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 freed from its pseudo-scientific apparatus of superannuated dogma.' Meanwhile, his classical training and his delight in the clearness and symmetry of the great French writers affected his taste. He has told us how his youthful enthusiasm took him at one time to Paris, to spend two months in seeing Rachel's performances on the French stage, and at another, to visit George Sand in her country retirement. And then came the experience of his official career which made him familiar with the educational systems of France and Germany, and with the chaotic set of institutions which represented an educational system in England. The master-thought, he says, by which his politics were governed was the thought of the 'bad civilisation of the English middle-class.' This was, in fact, the really serious aim to which his whole literary activity in later life converged. Condemned to live and work among the middle-class, while imbued with the ideas in which they were most defective, loving, as he did, the beauty and freshness of Oxford, the logical clearness and belief in ideas of France, the devotion to scientific truth and philosophical thoroughness in Germany, the