Mr. Howard talked politics and told me the passage at the close of Carlyle's letter meant a plan of Lord Beaconsfield for at once occupying Constanti… - John Richard Green

Last night I met Gladstone—it will always be a memorable night to me; Stubbs was there, and Goldwin Smith and Humphrey Sandwith and Mackenzie Wallace whose great book on Russia is making such a stir, besides a few other nice people; but one forgets everything in Gladstone himself, in his perfect naturalness and grace of manner, his charming abandon of conversation, his unaffected modesty, his warm ardour for all that is noble and good. I felt so proud of my leader—the chief I have always clung to through good report and ill report—because, wise or unwise as he might seem in this or that, he was always noble of soul. He was very pleasant to me, and talked of the new historic school he hoped we were building up as enlisting his warmest sympathy. I wish you could have seen with what a glow he spoke of the Montenegrins and their struggle for freedom; how he called on us who wrote history to write what we could of that long fight for liberty! And all through the evening not a word to recall his greatness amongst us, simple, natural, an equal among his equals, listening to every one, drawing out every one, with a force and a modesty that touched us more than all his power.

What one really sees on the Continent, if one likes to learn from their statesmen and journals instead of from the chatter of table d'hôtes, is the immense influence for good which England is just now wielding. I see Mr. Fish tells Spain to compare England's colonial policy with her own if she wants to know how to manage a colony. So in Germany "English Constitutionalism" is getting too hard even for Bismarck, as his remarkable speech about ministerial responsibility showed. It was the argument from England alone which he cared to answer. So here the influence of France seems to have faded away,—it is English order, English justice, English self-government that Italians are talking about as a model for their own.

No greater moral change ever passed over a nation than passed over England during the years which parted the middle of the reign of Elizabeth from the meeting of the Long Parliament. England became the people of a book, and that book was the Bible. It was as yet the one English book which was familiar to every Englishman; it was read at churches and read at home, and everywhere its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not deadened to their force and beauty, kindled a startling enthusiasm.