en him an unusually wide outlook
over mankind at large.

His interest in the great things, so far from turning him away from
the small things, seemed to quicken his sense of their significance.
It was a noteworthy feature of his view of history that he should have
held that the explanation of most of what has passed in the light is
to be found in what has passed in the dark. He was always hunting for
the key to secret chambers, preferring to believe that the grand
staircase is only for show, and meant to impose upon the multitude,
while the real action goes on in hidden passages behind. No one knew
so much of the gossip of the past; no one was more intensely curious
about the gossip of the present, though in his hands it ceased to be
gossip and became unwritten history. One was sometimes disposed to
wonder whether he did not think too much about the backstairs. But he
had seen a great deal of history in the making.

The passion for acquiring knowledge which his German education had
fostered ended by becoming a snare to him, because it checked his
productive powers. Not that learning burdened him, or clogged the
soaring pinions of his mind. He was master of all he knew. But
acquisition absorbed so much of his time that little was left for
literary composition. (Doellinger saw the danger, for he observed that
if Acton did not write a great book before he reached the age of
forty, he would never do so.) It made him think that he could not
write on a subject till he had read everything, or nearly everything,
that others had written about it. It developed the habit of making
extracts from the books he read, a habit which took the form of
accumulating small slips of paper on which these extracts were written
in his exquisitely neat and regular hand, the slips being arranged in
cardboard boxes according to their subjects. He had hundreds of these
boxes; and though much of their contents must no doubt be valuable,
the time spent in distilling and bottling the essence of the books
whence they came, might have been better spent in giving to the world
the ideas which they had helped to evoke in his own mind. If one may
take the quotations appended to his inaugural lecture as a sample of
those he had collected, many of them were not exceptionally valuable,
and did little more than show how the same idea, perhaps no recondite
one, might be expressed in different words by different persons. When
one read some article he had written