leaving, like Mr. Valiant-for-Truth before he crossed the river, his arms to those who could wield them. It was well for him; he could not have borne long years of failing strength and ebbing mental energy. Anything less than life at its full was death to him.

Released from work, he was intensely gay, and his tastes were sufficiently simple for him to find enjoyment everywhere. He loved all beautiful things, and, though he had seen everything, the gleam of the sinking sun through the pine aisles at his Pyrford cottage would hold him spellbound; and in summer he would spend hours trying to distinguish the bird notes, naming the river flora, or watching the creature life upon the river banks. So in the Forest of Dean, that constituency which he loved well and which well deserved his love, his greatest pleasure was to set himself as guide to all its pleasant places, rehearsing the name of each blue hill on the far horizon, tracing the windings and meeting of the rivers, loving all best, I think, when the ground was like a sea of bluebells and anemones in the early year. He watched eagerly each season for the first signs of spring, and when he was very ill he told me that it must ever be a joy untouched by advancing years. But indeed he had in him the heart of the spring. I think it was largely this simple love of nature which kept him always strong and sweet even after the deep blow of his wife's death in 1904.

Wherever he was, life took on warmth and colour. Travel with him was a revelation, trodden and hackneyed though the road might be. In his vivid narrative the past lived again. Once more troops fought and manoeuvred as we passed through stretches of peaceful country which were the battlefields of France; Provence broke on us out of a mist of legendary lore, the enchantment deepening as we reached the little-traversed highlands near the coast--those Mountains of the Moors where in past days, _connu comme le loup blanc_ among the people, he had wandered on foot with his old Provencal servant before motors and light railways were.

His care for the _Athenaeum_, inspired by the more than filial love he bore his grandfather, its earlier proprietor, led to continual reading and reviewing, and he would note with interest those few Parliamentarians who, keeping themselves fresh for their work of routine by some touch with the world of Literature, thereby, as he phrased it, "saved their souls."

Of the events which cut his public life asunder it is sufficient to say here that those nearest him never believed in the truth of the charges brought, finding it almost inconceivable that they should have been made; while the letters and records in my hands bear testimony to that great outer circle of friends, known and unknown, who have expressed by spoken or by written word, in public and in private, their share in that absolute belief in him which was a cardinal fact of our work and life.

The fortitude which gave to his country, after the crash of 1886, twenty- five years of tireless work, was inspired, for those who knew him best, by that consciousness of rectitude which holds a man above the clamour of tongues, and finds its reward in the fulfilment of his life's purpose.

"To have an end, a purpose, an object pursued through all vicissitudes of fortune, through heart's anguish and shame, through humiliation and disaster and defeat--that is the great distinction, the supreme justification of a life." So wrote his wife in her preface for _The Shrine of Death_.

The service of his country was the purpose of his life. Nor was that life justified alone by his unswerving pursuit of its great aim; it was justified also in its fulfilment, for his service was entirely fruitful-- he wrested success from failure, gain from loss.

It has been said that in 1886 the nation lost one who would have been among its greatest administrators. Yet when we look back on all that was inspired and done by him, on the thousand avenues of usefulness into which