Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/214



RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE. is our sorrowful duty to record the death of the most illustrious of our fellow-countrymen. Not merely those who, like the present writer, have been proud to range themselves under his political banner to the end, but his most determined opponents, and indeed the whole civilised world, mourn his departure. In his many-sided sympathies and in the varied range of his knowledge, folklore had a place. He was an original member of the Society, and, down at all events to a short time since, a reader of its publications. If his mythological theories have not commended themselves to scientific students, his works on Homer and the problems of the Homeric poems, in which those theories were mainly set forth, have been for very many a stimulus to thought and inquiry. It would be impertinent in us to do more here than express our sense of the loss we have sustained, and humbly join in the tribute of admiration and regret which has been poured out by all men at his tomb. After a long and painful illness, borne with that lion-heart which ever characcerised him, he "fared forth" (to use an expressive Old-English phrase) in the dawn of the 19th May, at the age of eighty-eight. While we mourn with his nearest and dearest for one who cannot be replaced, as Englishmen — as Britons — we rejoice in the imperishable fame of the orator, statesman, scholar, dialectician, and critic.