[43] There was an anecdote current in the University of Oxford down to my time that when Lowe was examining in the examination which the statutes call "Responsions," the dons "Little-go," and the undergraduates "Smalls," a friend coming in while the _viva voce_ was in progress, asked him how he was getting on. "Excellently," said Lowe; "five men plucked already, and the sixth very shaky." Another tale, not likely to have been invented, relates that when he and several members of the then Liberal Ministry were staying in Dublin with the Lord Lieutenant, and had taken an excursion into the Wicklow hills, they found themselves one afternoon obliged to wait for half an hour at a railway station. To pass the time, Lowe forthwith engaged in a dispute about the charge with the car-drivers who had brought them, a dispute which soon became hot and noisy, to the delight of Lowe, but to the horror of the old Lord Chancellor, who was one of the party. [44] _Essays on Reform_, published in 1867. [45] The then borough qualification, which Mr. Gladstone's Bill proposed to reduce to L7. [46] Mr. Gladstone said to me in 1897 that the extension of the suffrage had, in his judgment, improved the quality of legislation, making it more regardful of the interests of the body of the people, but had not improved the quality of the House of Commons. [47] Sir H. S. Maine's _Quarterly Review_ articles, published in a volume under the title of _Popular Government_, come nearest to being a literary presentation of the case against democracy, but they are, with all their ingenuity and grace of style, so provokingly vague and loosely expressed that there can seldom be found in them a proposition with which one can agree, or from which one can differ. E. de Laveleye's well-known book is not much more substantial, but instruction may (as respects France) be found in the late Edmond Scherer's _De la Democratie_, and (as respects England and the United States) in M. Ostrogorski's recent book, _Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties_. WILLIAM ROBERTSON SMITH Robertson Smith,[48] the most widely learned and one of the most powerful teachers that either Cambridge or Oxford could show during the years of his residence in England, died at the age of forty-seven on the 31st of March 1894. To the English public generally his name was little known, or was remembered only in connection with the theological controversy and ecclesiastical trial of which he had been the central figure in Scotland fifteen years before. But on the Continent of Europe and by Orientalists generally he was regarded as the foremost Semitic scholar of Britain, and by those who knew him as one of the most remarkable men of his time.