Page:History of Freedom.djvu/39

 INTRODUCTION

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single essay without observing this marked characteristic. He has been called a" Meredith turned historian," and that there is truth in this judgment, anyone who sees at once the difficulty and the suggestiveness of his reviews can bear \vitness. He could hardly write the briefest note without stamping his personality upon it and exhibit- ing the marks of a very complex culture. But the main characteristic of his style is that it represents the ideals of a man to whom every \vord ,vas sacred. I ts analogies are rather in sculpture than painting. Each paragraph, almost every sentence is a perfectly chiselled whole, im- pressive by no brilliance or outside polish, so much as by the inward intensity of which it is the symbol. Thus his writing is never fluent or easy, but it has a moral dignity rare and unfashionable. Acton, indeed, was by no means without a gift of rhetoric, and in the" Lecture on Mexico," here republished, there is ample evidence of a power of handling words which should impress a popular audience. It is in gravity of judgment and in the light he can draw from small details that his power is most plainly shown. On the other hand, he had a little of the scholar's love of clinging to the bank, and, as the notes to his " Inaugural JJ show, he seems at thnes too much disposed to use the crutches of quotation to prop up positions which need no such support. It was of course the same habit-the desire not to speak before he had read everything that was relevant, whether in print or manuscript-that hindered so severely his output. His projected History of Liberty was, from the first, impossible of achievement. It would have required the intellects of Napoleon and Julius Cæsar combined, and the lifetime of the patriarchs, to have executed that project as Acton appears to have planned it. A History oj Liberty, beginning with the ancient world and carried do\\.n to our own day, to be based entirely upon original