John Morley

Week after week the ugly tale went on—a squalid ogre let loose among a population demoralised by ages of wicked neglect, misery, and oppression.

I sought to be in preparation for prompt obedience, feeling no desire to go, but on the other hand without reluctance because firmly convinced that whatever He ordains for us is best, best both for us and for all.

As to the idea, he said, that all independent action on the part of this great country was to be made chargeable for producing war in Europe, “that is in my opinion a mistake almost more deplorable than almost any committed in the history…

Those of the second are black also, but with more hope of some early dawn.

It is so easy to write, but to write honestly nearly impossible.

To speak frankly, it seemed to me that the Queen’s peculiar faculty and habit of conversation had disappeared.

It was a faculty, not so much the free offspring of a rich and powerful mind, as the fruit of assiduous care with long practice and much opportunity.

He received the verdict with perfect serenity and with a sense of unutterable relief, for his sufferings had been cruel.

It was “no importunate and heavy load.” The force was spent, but it had been nobly spent in devoted and effective service for his country and his fellow-men.

The language of the movers was worthy of the British parliament at its best, worthy of the station of those who (M188) used it, and worthy of the figure commemorated.

Of course, he had qualities that distinguished him from all other men; and you may say that it was his transcendent intellect, his astonishing power of attaching men to him, and the great influence he was able to exert upon the thought and…

But these things, which explain the attachment, the adoration of those whose ideas he represented, would not explain why it is that sentiments almost as fervent are felt and expressed by those whose ideas were not carried out by his policy.

My Lords, I do not think the reason is to be found in anything so far removed from the common feelings of mankind as the abstruse and controversial questions of the policy of the day.

He will leave behind him, especially to those who have followed with deep interest the history of the later years—I might almost say the later months of his life—he will leave behind him the memory of a great Christian statesman.

It is not enough for us to keep up simply a level, though it be a high level, of probity and of patriotism.

The mere average of civic virtue is not sufficient to preserve this Assembly from the fate that has overcome so many other Assemblies, products of democratic forces.

Famous men, in the immortal words of Pericles to his Athenians, have the whole world for their tomb; they are commemorated not only by columns and inscriptions in their own land; in foreign lands too a memorial of them is graven in the…

No other statesman on our famous roll has touched the imagination of so wide a world.

The whole of the civilised world will beweep the loss of a great statesman, whose political views were so widely humane and peaceable.

What light does it shed upon the working of the parliamentary system; on the weakness and strength of popular government; on the good and bad of political party; on the superiority of rule by cabinet or by an elected president; on the…

Did they mean a real moulding of opinion, an actual impression, whether by argument or temper or personality or all three, on the minds of hearers?

What thoughts does his career suggest on the relations of Christianity to patriotism, or to empire, or to what has been called neo-paganism?

But the public aspect of the period which closes for me with the fourteen years (so I love to reckon them) of my formal connection with Midlothian is too important to pass without a word.

It has been predominantly a history of emancipation—that is of enabling man to do his work of emancipation, political, economical, social, moral, intellectual.

Not numerous merely, but almost numberless, have been the causes brought to issue, and in every one of them I rejoice to think that, so far as my knowledge goes, Scotland has done battle for the right.