THE MAN 6 I 



of our thought and opinion, our most intimate con- 

 victions. 



With the exception of a hurried visit to London 

 in January, 1895, to join as spokesman in a deputation 

 to Lord Salisbury on a cause near his heart, that of 

 London University Reform, he never left Eastbourne 

 again. The last thing which he wrote was a criticism 

 of Mr. Balfour's "quaintly-entitled" (the happy 

 phrase is Mr. Leslie Stephen's) Foundations of Belief} 

 He had to deal with the same vagueness, elusiveness, 

 and want of insight into the position travestied which 

 is the feature of Mr. Gladstone's polemics, and which 

 make Mr. Balfour, trained as he is in the same at- 

 mosphere of obscuration of the truth and of dialec- 

 tical fencing, the intellectual representative of that 

 master of the art of mystification. In returning the 

 proofs of the first part of the article to the editor of 

 the Nineteenth Century, Huxley wrote : — 



My estimation of Balfour, as a thinker, sinks lower 

 and lower the farther I go. God help the people 

 who think his book an important contribution to 

 thought ! The Gigadibsians 2 who say so are past 



1 See infra, p. 204. 

 2 " You Gigadibs who, thirty years of age, 

 Believe you see two points in Hamlet's soul 

 Unseized by the Germans yet — which view you'll print." 

 — Bishop Blougrani's Apology — Browning. 

 (Quoted by Huxley, Nineteenth Century, 

 March. 1895, P- 5 2 %-) 



