they enjoy what is to ordinary people the greatest luxury in the world, namely, the being sympathetically commandeered, and duly valued.  Inspiration and leadership are not common gifts, and there are abundance of capable people who cannot strike out a novel line of their own, but can do excellent work if they can be inspired and led.  I was once for a short time brought into close contact with a man of this kind; it was impossible to put down on paper or to explain to those who did not know him what his claim to greatness was.  I remember being asked by an incredulous outsider where his greatness lay, and I could not name a single conspicuous quality that my hero possessed.  But he dominated his circle for all that, and many of them were men of far greater intellectual force than himself.  He had his own way; if he asked one to do a particular thing, one felt proud to be entrusted with it, and amply rewarded by a word of approval.  It was possible to take a different view from the view which he took of a matter or a situation, but it was impossible to express one’s dissent in his presence.  A few halting, fumbling words of his were more weighty than many a facile and voluble oration.  Personally I often mistrusted his judgment, but I followed him with an eager delight.  With such men as these, posterity is often at a loss to know why they impressed their contemporaries, or why they continue to be spoken of with reverence and enthusiasm.  The secret is that it is a kind of moral and magnetic force, and the lamentable part of it is that such men, if they are not enlightened and wise, may do more harm than good, because they tend to stereotype what ought to be changed and renewed.

That is one way of greatness; a sort of big, blunt force that overwhelms and uplifts, like a great sea-roller, yielding at a hundred small points, yet crowding onwards in soft volume and ponderous weight.

Two interesting examples of this impressive and indescribable greatness seem to have been Arthur Hallam and the late Mr. W. E. Henley.  In the case of Arthur Hallam, the eulogies which his friends pronounced upon him seem couched in terms of an intemperate extravagance.  The fact that the most splendid panegyrics upon him were uttered by men of high genius is not in itself more conclusive than if such panegyrics had been conceived by men of lesser quality, because the greater that a man is the more readily does he perceive and more magniloquently acknowledge greatness.  Apart from In Memoriam, Tennyson’s recorded utterances about Arthur Hallam are expressed in terms of almost hyperbolical laudation.  I once was fortunate enough to have the opportunity of asking Mr. Gladstone about Arthur Hallam.  Mr. Gladstone had been his close friend at Eton and his constant companion.  His eye flashed, his voice gathered volume, and with a fine gesture of his hand he said that he could only deliberately affirm that physically, intellectually, and morally, Arthur Hallam approached more nearly to an ideal of