The Duke of Argyll, again, during the space of
forty years, had found him "always reverent, hating all levity or
flippancy," and was struck by his possessing "the noblest humility I
have ever known." Lord Macaulay, who "had stood absolutely aloof," once
having been permitted to glance at the proof-sheets of _Guenevere_, was
"absolutely subdued" to "unfeigned and reverent admiration." The duke
was the glad emissary who was "the medium of introduction," and he
recognised in Macaulay's subjugation "a premonition" of Tennyson's
complete "conquest over the living world and over the generations that
are to come."

Thus the priesthood circled round their idol, waving their censers and
shouting their hymns of praise, while their ample draperies effectively
hid from the public eye the object which was really in the centre of
their throng, namely, a gaunt, black, touzled man, rough in speech,
brooding like an old gipsy over his inch of clay pipe stuffed with shag,
and sucking in port wine with gusto--"so long as it is black and sweet
and strong, I care not!" Their fault lay, not in their praise, which was
much of it deserved, but in their deliberate attempt in the interests of
what was Nice and Proper--gods of the Victorian Age--to conceal what any
conventional person might think not quite becoming. There were to be no
shadows in the picture, no stains or rugosities on the smooth bust of
rosy wax.

On the pretext, therefore, of supplying a brief and above all a
complimentary set of portraits, Mr. Strachey takes the biography of an
ecclesiastic, an educational authority, a woman of action, and a man of
adventure, and tells them over again in his own way. The four figures he
chooses are all contemporary, and yet, so implacably does time hurry us
along, all would be very old if they still survived. Three of them could
hardly survive, for Cardinal Manning and Dr. Arnold would be far over a
hundred, and Florence Nightingale in her ninety-ninth year; the fourth,
General Gordon, would be eighty-five. The motto of Mr. Strachey is "Put
not your trust in the intellectual princes of the Victorian Age," or, at
least, in what their biographers have reported of them; they were not
demi-gods in any sense, but eccentric and forceful figures working dimly
towards aims which they only understood in measure, and which very
often were not worth the energy which they expended on them. This
attitude alone would be enough to distinguish Mr. Strachey f