books, and of a multitude of articles upon all sorts of
subjects. He showed himself as eagerly interested in matters of
classical scholarship and Christian doctrine and ecclesiastical
history as in questions of national finance and foreign policy. No
account of him could be complete without reviewing his actions and
estimating the results of his work in all these directions.

But the difficulty of describing and judging him goes deeper. His was
a singularly complex nature, whose threads it was hard to unravel.
His individuality was extremely strong. All that he said or did
bore its impress. Yet it was an individuality so far from being
self-consistent as sometimes to seem a bundle of opposite qualities
capriciously united in a single person. He might with equal truth
have been called, and he was in fact called, a conservative and a
revolutionary. He was dangerously impulsive, and had frequently to
suffer for his impulsiveness; yet he was also not merely prudent and
cautious, but so astute as to have been accused of craft and
dissimulation. So great was his respect for tradition that he clung
to views regarding the authorship of the Homeric poems and the date
of the books of the Old Testament which nearly all competent
specialists have now rejected. So bold was he in practical matters
that he carried through sweeping changes in the British constitution,
changed the course of English policy in the nearer East, overthrew an
established church in one part of the United Kingdom, and committed
himself in principle to the overthrow of two other established
churches in other parts. He came near to being a Roman Catholic in
his religious opinions, yet was for the last twenty years of his life
the trusted leader of the English Protestant Nonconformists and the
Scottish Presbyterians. No one who knew him intimately doubted his
conscientious sincerity and earnestness, yet four-fifths of the
English upper classes were in his later years wont to regard him as
a self-interested schemer who would sacrifice his country to his
ambition. Though he loved general principles, and often soared out
of the sight of his audience when discussing them, he generally
ended by deciding upon points of detail the question at issue. He
was at different times of his life the defender and the assailant of
the same institutions, yet scarcely seemed inconsistent in doing
opposite things, because his methods and his arguments preserved the
same type and co