord Granville, who so long had been his best friend,
died. The loss by his death was severe. As Acton, who knew of their
relations well and from within, wrote to Mr. Gladstone (April 1):--

There was an admirable fitness in your union, and I had been able
to watch how it became closer and easier, in spite of so much to
separate you, in mental habits, in early affinities, and even in
the form of fundamental convictions, since he came home from your
budget, overwhelmed, thirty-eight years ago. I saw all the
connections which had their root in social habit fade before the
one which took its rise from public life and proved more firm and
more enduring than the rest.

II

In September he paid a visit to his relatives at Fasque, and thence he
went to Glenalmond--spots that in his tenacious memory must have awakened
hosts of old and