I think it would be just as well that Gardner should put his Royal title at the foot of the title-page, as in his other publications, and just in the same way. {146} I suppose H.M. will not consider that she is thus made responsible for all the opinions to be found within. If she does, it will be time for her to say so when it strikes her. I have just attacked a great frequenter and pillar of the Athenæum Club for not having us taken in there; and I hope he will succeed in wiping this reproach from the institution. Bute's control of the _Scottish Review_ was maintained until the end of his life. The seventy-second and final number appeared in October, 1900, the month in which he died. Occasional entries in his diaries show that he had incurred very heavy expenses in connection with the _Review_--perhaps, from first to last, almost as heavy as those entailed on him by the establishment and support, twenty years before, of a Conservative daily newspaper in the heart of Liberal Wales. As he had not grudged that outlay in what he believed to be a good cause, so he did not consider the money expended on this literary enterprise to have been expended in vain. If the _Scottish Review_ under his control had not proved precisely a commercial success--and perhaps he had never really expected that it would--its conduct and management had at least provided him with congenial work and occupation during a period extending over several years. It afforded him a convenient vehicle for the publication of his curious researches into some of the obscurer corners of ecclesiastical and general history: it brought him into contact, either personally or by correspondence, with many distinguished scholars and men of letters whom he might otherwise have had no opportunity of knowing: it led indirectly to the forming of at least one intimate friendship which was the source of pleasure and interest to him until the {147} end of his life; and it brought him opportunities which he valued of playing the part of an unostentatious Mæcenas--in other words, of giving practical encouragement to literary beginners in whom he discerned actual ability or promise for the future, enabling them to make their first public appearance in a periodical of repute, and thus assisting them to mount at least the first slopes of the Parnassus to which they aspired. [Sidenote: 1889, Death of Bishop Grant]