Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/183

. The contrast of political type would be sharp and salutary, and an important outpost of the city Tammany might thus be carried. Westminster, after discarding Mr. Mill, was hardly entitled to have it placed in her power to reject the greatest of his disciples.

As in the case of most speculative writers, the story of Mr. Morley's life is exceedingly simple,—almost necessarily an autour de ma chambre affair. His life is in his books, which have influenced the thoughts of many who have never read them. He was born at Blackburn in December, 1838, the son of a physician in good practice. The father set great store by learning, was somewhat eccentric, and a not wholly judicious parent. As might be expected in such circumstances, the future editor of "The Fortnightly" went the regular round of school, college, and bar. He was educated at Cheltenham College, whence he proceeded to Oxford, where he graduated in 1859. Subsequently he kept terms at Lincoln's Inn, and was duly "called" to the bar by that honorable society, but never practised.

It is not a little remarkable that all this time Mr. Morley showed no particular aptitude or even liking for study. He who has since dug so sedulously about the very roots of the tree of knowledge, among the primary conceptions of the human race, he who is now in the very vanguard of "free thought," was at college something of a mooning "Evangelical." Who in this mysterious world can foresee himself? What a contrast, for example, is here to the experience of his friend Mill, whose old pagan father, James, is credibly said to have imparted to him when an urchin the somewhat startling intelligence that there is no God, coupled with a prudent