Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography

One look back--as we hurry o'er the plain, Man's years speeding us along-- One look back! From the hollow past again, Youth, come flooding into song! Tell how once, in the breat...

At this point of the narrative it is necessary to make a passing allusion to Doctors, who, far more than Premiers or Priests or any other class of men, have determined the cours...

All that we saw and heard in Chapel confirmed what we were told. We saw the bowed form, the clasped hands, the rapt gaze, as of a man who in worship was really _solus cum Solo_,...

It may seem odd that one should remember so much about sermons preached so long ago, but Bishop Welldon's testimony illustrates the point. "When I came to Harrow, I was greatly...

The 13th of October was my first Sunday in Oxford, and my friend Charles Gore took me to the Choral Eucharist at Cowley St. John, and afterwards to luncheon with the Fathers. So...

My Oxford life was cut sharply into two halves by a very definite dividing-line; the first half was cheerful and irresponsible enough. A large part of the cheerfulness was conne...

Not long ago I was addressing a company of Oxford undergraduates, all keenly alive to the interests and controversies of the present hour, all devotedly loyal to the tradition o...

When I was penning, in the last chapter, my perfectly sincere praises of the country, an incongruous reminiscence suddenly froze the genial current of my soul. Something, I know...

My fondness for the Law Courts might suggest that I was inclined to be a lawyer. Not so. Only two professions ever attracted me in the slightest degree,--Holy Orders and Parliam...

Dinner and luncheon and supper must, I suppose, be reckoned among the permanent facts of life; but there is, or was, one meal of which I have witnessed the unwept disappearance....

In the autumn of 1875 an insurrection had broken out in Bulgaria, and the Turkish Government despatched a large force to repress it. This was done, and repression was followed b...

"In old days it was the habit to think and say that the House of Commons was an essentially 'queer place,' which no one could understand until he was a Member of it. It may, per...

The Session as a whole was extremely dull. The Irish Land Bill was so complicated that, according to common report, only three persons in the House understood it, and they were...

"It's really ludicrous--the P. M. G. professing a clearly suprarational faith in an elderly Engineer, saying that he will cook the goose if no one interferes with him ... as if...

On the 1st of March, 1894, Gladstone made his last speech in the House of Commons. In that speech he bequeathed to his party the legacy of a nobly-worded protest against the irr...

The mention of Lord Derby reminds me of the much-criticized body to which he belonged. When I entered Parliament, the Chief Clerk of the House of Commons was Sir Thomas Erskine...

It did not take me long to find that the society in which I habitually lived, and which I have described in a former chapter, was profoundly ignorant. A most amusing law-suit be...

"Here you are being educated either for life or for fashion. Which is it? What is your ambition? Is it to continue, with fewer restrictions, the amusements which have engrossed...

The Council had got itself duly divided into Committees, and it was noticeable that there was an enormous rush of Councillors anxious to serve on the Housing Committee. The "Bit...

All Saints, Margaret Street, St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, and St. Barnabas, Pimlico, showed a type of worship refined, artistic, and rather prim. St. Alban's, Holborn, "the Mother...