that the English element in
Acton came out most strongly in this period, closing as it did with the
Cambridge Professorship, and including the development of the friendship
between himself and Mr. Gladstone.

We have spoken both of the English element in Acton and of his European
importance. This is the only way in which it is possible to present or
understand him. There were in him strains of many races. On his
father's side he was an English country squire, but foreign residence
and the Neapolitan Court had largely affected the family, in addition to
that flavour of cosmopolitan culture which belongs to the more highly
placed Englishmen of the Roman Communion. On his mother's side he was a
member of one of the oldest and greatest families in Germany, which was
only not princely. The Dalbergs, moreover, had intermarried with an
Italian family, the Brignoli. Trained first at Oscott under Wiseman, and
afterwards at Munich under Doellinger, in whose house he lived, Acton by
education as well as birth was a cosmopolitan, while his marriage with
the family of Arco-Valley introduced a further strain of Bavarian
influence into his life. His mother's second marriage with Lord
Granville brought him into connection with the dominant influences of
the great Whig Houses. For a brief period, like many another county
magnate, he was a member of the House of Commons, but he never became
accustomed to its atmosphere. For a longer time he lived at his house in
Shropshire, and was a stately and sympathetic host, though without much
taste for the avocations of country life. His English birth and Whig
surroundings were largely responsible for that intense constitutionalism,
which was to him a religion, and in regard both to ecclesiastical and civil
politics formed his guiding criterion. This explains his detestation of all
forms of absolutism on the one hand, and what he always called
"the revolution" on the other.

It was not, however, the English strain that was most obvious in Acton,
but the German. It was natural that he should become fired under
Doellinger's influence with the ideals of continental scholarship and
exact and minute investigation. He had a good deal of the massive
solidity of the German intellect. He liked, as in the "Letter to a
German Bishop," to make his judgment appear as the culmination of so
much weighty evidence, that it seemed to speak for itself. He had, too,
a little of the German habit of breaking a butter