she worked; now translating from some foreign poet,
now rolling forth melodiously the exquisite cadences of "Queen Mab."
Student of philosophy as he was, he was deeply and steadily sceptical;
and a very religious relative has told me that he often drove her from
the room by his light, playful mockery of the tenets of the Christian
faith. His mother and sister were strict Roman Catholics, and near the
end forced a priest into his room, but the priest was promptly ejected
by the wrath of the dying man, and by the almost fierce resolve of the
wife that no messenger of the creed he detested should trouble her
darling at the last.

Deeply read in philosophy, he had outgrown the orthodox beliefs of his
day, and his wife, who loved him too much to criticise, was wont to
reconcile her own piety and his scepticism by holding that "women ought
to be religious," while men had a right to read everything and think as
they would, provided that they were upright and honourable in their
lives. But the result of his liberal and unorthodox thought was to
insensibly modify and partially rationalise her own beliefs, and she
put on one side as errors the doctrines of eternal punishment, the
vicarious atonement, the infallibility of the Bible, the equality of
the Son with the Father in the Trinity, and other orthodox beliefs, and
rejoiced in her later years in the writings of such men as Jowett,
Colenso, and Stanley. The last named, indeed, was her ideal Christian
gentleman, suave, polished, broad-minded, devout in a stately way. The
baldness of a typical Evangelical service outraged her taste as much as
the crudity of Evangelical dogmas outraged her intellect; she liked to
feel herself a Christian in a dignified and artistic manner, and to be
surrounded by solemn music and splendid architecture when she "attended
Divine service." Familiarity with celestial personages was detestable
to her, and she did her duty of saluting them in a courtly and reverent
fashion. Westminster Abbey was her favourite church, with its dim light
and shadowy distances; there in a carven stall, with choristers
chanting in solemn rhythm, with the many-coloured glories of the
painted windows repeating themselves on upspringing arch and clustering
pillars, with the rich harmonies of the pealing organ throbbing up
against screen and monument, with the ashes of the mighty dead around,
and all the stately memories of the past inwrought into the very
masonry, there Relig