Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/18

 Greece and Rome. He availed himself of every advantage the university could bestow; and, unlike most other scholars who subsequently become politicians and men of the world, he has never ceased to add to the immense store of his academic acquirements. He has published Latin sacred verses not appreciably inferior in grace to those of Buchanan and Milton; and as a Homeric student his "Studies of Homer and the Homeric Age" entitle him to no mean place among scholarly critics.

Unfortunately, however, for him, the sciences of observation—chemistry, botany, geology, natural history, and the like—were in his day almost wholly neglected at Oxford; and in place thereof an incredible mind-distorting theology was in vogue, from the evil consequences of which the Premier has not yet been able altogether to emancipate himself. It has laid him open to many false charges, and to some true ones. It made him for years a defender of the utterly indefensible Irish Establishment; and, when at last "the slow and resistless force of conviction" brought him to a better frame of mind, the change was attributed by thousands who ought to have known better to a concealed conversion to Romanism. In vain has he striven in pamphlet and periodical to rebut the allegation, and to make intelligible to the English people his theological stand-point. Newman, Manning, Capel,—the most redoubtable champions of Roman Catholicism in England,—he has met foot to foot and hand to hand on their own ground, and foiled with their own weapons. He has proved, with amazing learning and ingenuity, worthy of the schoolmen, that the Papacy has at last succeeded in "repudiating both science and history," and that his Holiness himself is next door to Antichrist.