unich.
Our great novelist and poet George Meredith has immortalized her in his
_Tragic Comedians_.

VIII. LORD ACTON'S LIST OF THE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS

Every one has heard of Lord Avebury's (Sir John Lubbock's) Hundred Best
Books, not every one of Lord Acton's. It is the privilege of the _Pall
Mall Magazine_ {225} to publish this latter list, the final impression as
to reading of one of the most scholarly men that England has known in our
time. The list in question is, as it were, an omitted chapter of a book
that was one of the successes of its year--_The Letters of Lord Acton to
Miss Mary Gladstone_--published by Mr. George Allen. That series of
letters made very pleasant reading. They showed Lord Acton not as a
Dryasdust, but as a very human personage indeed, with sympathies
invariably in the right place.

Nor can his literary interests be said to have been restricted, for he
read history and biography with avidity, and probably knew more of
theology than any other layman of modern times. In imaginative
literature, however, his critical instinct was perhaps less keen. He
called Heine "a bad second to Schiller in poetry," which is absurd; and
he thought George Eliot the greatest of modern novelists. In arriving at
the latter judgment he had the excuse of personal friendship and
admiration for a woman whose splendid intellectual gifts were undeniable.

In one letter we find Lord Acton discussing with Miss Gladstone the
eternal question of the hundred best books. Sir John Lubbock had
complained to her of the lack of a guide or supreme authority on the
choice of books. Lord Acton had replied that, "although he had something
to learn on the graver side of human knowledge," Sir John would execute
his own scheme better than almost anybody. We all know that Sir John
Lubbock attempted this at a lecture delivered at the Great Ormond Street
Working Men's College; that that lecture has been reprinted again and
again in a book entitled _The Pleasures of Life_, and that the publishers
have sold more than two hundred thousand copies--a kind of success that
might almost make some of our popular novelists turn green with envy.
Later on in the correspondence Lord Acton quoted one of the popes, who
said that "fifty books would include every good idea in the world."
"But," continued Lord Acton, "literature has doubled since then, and it
would be hard to do without a hundred."

Lord Acton was possessed of the happy