nowles probably in his March number on the Poseidon of Homer, a
most curious and exotic personage.... Williams and Norgate got me
the books I wanted, but alack for the time to read them! In
addition to want of time, I have to deplore my slowness in
reading, declining sight, and declining memory; all very serious
affairs for one who has such singular reason to be thankful as to
general health and strength.

I wish I could acknowledge duly or pay even in part your
unsparing, untiring kindness in the discharge of your engagements
as "Cook." Come early to England--and stay long. We will try what
we can to bind you.

A few months later, he added to his multifarious exercises in criticism
and controversy, a performance that attracted especial attention.(217)
"Mamma and I," he wrote to Mrs. Drew, "are each of us still separately
engaged in a death-grapple with _Robert Elsmere_. I complained of some of
the novels you gave me to read as too stiff, but they are nothing to this.
It is wholly out of the common order. At present I regard with doubt and
dread the idea of doing anything on it, but cannot yet be sure whether
your observations will be verified or not. In any case it is a tremendous
book." And on April 1 (1888), he wrote, "By hard work I have finished and
am correcting my article on _Robert Elsmere_. It is rather stiff work. I
have had two letters from her. She is much to be liked personally, but is
a fruit, I think, of what must be called Arnoldism."

_To Lord Acton._

_Aston Clinton, Tring, Easter Day, April 1, '88._--I do not like to
let too long a time elapse without some note of intercourse, even
though that season approaches which brings you back to the shores
of your country. Were you here I should have much to say on many
things; but I will now speak, or first speak, of what is
uppermost, and would, if a mind is like a portmanteau, be taken or
tumble out first.

You perhaps have not heard of _Robert Elsmere_, for I find without
surprise, that it makes its way slowly into public notice. It is
not far from twice the length of an ordinary novel; and the labour
and effort of reading it all, I should say, sixfold; while one
could no more stop in it than in reading Thucydides. The idea of
the book, perhaps of the writer, appears to be a movement of
retreat from Christianity upon Theism: a Theism with a Christ