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the name ‘Association of Liberal Thinkers’). The best known people in it were Voysey (a small and narrow soul who got alarmed and withdrew), Leslie Stephen (who married Miss Thackeray), Stuart Glennie (who wrote the account of Buckle's Eastern travels), G. J. Holyoke (veteran radical), Mr. Blyden of Liberia (black and Mohammedan who has written on that subject in Fraser), Mrs. Rose (formerly of N. Y.), A. J. Eyres the philologist, and various Unitarian ministers.
I spoke several times and twice succeeded in allaying incipient contests by suggesting phrases that reconciled different opinions, so that one speaker proposed to send me as arbitrator to reconcile the strikes now going on at the North, and they all laughed and applauded.
In June
Colonel Higginson was in
Oxford on Commemoration Day and lunched with
the new D. C.L's and their wives and other notabilities, a grand affair in the beautiful hall of All Souls College.
I sat between Bryce and Mrs. Spottiswode, wife of one of the new D. C.L's, and opposite a young Lord Donoughmore, whose name delighted me because I thought of the statues of
Haythen goddesses most rare
Homer, Venus and Nebuchadnezzar
All standing naked in the open air.
The song says of them farther that they are “all second cousin to My Lord Donoughmore” and here was the real youth.
Here he met
Dr. Pattison, author of ‘Essays and Reviews,’ who
spoke warmly to me of Atlantic
