avonic and Latin.
Unfortunately I have a very great increase of difficulty in
_hearing_ the words in foreign tongues, a difficulty which I hope
has hardly begun with you as yet.

Like a good host, Lord Acton kept politics out of his way as well as he
could, but some letter of mine "set him on fire, and he is full of ----'s
blunder and of Parnell's bill." Parliamentary duty was always a sting to
him, and by September 20 he was back in the House of Commons, speaking on
the Tenants Relief (Ireland) bill. Then to the temple of peace at Hawarden
for the rest of the year, to read the _Iliad_ "for the twenty-fifth or
thirtieth time, and every time richer and more glorious than before"; to
write elaborately on Homeric topics; to receive a good many visitors; and
to compose the admirable article on Tennyson's second _Locksley Hall_. On
this last let us pause for an instant. The moment was hardly one in which,
from a man of nature less great and powerful than Mr. Gladstone, we should
have counted on a buoyant vindication of the spirit of his time. He had
just been roughly repulsed in the boldest enterprise of his career; his
name was a target for infinite obloquy; his motives were largely denounced
as of the basest; the conflict into which he had plunged and from which he
could not withdraw was hard; friends had turned away from him; he was old;
the issue was dubious and dark. Yet the personal, or even what to him were
the national discomfitures of the hour, were not allowed to blot the sun
out of the heavens. His whole soul rose in challenge against the tragic
tones of Tennyson's poem, as he recalled the solid tale of the vast
improvements, the enormous mitigation of the sorrows and burdens of
mankind, that had been effected in the land by public opinion and public
authority, operative in the exhilarating sphere of self-government during
the sixty years between the first and second _Locksley Hall_.

The sum of the matter seems to be that upon the whole, and in a
degree, we who lived fifty, sixty, seventy years back, and are
living now, have lived into a gentler time; that the public
conscience has grown more tender, as indeed was very needful; and
that in matters of practice, at sight of evils formerly regarded
with indifference or even connivance, it now not only winces but
rebels; that upon the whole the race has been reaping, and not
scattering; earning and not wasting; and that