CHAPTER XXX
The personality of Alfred H. Louis is identified with New York for me; he accompanied my remaining years there, guide, philosopher and friend. He took in hand that indiscriminate heterogeneous reading which the Free Library made possible. He proved an unfailing and inspiring counsellor. How, why or whence he came to be in America at all I never knew. One thing that stirred him into vehemence, when the past was mentioned, was the name of Gladstone. With flashing eyes and voice of thunder he condemned the Grand Old Man, both as to character and policy, in unmeasured terms. Gladstone, apparently, had done him a personal injury as well. "We cannot let that man come among us," was Gladstone's dictum, when Louis's name was being considered as a candidate for Parliament by the Party.
"He is too earnest." This fragment was all he ever told me, but there lay evidently much behind it. "Too earnest!" he repeated with contemptuous indignation.
Of his days at Cambridge he was more communicative, though, unfortunately, I kept no notes. The eloquence and earnestness of his speeches at the Union, when Sir William Harcourt was president, made, according to his own account, a great stir. Of Dr. (Bishop) Lightfoot, of Benson, afterwards Archbishop, he had intimate memories, coloured by warm praise. His book on "England's Foreign Policy" (Bentley, 1869) apparently angered Gladstone extremely, and Louis's political career was killed.
He was called to the bar. Of success, of important cases, he told me nothing. His early brilliance suffered, I gathered, a strange eclipse, and from things he hinted at, I surmised—I cannot state it definitely—that a period in some kind of maison de santé followed about this time. That he had been, then or later, in an asylum for the
