But it was not till 1897, as he himself records, that the indomitable spirit so far yielded to these limitations as to resign--or rather contemplate resigning--the second great task of which he had spoken to me at Oxford, nine years before. "I have begun seriously to ask myself whether I shall ever be able to face--_The Olympian Religion_." It was, I think, in the winter of 1895 that I saw him for the last time at our neighbors', the Rothschilds, at Tring Park. He was then full of animation and talk, mainly of things political, and, indeed, not long before he had addressed a meeting at Chester on the Turkish massacres in Armenia, and was still to address a large audience at Liverpool on the same subject--his last public appearance--a year later. When _George Tressady_ appeared he sent me a message through Mrs. Drew that he feared George Tressady's Parliamentary conduct "was inconceivable in a man of honor"; and I was only comforted by the emphatic and laughing dissent of Lord Peel, to whom I repeated the verdict. "Nothing of the kind! But of course he was thinking of _us_--the Liberal Unionists." Then came the last months when, amid a world's sympathy and reverence, the great life, in weariness and pain, wore to its end. The "lying in state" in Westminster Hall seemed to me ill arranged. But the burying remains with me as one of those perfect things, which only the Anglican Church at its best, in combination with the immemorial associations of English history, can achieve. After it, I wrote to my son: I have now seen four great funerals in the Abbey--Darwin, Browning, Tennyson, and the funeral service for Uncle Forster, which was very striking, too. But no one above forty of those in the Abbey yesterday will ever see the like again. It was as beautiful and noble as the "lying in state" was disappointing and ugly. The music was exquisite, and fitting in every respect; and when the high sentence rang out, "and their name liveth for evermore," the effect was marvelous. One seemed to hear the voice of the future already pealing through the Abbey--as though the verdict were secured, the judgment given.