Mr. J. A. Froude once told me that he did not in the least mind the accusation which was brought against him (certainly not without reason) of being prejudiced. "A good stiff prejudice," he said, "is a very useful thing. It is like a rusty weathercock. It will yield to a strong and long-continued blast of conviction, but it does not veer round and round in compliance with every shifting current of opinion." What Mr. Froude expressed other people felt, though perhaps they would not have cared to avow it so honestly. One of the most notable changes which I have seen is the decay of prejudice. In old days people felt strongly and spoke strongly, and acted as they spoke. In every controversy they were absolutely certain that they were right and that the other side was wrong, and they did not mince their words when they expressed their opinions. The first Lord Leicester of the present creation (1775-1844) told my father (1807-1894) that, when he was a boy, his grandfather had taken him on his knee and said, "Now, my dear Tom, whatever else you do in life, mind you never trust a Tory;" and Lord Leicester added, "I never have, and, by George, I never will." On the other hand, when Dr. Longley, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, did homage on his appointment to the see of Ripon, King William IV. said, "Bishop of Ripon, I charge you, as you shall answer before Almighty God, that you never by word or deed give encouragement to those d---- d Whigs, who would upset the Church of England." John Keble, the gentle saint of the Tractarian movement, when he saw the Whigs preparing to attack the property of the Church, proclaimed that the time had come when "scoundrels should be called scoundrels." And the Tractarians had no monopoly of vigorous invective, for, when their famous "Tract XC." incurred the censure of an Evangelical dean, he urbanely remarked that "he would be sorry to trust the author of that tract with his purse." Macaulay, on the morning after a vital division, in which the Whigs had saved their places by seventy-nine votes, wrote triumphantly to his sister-- "So hang the dirty Tories, and let them starve and pine, And hurrah! for the majority of glorious seventy-nine." The same cordial partisan wrote of a political opponent that he was "a bad, a very bad, man; a disgrace to politics and to literature;" and, of an acquaintance who had offended him socially, "his powers gone; his spite immortal--a dead nettle."