of personal adhesion was conveyed which only very
partially existed, or even where it did not exist at all: that is a
risk of misinterpretation which it is always hard for the historical
critic to escape. There may have been a too eager tone; but to be
eager is not a very bad vice at any age under the critical forty.
There were some needlessly aggressive passages, and some sallies which
ought to have been avoided, because they gave pain to good people.
There was perhaps too much of the particular excitement of the time.
It was the date when _Essays and Reviews_ was still thought a terrible
explosive; when Bishop Colenso's arithmetical tests as to the flocks
and herds of the children of Israel were believed to be sapping not
only the inspiration of the Pentateuch but the foundations of the
Faith and the Church; and when Darwin's scientific speculations were
shaking the civilised world. Some excitement was to be pardoned in
days like those, and I am quite sure that one side needed pardon at
least as much as the other. For the substantial soundness of the
general views winch I took of the French revolutionary thinkers at
that time, I feel no apprehension; nor--some possible occasional
phrases or sentences excepted and apart--do I see the smallest reason
to shrink or to depart from any one of them. So far as one particular
reference may serve to illustrate the tenour of the whole body
of criticism, the following lines, which close my chapter on the
"Encyclopaedia," will answer the purpose as well as any others, and I
shall perhaps be excused for transcribing them:--

"An urgent social task lay before France and before Europe: it
could not be postponed until the thinkers had worked out a scheme
of philosophic completeness. The thinkers did not seriously make
any effort after this completeness. The Encyclopaedia was the most
serious attempt, and it did not wholly fail. As I replace in my
shelves this mountain of volumes, 'dusky and huge, enlarging on
the sight,' I have a presentiment that their pages will seldom
again be disturbed by me or by others. They served a great purpose
a hundred years ago. They are now a monumental ruin, clothed with
all the profuse associations of history. It is no Ozymandias of
Egypt, king of kings, whose wrecked shape of stone and sterile
memories we contemplate. We think rather of the grey and crumbling
walls of an ancient stronghold, reared by