With the Evangelical party, represented to him by his Irish friend, Mr.Cleaver, he had sympathetic relations, and practical, though not doctrinal, agreement.

His temporary leaning towards Tractarianism was no more than personal admiration for Newman, and he took orders not because he was a High Churchman, but because he was a Fellow.

Yet it was in some respects a fortunate accident, which, by shutting him out from other professions, drove him into literature.

Fiction he soon learned to avoid, for his early experiments in it were failures, and in later years his least successful book, with all its eloquence, was The Two Chiefs of Dunboy.

As an historical writer he has few superiors, and his essays are among the most delightful in our tongue.