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                       CRITICAL
                     MISCELLANIES

                          BY

                      JOHN MORLEY


                       VOL. III.
               Essay 7: W.R. Greg: A Sketch


                        London
              MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

            NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

                         1904

       *       *       *       *       *




W. R. GREG: A SKETCH.


Characteristics                                                    213

Born at Manchester in 1809                                         215

Mathew Henry Greg                                                  217

Goes to the Edinburgh University in the winter of 1826-1827        220

Sir William Hamilton                                               221

Mother died, 1828                                                  224

The Apprentice House                                               225

De Tocqueville                                                     229

Goes abroad                                                        231

_Genius of the Nineteenth Century_                                 232

Starts in business on his own account at Bury, 1833                235

Marries the daughter of Dr. Henry in 1835                          236

Moves to the Lakes                                                 238

Sir George Cornewall Lewis                                         244

Offered a place on the Board of Customs, 1856                      244

Letter to James Spedding, May 24, 1856                             245

Marries again in 1874 the daughter of Mr. James Wilson             246

Death of his brother-in-law, Walter Bagehot (1877)                 247

Letter to Lady Derby                                               247

Died November 1881                                                 248

_Enigmas of Life_, 1875                                            252

Letter to Lord Grey, May 28, 1874                                  255

Conclusion                                                         256

       *       *       *       *       *




W. R. GREG: A SKETCH.


It is perhaps a little hard to undertake to write about the personality
of a thinker whose ideas one does not share, and whose reading of the
events and tendencies of our time was in most respects directly opposite
to one's own. But literature is neutral ground. Character is more than
opinion. Here we may forget the loud cries and sounding strokes, the
watchwords and the tactics of the tented field, and fraternise with the
adversary of the eve and the morrow in friendly curiosity and liberal
recognition. It fell to the present writer at one time to have one or
two bouts of public controversy with Mr. Greg. In these dialectics Mr.
Greg was never vehement and never pressed, but he was inclined to
be--or, at least, was felt by an opponent to be--dry, mordant, and
almost harsh. These disagreeable prepossessions were instantly
dissipated, as so often happens, by personal acquaintance. He had not
only the courtesy of the good type of the man of the world, but an air
of moral suavity, when one came near enough to him, that was infinitely
attractive and engaging. He was urbane, essentially modest, and readily
interested in ideas and subjects other than his own. There was in his
manner and address something of what the French call _liant_. When the
chances of residence made me his neighbour, an evening in his
drawing-room, or half an hour's talk in casual meetings in afternoon
walks on Wimbledon Common, was always a particularly agreeable incident.
Some men and women have the quality of atmosphere. The egotism of the
natural man is surrounded by an elastic medium. Mr. Greg was one of
these personalities with an atmosphere elastic, stimulating, elevating,
and yet composing. We do wrong to narrow our interests to those only of
our contemporaries who figure with great lustre and _eclat_ in the
world. Some of the quiet characters away from the centre of great
affairs are as well worth our attention as those who in high-heeled
cothurnus stalk across the foreground.

Mr. Greg, it is not necessary to say, has a serious reputation in the
literature of our time. In politics he was one of the best literary
representatives of the fastidious or pedantocratic school of government.
In economics he spoke the last word, and fell, sword in hand, in the
last trench, of the party of capitalist supremacy and industrial
tutelage. In the group of profound speculative questions that have come
up for popular discussion since the great yawning rents and fissures
have been made in the hypotheses of theology by the hypotheses of
science, he set a deep mark on many minds. 'We are in the sick foggy
dawn of a new era,' says one distinguished writer of our day, 'and no
one saw more clearly than W. R. Greg what the day that would follow was
likely to be.' To this I must humbly venture to demur; for there is no
true vision of the fortunes of human society without Hope, and without
Faith in the beneficent powers and processes of the Unseen Time. That
and no other is the mood in which our sight is most likely to pierce the
obscuring mists from which the new era begins to emerge. When we have
said so much as this, it remains as true as before that Mr. Greg's
faculty of disinterested speculation, his feeling for the problems of
life, and his distinction of character, all make it worth while to put
something about him on record, and to attempt to describe him as he was,
apart from the opaque influences of passing controversy and of
discussions that are rapidly losing their point.

Mr. Greg was born at Manchester in 1809. The family stock was Irish by
residence and settlement, though Scotch in origin. The family name was
half jocosely and half seriously believed to be the middle syllable of
the famous clan of Macgregor. William Rathbone Greg's grandfather was a
man of good position in the neighbourhood of Belfast, who sent two of
his sons to push their fortunes in England. The younger of the two was
adopted by an uncle, who carried on the business of a merchant at
Manchester. He had no children of his own. The boy was sent to Harrow,
where Dr. Samuel Parr was then an assistant master. When the post of
head master became vacant, Parr, though only five-and-twenty, entered
into a very vehement contest for the prize. He failed, and in a fit of
spleen set up an establishment of his own at Stanmore. Many persons, as
De Quincey tells us, of station and influence both lent him money and
gave him a sort of countenance equally useful to his interests by
placing their sons under his care. Among those who accompanied him from
Harrow was Samuel Greg. The lad was meant by his uncle to be a
clergyman, but this project he stoutly resisted. Instead of reading for
orders he travelled abroad, acquired foreign languages, and found out
something about the commercial affairs of the continent of Europe. His
uncle died in 1783, and the nephew took up the business. It was the date
of the American Peace. Samuel Greg was carried forward on the