it is not necessary to say, has a serious reputation in the
literature of our time. In politics he was one of the best literary
representatives of the fastidious or pedantocratic school of government.
In economics he spoke the last word, and fell, sword in hand, in the
last trench, of the party of capitalist supremacy and industrial
tutelage. In the group of profound speculative questions that have come
up for popular discussion since the great yawning rents and fissures
have been made in the hypotheses of theology by the hypotheses of
science, he set a deep mark on many minds. 'We are in the sick foggy
dawn of a new era,' says one distinguished writer of our day, 'and no
one saw more clearly than W. R. Greg what the day that would follow was
likely to be.' To this I must humbly venture to demur; for there is no
true vision of the fortunes of human society without Hope, and without
Faith in the beneficent powers and processes of the Unseen Time. That
and no other is the mood in which our sight is most likely to pierce the
obscuring mists from which the new era begins to emerge. When we have
said so much as this, it remains as true as before that Mr. Greg's
faculty of disinterested speculation, his feeling for the problems of
life, and his distinction of character, all make it worth while to put
something about him on record, and to attempt to describe him as he was,
apart from the opaque influences of passing controversy and of
discussions that are rapidly losing their point.

Mr. Greg was born at Manchester in 1809. The family stock was Irish by
residence and settlement, though Scotch in origin. The family name was
half jocosely and half seriously believed to be the middle syllable of
the famous clan of Macgregor. William Rathbone Greg's grandfather was a
man of good position in the neighbourhood of Belfast, who sent two of
his sons to push their fortunes in England. The younger of the two was
adopted by an uncle, who carried on the business of a merchant at
Manchester. He had no children of his own. The boy was sent to Harrow,
where Dr. Samuel Parr was then an assistant master. When the post of
head master became vacant, Parr, though only five-and-twenty, entered
into a very vehement contest for the prize. He failed, and in a fit of
spleen set up an establishment of his own at Stanmore. Many persons, as
De Quincey tells us, of station and influence both lent him money and
gave him a sort of countenance equally useful t