oric, and in the
"Lecture on Mexico," here republished, there is ample evidence of a
power of handling words which should impress a popular audience. It is
in gravity of judgment and in the light he can draw from small details
that his power is most plainly shown. On the other hand, he had a little
of the scholar's love of clinging to the bank, and, as the notes to his
"Inaugural" show, he seems at times too much disposed to use the
crutches of quotation to prop up positions which need no such support.
It was of course the same habit--the desire not to speak before he had
read everything that was relevant, whether in print or manuscript--that
hindered so severely his output. His projected _History of Liberty_ was,
from the first, impossible of achievement. It would have required the
intellects of Napoleon and Julius Caesar combined, and the lifetime of
the patriarchs, to have executed that project as Acton appears to have
planned it. A _History of Liberty_, beginning with the ancient world and
carried down to our own day, to be based entirely upon original
sources, treating both of the institutions which secured it, the persons
who fought for it, and the ideas which expressed it, and taking note of
all that scholars had written about every several portion of the
subject, was and is beyond the reach of a single man. Probably towards
the close of his life Acton had felt this. The _Cambridge Modern
History_, which required the co-operation of so many specialists, was to
him really but a fragment of this great project.

Two other causes limited Acton's output. Towards the close of the
seventies he began to suspect, and eventually discovered, that he and
Doellinger were not so close together as he had believed. That is to say,
he found that in regard to the crimes of the past, Doellinger's position
was more like that of Creighton than his own--that, while he was willing
to say persecution was always wrong, he was not willing to go so far as
Acton in rejecting every kind of mitigating plea and with mediaeval
certainty consigning the persecutors to perdition. Acton, who had as he
thought, learnt all this from Doellinger, was distressed at what seemed
to him the weakness and the sacerdotal prejudice of his master, felt
that he was now indeed alone, and for the time surrendered, as he said,
all views of literary work. This was the time when he had been gathering
materials for a _History of the Council of Trent_. That this cleavag