John Morley

I hope you will receive this tribute from one who regards your private friendship as one of the great privileges of his life.

If I were fifteen years younger than I am, how happy I would be to come over to my beloved England once more, and see you surrounded by your sons and daughters, loved, admired, I would almost say worshipped, by a whole grateful nation.

The constant tension of his mind never impaired his tenderness and wise solicitude for family and kinsfolk, and for all about him; and no man ever had such observance of decorum with such entire freedom from pharisaism.

Nor did the order and moral prosperity of his own home (M149) leave him complacently forgetful of fellow-creatures to whom life’s cup had been dealt in another measure.

Though, I daresay, pretty nearly unanimous against his recent policies, they were all fascinated by his simplicity, his freedom from assumption or parade, his eagerness to know how leading branches of Oxford study fared, his naturalness…

What I recollect is about General Councils: where in treating the declaration that they may err he virtually says, “No doubt they may—unless the Holy Ghost prevents them.” But he was a wonderful man, a holy man, a very refined man, and (to…

No, the line must be drawn firm between the writer and the man of action; no comparisons there.

Full of interest in Hamlet, and enthusiasm for it—comes closer than any other play to some of the strangest secrets of human nature—what is the key to the mysterious hold of this play on the world’s mind?

I produced my favourite proposition that Measure for Measure is one of the most modern of all the plays; the profound analysis of Angelo and his moral catastrophe, the strange figure of the duke, the deep irony of our modern time in it all.

He is too healthy, too objective, too simple, for all the complexities of modern morbid analysis.

Now Carlyle, so mighty as he is in flash and penetration, has no eye for motives.

Macaulay, too, is so caught by a picture, by colour, by surface, that he is seldom to be counted on for just account of motive.

Have you ever realised what a deadly blow was the ruin of Byzantium by the Latins, how wonderful a fabric the Eastern Empire was?

Brittle like glass is fortune,—bright as light, and then the crash.

They could only explain all these doings, not by “wrong-headedness or imbecility,” but by a strange theory that there must be deliberate treachery among the government agents.

He had a sincere contempt for speeches in themselves, and was wont to set down most of them to vanity.

His speech was admirable; firm without emphasis, penetrating, dignified, freezing, and unanswerable.

Parnell filled in Irish imagination and feeling, how popular, how mysterious, how invincible he had been, to blame them because in the first moment of shock and bewilderment they did not instantly plant themselves in the judgment seat…

Gladstone himself used to say, it could be the duty of any party leader to take into his hands the intolerable burden of exercising the rigours of inquisition and private censorship over every man with whom what he judged the highest…

Men, in whose hearts religion and morals held the first place, were strongly joined by men accustomed to settle political action by political considerations.

Platform-men united with pulpit-men in swelling the whirlwind.

Electoral calculation and moral faithfulness were held for once to point the same way.

Undoubtedly some who have fallen into shift and deceit in this particular relation, have yet been true as steel in all else.

For a man’s character is a strangely fitted mosaic, and it is unsafe to assume that all his traits are of one piece, or inseparable in fact because they ought to be inseparable by logic.

But people were in no humour for casuistry, and whether all this be sophistry or sense, the volume of hostile judgment and obstinate intention could neither be mistaken, nor be wisely breasted if home rule was to be saved in Great Britain.