ng their case the best possible
colouring. For, to be sure of one's ground, one must meet one's
adversaries' strongest arguments, and not be content with merely picking
holes in his armour. Otherwise one's own belief may be at the mercy of
the next clever opponent. The reader may doubt how far Acton succeeded
in his own aim, for there was a touch of intolerance in his hatred of
absolutism, and he believed himself to be divided from his
ecclesiastical and political foes by no mere intellectual difference but
by a moral cleavage. Further, his writing is never half-hearted. His
convictions were certitudes based on continual reading and reflection,
and admitting in his mind of no qualification. He was eminently a
Victorian in his confidence that he was right. He had none of the
invertebrate tendency of mind which thinks it is impartial, merely
because it is undecided, and regards the judicial attitude as that which
refrains from judging. Acton's was not a doubting mind. If he now and
then suspended his judgment, it was as an act of deliberate choice,
because he had made up his mind that the matter could not be decided,
not because he could not decide to make up his mind. Whether he was
right or wrong, he always knew what he thought, and his language was as
exact an expression of his meaning as he could make it. It was true that
his subtle and far-sighted intelligence makes his style now and then
like a boomerang, as when he says of Ranke's method "it is a discipline
we shall all do well to adopt, and also do well to relinquish." Indeed,
it is hardly possible to read a single essay without observing this
marked characteristic. He has been called a "Meredith turned historian,"
and that there is truth in this judgment, any one who sees at once the
difficulty and the suggestiveness of his reviews can bear witness. He
could hardly write the briefest note without stamping his personality
upon it and exhibiting the marks of a very complex culture. But the main
characteristic of his style is that it represents the ideals of a man to
whom every word was sacred. Its analogies are rather in sculpture than
painting. Each paragraph, almost every sentence is a perfectly chiselled
whole, impressive by no brilliance or outside polish, so much as by the
inward intensity of which it is the symbol. Thus his writing is never
fluent or easy, but it has a moral dignity rare and unfashionable.

Acton, indeed, was by no means without a gift of rhet