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 governing "the most miserable people on the face of the globe." With the loyalty to the temporal power characteristic of his race, he had rendered to Cæsar such service as Cæsar prizes. Judging by the standards of the people among whom he lived, his life, as he declared near the end of his tenure of it, had not been altogether vanity.

Yet in the end one recognizes regretfully in the man reserves of power of another sort, which his occasions never fully called forth, and potentialities of influence which his political choices made unavailing. He himself recognized them, when in his seventy-sixth year he abandoned the premiership for "Endymion." One likes to think of his return upon himself in his penultimate spring, when the days "were getting very long, and soft, and sweet," and he lay under the purple oaks of Hughenden, among his loved violets and primroses, lost in the fathomless revery of which he was capable—"one of those reveries when the incidents of our existence are mapped before us, when each is considered with relation to the rest, and assumes in our knowledge its destined and absolute position; when, as it were, we take stock of our experience, and ascertain how rich sorrow and pleasure, feeling and thought, intercourse with our fellow creatures and the fortuitous mysteries of life, have made us in wisdom." In those last calm days of illumination and quiet retrospection, what, one wonders, was his final judgment upon the ancient wisdom of his own race, when, secure in the sense of its spiritual supremacy and