y and that mastery of subtlety,
allusion, and wit, which make his interpretation an adventure and his
judgment a sword.

A few instances may be given. In criticising a professor of history
famous in every way rather than as a student, Acton says, "his Lectures
are indeed not entirely unhistorical, for he has borrowed quite
discriminatingly from Tocqueville." Of another writer he says that
"ideas, if they occur to him, he rejects like temptations to sin." Of
Ranke, thinking perhaps also of himself, he declares that "his intimate
knowledge of all the contemporary history of Europe is a merit not
suited to his insular readers." Of a partisan French writer under Louis
Napoleon he says that "he will have a fair grievance if he fails to
obtain from a discriminating government some acknowledgment of the
services which mere historical science will find it hard to appreciate."
Of Laurent he says, that "sometimes it even happens that his information
is not second-hand, and there are some original authorities with which
he is evidently familiar. The ardour of his opinions, so different from
those which have usually distorted history, gives an interest even to
his grossest errors. Mr. Buckle, if he had been able to distinguish a
good book from a bad one, would have been a tolerable imitation of M.
Laurent." Perhaps, however, the most characteristic of these forgotten
judgments is the description of Lord Liverpool and the class which
supported him. Not even Disraeli painting the leader of that party which
he was destined so strangely to "educate" could equal the austere and
accurate irony with which Acton, writing as a student, not as a
novelist, sums up the characteristics of the class of his birth.

Lord Liverpool governed England in the greatest crisis of the war,
and for twelve troubled years of peace, chosen not by the nation, but
by the owners of the land. The English gentry were well content with
an order of things by which for a century and a quarter they had
enjoyed so much prosperity and power. Desiring no change they wished
for no ideas. They sympathised with the complacent respectability of
Lord Liverpool's character, and knew how to value the safe sterility
of his mind. He distanced statesmen like Grenville, Wellesley, and
Canning, not in spite of his inferiority, but by reason of it. His
mediocrity was his merit. The secret of his policy was that he had
none. For six years his administ