current affairs, yet were well aware how much they profited by his
Socratic objections, and knew, too, what real acquaintance with men
and business, what honest sympathy and friendliness, and what serious
judgment and interest all lay under his playful and racy humour.

More untimely, in one sense, than any other was the death of Professor
Clifford, whose articles in this Review attracted so much attention,
and I fear that I may add, gave for a season so much offence six or
seven years ago. Cairnes was scarcely fifty when he died, and Bagehot
was fifty-one, but Clifford was only four-and-thirty. Yet in this
brief space he had not merely won a reputation as a mathematician of
the first order, but had made a real mark on his time, both by the
substance of his speculations in science, religion, and ethics, and
by the curious audacity with which he proclaimed at the pitch of his
voice on the housetops religious opinions that had hitherto been kept
among the family secrets of the _domus Socratica_. It is melancholy
to think that exciting work, done under pressure of time of his own
imposing, should have been the chief cause of his premature decline.
How intense that pressure was the reader may measure by the fact that
a paper of his on _The Unseen Universe_, which filled eighteen pages
of the Review, was composed at a single sitting that lasted from a
quarter to ten in the evening till nine o'clock the following morning.
As one revolves these and other names of eminent men who actively
helped to make the Review what it has been, it would be impossible to
omit the most eminent of them all. Time has done something to impair
the philosophical reputation and the political celebrity of J.S. Mill;
but it cannot alter the affectionate memory in which some of us must
always hold his wisdom and goodness, his rare union of moral ardour
with a calm and settled mind. He took the warmest interest In this
Review from the moment when I took it up, partly from the friendship
with which he honoured me, but much more because he wished to
encourage what was then--though it is now happily no longer--the only
attempt to conduct a periodical on the principles of free discussion
and personal responsibility. While recalling these and others who are
no more, it was naturally impossible for me to forget the constant
and valuable help that has been so freely given to me, often at much
sacrifice of their own convenience, by those friends and contribut