Lecky was not in England at the time of my visit and I can only claim to have had with him an epistolary acquaintance.  To some extent I have worked on the same themes with him, and preserve among my treasures certain letters in which he made me feel that he regarded my accomplishment as not unworthy.  Sir Charles Dilke and the Bishop of Oxford, William Stubbs, author of the great Constitutional History, I also never met, but I have letters from them which I keep with those of Lecky as things which my children will prize.  With Edward A. Freeman, however, I came into cordial relations, a character well worthy of a sketch.  He once came to America where with his fine English distinction behind him he met a good reception.  He deported himself after the fashion of many another great Englishman, somewhat clumsily.  At St. Louis he amusingly misapprehended conditions.  Remembering the origin of the city he took it for granted that the audience which greeted him was for the most part of French descent, whereas probably not a dozen persons present had a trace of French blood in their veins.  Because backwoodsmen a few generations before had possessed that region he took it for granted that we were backwoodsmen still.  He addressed us under these misconceptions, the result being a “talking down” to a company of supposedly Latin extraction and quite illiterate.  The fact was that the crowd, Anglo-Saxon with a strong infusion of German, was made up of people of high intelligence, the best whom the city could furnish, a city at the time noted for its interest in philosophical pursuits and the home of a highly educated class.  Freeman’s well-meant remarks would have seemed elementary to an audience of school-children.  The address was quite inadequate and the unfortunate visitor had a rather cool reception.  Freeman was only one of many in all this.  The astronomer R.A.  Proctor came to similar grief for a similar gaucherie, and even so famous a man as Lord Kelvin suffered in like manner.  I have been told that at Yale University when addressing a college audience zealous for their own institution, he stumbled badly on the threshold by enlarging on the great privilege he was enjoying in speaking to the students of Cornell, proceeding blandly under the conviction that he was at Ithaca instead of under the elms of New Haven.  But this clumsiness in Freeman and in others was only a surface blemish.  He was a great writer treating with profound learning the story of Greece and Rome and South-western Europe in general, and illuminating as probably no other man has done the distant Saxon and early Norman dimnesses that lie in the background of our own past.  I held him in thorough respect and when, following an article I had prepared in London for the Pall Mall Gazette, I received a polite note from him inviting me to come to see him at Somerleaze near Wells, I was much rejoiced.  I went thither, passing through the beautiful green heart of England.