[Footnote 68:  “Mr. Carnegie had proved his originality, fullness of mind, and bold strength of character, as much or more in the distribution of wealth as he had shown skill and foresight in its acquisition.  We had become known to one another more than twenty years before through Matthew Arnold.  His extraordinary freshness of spirit easily carried Arnold, Herbert Spencer, myself, and afterwards many others, high over an occasional crudity or haste in judgment such as befalls the best of us in ardent hours.  People with a genius for picking up pins made as much as they liked of this:  it was wiser to do justice to his spacious feel for the great objects of the world—­for knowledge and its spread, invention, light, improvement of social relations, equal chances to the talents, the passion for peace.  These are glorious things; a touch of exaggeration in expression is easy to set right....  A man of high and wide and well-earned mark in his generation.” (John, Viscount Morley, in Recollections, vol.  II, pp. 110, 112.  New York, 1919.)]

[Illustration:  Photograph from Underwood & Underwood, N.Y.

VISCOUNT MORLEY OF BLACKBURN]

I told him the story of the pessimist whom nothing ever pleased, and the optimist whom nothing ever displeased, being congratulated by the angels upon their having obtained entrance to heaven.  The pessimist replied: 

“Yes, very good place, but somehow or other this halo don’t fit my head exactly.”

The optimist retorted by telling the story of a man being carried down to purgatory and the Devil laying his victim up against a bank while he got a drink at a spring—­temperature very high.  An old friend accosted him: 

“Well, Jim, how’s this?  No remedy possible; you’re a gone coon sure.”

The reply came:  “Hush, it might be worse.”

“How’s that, when you are being carried down to the bottomless pit?”

“Hush”—­pointing to his Satanic Majesty—­“he might take a notion to make me carry him.”

Morley, like myself, was very fond of music and reveled in the morning hour during which the organ was being played at Skibo.  He was attracted by the oratorios as also Arthur Balfour.  I remember they got tickets together for an oratorio at the Crystal Palace.  Both are sane but philosophic, and not very far apart as philosophers, I understand; but some recent productions of Balfour send him far afield speculatively—­a field which Morley never attempts.  He keeps his foot on the firm ground and only treads where the way is cleared.  No danger of his being “lost in the woods” while searching for the path.

Morley’s most astonishing announcement of recent days was in his address to the editors of the world, assembled in London.  He informed them in effect that a few lines from Burns had done more to form and maintain the present improved political and social conditions of the people than all the millions of editorials ever written.  This followed a remark that there were now and then a few written or spoken words which were in themselves events; they accomplished what they described.  Tom Paine’s “Rights of Man” was mentioned as such.