One other recollection of the _Robert Elsmere_ year may fitly end my story of it. In September we spent an interesting afternoon at Hawarden--the only time I ever saw "Mr. G." at leisure, amid his own books and trees. We drove over with Sir Robert and Lady Cunliffe, Mr. Gladstone's neighbors on the Welsh border, with whom we were staying. Sir Robert, formerly an ardent Liberal, had parted from Mr. Gladstone in the Home Rule crisis of 1886, and it was the first time they had called at Hawarden since the split. But nothing could have been kinder than the Gladstones' reception of them and of us. "Mr. G." and I let theology alone!--and he was at his best and brightest, talking books and poetry, showing us the octagonal room he had built out for his 60,000 selected letters--among them "hundreds from the Queen"--his library, the park, and the old keep. As I wrote to my father, his amazing intellectual and physical vigor, and the alertness with which, leading the way, he "skipped up the ruins of the keep," were enough "to make a Liberal Unionist thoughtful." Ulysses was for the time in exile, but the "day of return" was not far off. Especially do I remember the animation with which he dwelt on the horrible story of Damiens, executed with every conceivable torture for the attempted assassination of Louis Quinze. He ran through the catalogue of torments so that we all shivered, winding up with a contemptuous, "And all that for just pricking the skin of that scoundrel Louis XV." I was already thinking of some reply both to Mr. Gladstone's article and to the attack on _Robert Elsmere_ in the _Quarterly_; but it took me longer than I expected, and it was not till March in the following year (1889) that I published "The New Reformation," a Dialogue, in the _Nineteenth Century_. Into that dialogue I was able to throw the reading and the argument which had been of necessity excluded from the novel. Mr. Jowett was nervous about it, and came up on purpose from Oxford to persuade me, if he could, not to write it. His view--and that of Mr. Stopford Brooke--was that a work of art moves on one plane, and historical or critical controversy on another, and that a novel cannot be justified by an essay. But my defense was not an essay; I put it in the form of a conversation, and made it as living and varied as I could. By using this particular form, I was able to give the traditional as well as the critical case with some fullness, and I took great pains with both. From a recently published letter, I see that Lord Acton wrote to Mr. Gladstone that the rôle played by the orthodox anti-rational and wholly fanatical Newcome in the novel belonged "to the infancy of art," so little could he be taken as representing the orthodox case. I wonder! I had very good reasons for Newcome. There are plenty of Newcomes in the theological literature of the last century. To have provided a more rational and plausible representative of orthodoxy would, I think, have