‘I strove my flowing hair to bind With many a festal chaplet twin’d; The mirror’s rays of glittering hue Betrayed me to my virgin view, Hast’ning to rest—Then peal’d on high O’er Ilion’s walls the victor’s cry; Troy heard the shout that sounded then, “Dash’d down the turrets of the foe, Shall sons of Greece again, again To home, and rest, and glory go.”’ In 1892 appeared ‘An Academic Sketch’ by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., being the Romanes Lecture delivered in the Sheldon Theatre, Oxford. Whilst it did not detract from, it scarcely added to, Mr. Gladstone’s reputation. It was, in fact, a speech somewhat of the after-dinner type. All the world knew that the Oxford of the past was a theme on which he could pleasantly dilate. In 1894 there appeared from Mr. Gladstone’s pen an article in the _Nineteenth Century_ on the ‘Atonement,’ occasioned by the study of Mrs. Besant’s ‘Autobiography.’ He says of her: ‘Mrs. Besant passes from her earliest to her latest stage of thought as lightly as a swallow skims the surface of the lawn, and with just as little effort to ascertain what lies beneath it. Her several schemes of belief or non-belief appear to have been entertained one after another with the same undoubting confidence, until the junctures successively arrived for their not regretful, but rather contemptuous, rejection. They are nowhere based upon reasoning, but on the authority of Mrs. Besant.’ The special proposition which Mr. Gladstone examines is one of four, the difficulties of which led Mrs. Besant to reject Christianity—the nature of the atonement of Christ. In dealing with this topic, Mr. Gladstone, after condemning the crude utterances of some theologians and preachers, by whom the New Testament doctrine has been travestied and misconceived, lays down what he conceives to be the true teaching. ‘What is here enacted in the kingdom of grace only repeats a phenomenon with which we are perfectly familiar in the natural and social order of the world, where the good, at the expense of pain endured by them, procure benefits for the unworthy.’