xviii OBITUARY NOTICES OF MEMBERS DECEASED. 



December 19, 1896, Lord Acton, an English Catholic scholar, who 

 had already expressed in the reviews a high opinion of Mr. Lea's 

 work, wrote to him describing the project of the " Cambridge Modern 

 History," which has now become so well known, and asking him to 

 write a chapter in the first volume to be called " The Eve of the 

 Reformation." In his letter Lord Acton uses the following expres- 

 sions : " This is the important and most critical and cardinal chap- 

 ter, which I am anxious to be allowed to place in your hands. . . . 

 It is clear that you are the one indicated and predestined writer, 

 there is no one else. ... I know of none whom I could go to if you 

 refuse." Mr. Lea replied in letters dated January 7 and March 22, 

 1-897, giving a somewhat reluctant consent, and pointing out that such 

 an article must contain many of the same statements that he had 

 already made in his published works. In reply Lord Acton wrote, 

 April 4, saying : " I sincerely thank you for the honor you do me in 

 giving the aid of your hand and the sanction of your name to our 

 international undertaking. . . . Your last work contains almost all 

 I am asking for, ten times told and full measure running over." 

 After some other intervening letters, the correspondence was re- 

 sumed in March and April, 1898, when Mr. Lea sent the manuscript 

 of the chapter, which was acknowledged by Lord Acton with renewed 

 thanks, and eventually printed exactly as written. Eight years later, 

 after Lord Acton's death, during a controversy that arose concern- 

 ing his Catholic orthodoxy, a correspondent in the Tablet, a London 

 Catholic journal, denied that Lord Acton had asked Mr. Lea to 

 write this famous chapter. In answer to this Mr. Lea prepared a 

 communication to the same paper giving an outline of the corre- 

 spondence which I have just described. Before sending this letter, 

 however, he saw an article in the London Times of October 30, 1906, 

 by the present Lord Acton, upholding his father's orthodoxy. In a 

 spirit of kindliness, and fearing to make this filial task more difiicult, 

 Mr. Lea decided not to send the correction he had prepared, laid 

 it away among his papers, and the facts are now made public for 

 the first time. 



Even his severest Catholic critics have restricted their condemna- 

 tion to a few parts of his work. There is not one of them that fails 

 to bow to the extent, the depth and the minuteness of his knowl- 



