These feelings broke out in time in at least one anonymous article.(258)
He told Lord Granville how anxious he was that no acknowledgment of
authorship, direct or indirect, should come from any of his friends. "Such
an article of necessity lectures the European states. As one of a public
of three hundred and more millions, I have a right to do this, but not in
my own person." This strange simplicity rather provoked his friends, for
it ignored two things--first, the certainty that the secret of authorship
would get out; second, if it did not get out, the certainty that the
European states would pay no attention to such a lecture backed by no name
of weight--perhaps even whether it were so backed or not. Faith in
lectures, sermons, articles, even books, is one of the things most easily
overdone.

Most of my reading, he went on to Acton, has been about the Jews
and the Old Testament. I have not looked at the books you kindly
sent me, except a little before leaving Hawarden; but I want to
get a hold on the broader side of the Mosaic dispensation and the
Jewish history. The great historic features seem to me in a large
degree independent of the critical questions which have been
raised about the _redaction_ of the Mosaic books. Setting aside
Genesis, and the Exodus proper, it seems difficult to understand
how either Moses or any one else could have advisedly published
them in their present form; and most of all difficult to believe
that men going to work deliberately after the captivity would not
have managed a more orderly execution. My thoughts are always
running back to the parallel question about Homer. In that case,
those who hold that Peisistratos or some one of his date was the
compiler, have at least this to say, that the poems in their
present form are such as a compiler, having liberty of action,
might have aimed at putting out from his workshop. Can that be
said of the Mosaic books? Again, are we not to believe in the
second and third Temples as centres of worship because there was a
temple at Leontopolis, as we are told? Out of the frying-pan, into
the fire.

When he left Amalfi (Feb. 14) for the north, he found himself, he says, in
a public procession, with great crowds at the stations, including Crispi
at Rome, who had once been his guest at Hawarden.

After his return home, he wrote again to Lord Acton:--

_April