ration outdid the Holy Alliance. For
five years it led the liberal movement throughout the world. The
Prime Minister hardly knew the difference. He it was who forced
Canning on the King. In the same spirit he wished his government to
include men who were in favour of the Catholic claims and men who
were opposed to them. His career exemplifies, not the accidental
combination but the natural affinity, between the love of
conservatism and the fear of ideas.

The longer essays republished in these volumes exhibit in most of its
characteristics a personality which even those who disagreed with his
views must allow to have been one of the most remarkable products of
European culture in the nineteenth century. They will show in some
degree how Acton's mind developed in the three chief periods of his
activity, something of the influences which moulded it, a great deal of
its preferences and its antipathies, and nearly all its directing
ideals. During the first period--roughly to be dated from 1855 to
1863--he was hopefully striving, under the influence of Doellinger (his
teacher from the age of seventeen), to educate his co-religionists in
breadth and sympathy, and to place before his countrymen ideals of right
in politics, which were to him bound up with the Catholic faith. The
combination of scientific inquiry with true rules of political justice
he claimed, in a letter to Doellinger, as the aim of the _Home and
Foreign Review_. The result is to be seen in a quarterly, forgotten,
like all such quarterlies to-day, but far surpassing, alike in
knowledge, range, and certainty, any of the other quarterlies,
political, or ecclesiastical, or specialist, which the nineteenth
century produced. There is indeed no general periodical which comes near
to it for thoroughness of erudition and strength of thought, if not for
brilliance and ease; while it touches on topics contemporary and
political in a way impossible to any specialist journal. A comparison
with the _British Critic_ in the religious sphere, with the _Edinburgh_
in the political, will show how in all the weightier matters of learning
and thought, the _Home and Foreign_ (indeed the _Rambler_) was their
superior, while it displayed a cosmopolitan interest foreign to most
English journals.

We need not recapitulate the story so admirably told already by Doctor
Gasquet of the beginning and end of the various journalistic enterprises
with which Acton was co