time, the long adventure of his life. He would bring out his diaries and his memoranda, he would rearrange his notes, he would turn over again the yellow leaves of faded correspondences; seizing his pen, he would pour out his comments and reflections, and fill, with an extraordinary solicitude, page after page with elucidations, explanations, justifications, of the vanished incidents of a remote past. He would snip with scissors the pages of ancient journals, and with delicate ecclesiastical fingers drop unknown mysteries into the flames.
Sometimes he would turn to the four red folio scrapbooks with their collection of newspaper cuttings concerning himself over a period of thirty years. Then the pale cheeks would flush and the close-drawn lips grow more menacing even than before. "Stupid, mulish malice," he would note. "Pure lying—conscious, deliberate and designed." "Suggestive lying. Personal animosity is at the bottom of this."
And then he would suddenly begin to doubt. After all, where was he? What had he accomplished? Had any of it been worth while? Had he not been out of the world all his life? Out of the world! "Croker's 'Life and Letters,' and Hayward's 'Letters,'" he notes, "are so full of politics, literature, action, events, collision of mind with mind, and that with such a multitude of men in every state of life, that when I look back, it seems as if I had been simply useless." And again, "the complete isolation and exclusion from, the official life of England in which I have lived, makes me feel as if I had done nothing." He struggled to console himself with the reflexion that all this was only "the natural order." "If the natural order is moved by the supernatural order, then I may not have done nothing. Fifty years of witness for God and His Truth, I hope, has not been in vain." But the same thoughts recurred. "In reading Macaulay's life I had a haunting feeling that his had been a life of public utility and mine a vita umbratilis, a life in the shade."
