doned for recalling my own memories
of one whom it is hard to forget.

A few words are enough to tell the tale of his earlier days. Born in
1840, the son of a bishop, and nephew of the late Speaker of the House
of Commons, Edward Denison passed from Eton to Christchurch, and was
forced after quitting the University to spend some time in foreign
travel by the delicacy of his health. His letters give an interesting
picture of his mind during this pause in an active life, a pause which
must have been especially distasteful to one whose whole bent lay from
the first in the direction of practical energy. "I believe," he says in
his later days, "that abstract political speculation is my _metier_;"
but few minds were in reality less inclined to abstract speculation.
From the very first one sees in him what one may venture to call the
best kind of "Whig" mind, that peculiar temper of fairness and
moderation which declines to push conclusions to extremes, and recoils
instinctively when opinion is extended beyond its proper bound. His
comment on Newman's 'Apologia' paints his real intellectual temper with
remarkable precision. "I left off reading Newman's 'Apologia' before I
got to the end, tired of the ceaseless changes of the writer's mind, and
vexed with his morbid scruples--perhaps, too, having got a little out of
harmony myself with the feelings of the author, whereas I began by being
in harmony with them. I don't quite know whether to esteem it a blessing
or a curse; but whenever an opinion to which I am a recent convert, or
which I do not hold with the entire force of my intellect, is forced too
strongly upon me, or driven home to its logical conclusion, or
over-praised, or extended beyond its proper limits, I recoil
instinctively and begin to gravitate towards the other extreme, sure to
be in turn repelled by it also."

I dwell on this temper of his mind because it is this practical and
moderate character of the man which gives such weight to the very
sweeping conclusions on social subjects to which he was driven in his
later days. A judgment which condemns the whole system of Poor Laws, for
instance, falls with very different weight from a mere speculative
theorist and from a practical observer whose mind is constitutionally
averse from extreme conclusions. Throughout however we see this
intellectual moderation jostling with a moral fervour which feels
restlessly about for a fitting sphere of action. "Real life," he wri