No doubt he belonged, as Lord Derby
(the Prime Minister) once said of himself, to a pre-scientific age.
Perhaps he was unconsciously biassed by the notion that such sciences
as geology and biology, for instance, were being used by some students
to sap the foundations of revealed religion. But I can recall no sign
of disposition to dissuade free inquiry either into those among the
sciences of nature which have been supposed to touch theology, or into
the date, authorship, and authority of the books of the Bible. He had
faith not only in his creed, but in God as a God of truth, and in the
power of research to elicit truth.

General propositions are dangerous, yet it seems safe to observe that
great men have seldom been obscurantists or persecutors. Either the
sympathy with intellectual effort which is natural to a powerful
intellect, or the sense that free inquiry, though it may be checked by
repression for a certain time or within a certain area, will
ultimately have its course, dissuades them from that attempt to dam up
the stream of thought which smaller minds regard as the obvious
expedient for saving souls or institutions.

It ought to be added, for this was a remarkable feature of his
character, that he had the deepest reverence for the great poets and
philosophers, placing the career of the statesman on a far lower plane
than that of those who rule the world by their thoughts enshrined in
literature. He expressed in a striking letter to Tennyson's eldest
son his sense of the immense superiority of the poet's life and work.
Once, in the lobby of the House of Commons, seeing his countenance
saddened by the troubles of Ireland, I told him, in order to divert
his thoughts, how some one had recently discovered that Dante had in
his last years been appointed at Ravenna to a lectureship which raised
him above the pinch of want. Mr. Gladstone's face lit up at once, and
he said, "How strange it is to think that these great souls whose
words are a beacon-light to all the generations that have come after
them, should have had cares and anxieties to vex them in their daily
life, just like the rest of us common mortals." The phrase reminded me
that a few days before I had heard Mr. Darwin, in dwelling upon the
pleasure a visit paid by Mr. Gladstone had given him, say, "And he
talked just as if he had been an ordinary person like one of
ourselves." The two great men were alike unconscious of their
greatness.

It was an unsp