Wherever he was, life took on warmth and colour. Travel with him was a revelation, trodden and hackneyed though the road might be. In his vivid narrative the past lived again. Once more troops fought and manoeuvred as we passed through stretches of peaceful country which were the battlefields of France; Provence broke on us out of a mist of legendary lore, the enchantment deepening as we reached the little-traversed highlands near the coast--those Mountains of the Moors where in past days, _connu comme le loup blanc_ among the people, he had wandered on foot with his old Provençal servant before motors and light railways were. His care for the _Athenaeum_, inspired by the more than filial love he bore his grandfather, its earlier proprietor, led to continual reading and reviewing, and he would note with interest those few Parliamentarians who, keeping themselves fresh for their work of routine by some touch with the world of Literature, thereby, as he phrased it, "saved their souls." Of the events which cut his public life asunder it is sufficient to say here that those nearest him never believed in the truth of the charges brought, finding it almost inconceivable that they should have been made; while the letters and records in my hands bear testimony to that great outer circle of friends, known and unknown, who have expressed by spoken or by written word, in public and in private, their share in that absolute belief in him which was a cardinal fact of our work and life. The fortitude which gave to his country, after the crash of 1886, twenty- five years of tireless work, was inspired, for those who knew him best, by that consciousness of rectitude which holds a man above the clamour of tongues, and finds its reward in the fulfilment of his life's purpose. "To have an end, a purpose, an object pursued through all vicissitudes of fortune, through heart's anguish and shame, through humiliation and disaster and defeat--that is the great distinction, the supreme justification of a life." So wrote his wife in her preface for _The Shrine of Death_. The service of his country was the purpose of his life. Nor was that life justified alone by his unswerving pursuit of its great aim; it was justified also in its fulfilment, for his service was entirely fruitful-- he wrested success from failure, gain from loss. It has been said that in 1886 the nation lost one who would have been among its greatest administrators. Yet when we look back on all that was inspired and done by him, on the thousand avenues of usefulness into which his boundless energy was directed, there is no waste, only magnificent achievement. An independent critic both by pen and speech inside and outside the House of Commons, the consolidator of whatever Radical forces that chamber held, the representative of labour before the Labour Party was, he stood for all the forces of progress, and when his great figure passed into the silence his place was left unfilled.