As to his generosity and kindness toward younger students, it was endless. I asked him once, when I was writing for _Macmillan_, to give me some suggestions for an article on Chateaubriand. The letter I received from him the following morning is a marvel of knowledge, bibliography, and kindness. And not only did he give me such a "scheme" of reading as would have taken any ordinary person months to get through, but he arrived the following day in a hansom, with a number of the books he had named, and for a long time they lived on my shelves. Alack! I never wrote the article, but when I came to the writing of _Eleanor_, for which certain material was drawn from the life of Chateaubriand, his advice helped me. And I don't think he would have thought it thrown away. He never despised novels! Once on a visit to us at Stocks, there were nine books of different sorts in his room which I had chosen and placed there. By Monday morning he had read them all. His library, when he died, contained about 60,000 volumes--all read; and it will be remembered that Lord Morley, to whom Mr. Carnegie gave it, has handed it on to the University of Cambridge. In 1884, when I first knew him, however, Lord Acton was every bit as keen a politician as he was a scholar. As is well known, he was a poor speaker, and never made any success in Parliament; and this was always, it seemed to me, the drop of gall in his otherwise happy and distinguished lot. But if he was never in an English Cabinet, his influence over Mr. Gladstone through the whole of the Home Rule struggle gave him very real political power. He and Mr. Morley were the constant friends and associates to whom Mr. Gladstone turned through all that critical time. But the great split was rushing on, and it was also in 1884 that, at Admiral Maxse's one night at dinner, I first saw Mr. Chamberlain, who was to play so great a part in the following years. It was a memorable evening to me, for the other guest in a small party was M. Clémenceau. M. Clémenceau was then at the height of his power as the maker and unmaker of French Ministries. It was he more than any other single man who had checkmated the Royalist reaction of 1877 and driven MacMahon from power; and in the year after we first met him he was to bring Jules Ferry to grief over _L'affaire de Tongkin_. He was then in the prime of life, and he is still (1917), thirty-three years later,[1] one of the most vigorous of French political influences. Mr. Chamberlain, in 1884, was forty-eight, five years older than the French politician, and was at that time, of course, the leader of the Radicals, as distinguished from the old Liberals, both in the House of Commons and Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet.