s were always imperfect. Perpetually engaged in going over
his own life and reconsidering his conclusions, he was not depressed by
unfinished work. When a sanguine friend hoped that all the contents of
his hundred note-books would come into use, he answered that perhaps
they might, if he lived for a hundred and fifty years. He seldom wrote a
book without compulsion, or the aid of energetic assistants. The
account of mediaeval sects, dated 1890, was on the stocks for half a
century. The discourse on the Templars, delivered at his last appearance
in public, had been always before him since a conversation with Michelet
about the year 1841. Fifty-six years lay between his text to the
_Paradiso_ of Cornelius and his last return to Dante.

When he began to fix his mind on the constitutional history of the
Church, he proposed to write, first, on the times of Innocent XI. It was
the age he knew best, in which there was most interest, most material,
most ability, when divines were national classics, and presented many
distinct types of religious thought, when biblical and historical
science was founded, and Catholicism was presented in its most winning
guise. The character of Odescalchi impressed him, by his earnestness in
sustaining a strict morality. Fragments of this projected work
reappeared in his lectures on Louis XIV., and in his last publication on
the Casuists. The lectures betray the decline of the tranquil idealism
which had been the admiration and despair of friends. Opposition to Rome
had made him, like his ultramontane allies in France, more indulgent to
the ancient Gallican enemy. He now had to expose the vice of that
system, which never roused the king's conscience, and served for sixty
years, from the remonstrance of Caussin to the anonymous warning of
Fenelon, as the convenient sanction of absolutism. In the work on
seventeenth-century ethics, which is his farthest, the moral point of
view prevails over every other, and conscience usurps the place of
theology, canon law, and scholarship. This was his tribute to a new
phase of literature, the last he was to see, which was beginning to put
ethical knowledge above metaphysics and politics, as the central range
of human progress. Morality, veracity, the proper atmosphere of ideal
history, became the paramount interest.

When he was proposed for a degree, the most eloquent lips at Oxford,
silenced for ever whilst I write this page, pointed to his excellence in
thos