Mr. Asquith belonged to the most famous of these cliques—the Balliol of Jowett, the saintly worldling. So, too, did Lords Curzon, Grey, and Milner; but whereas they brought to Oxford characters formed by other influences, Asquith brought little but a sound constitution and a white sheet of paper; and Balliol wrote upon it nearly the whole-man, 1 The Prime Minister of later years is the former Balliol scholar, looking larger and feeling smaller; the speeches in which Mr. Asquith knew so well how to express the mind of a nation in stately and sonorous phrase are the old Latin prose exercises retranslated into English and furnished with modern instances; the working of democratic institutions is the Oxford examination schools again with eccentric examiners; distortion and exaggeration of political sentiment are grown-up howlers more hateful than ever to the scholar, to whom exactness, balance, avoidance of excess are the master intellectual virtues. Mr, Asquith through life is always the prize scholar politics.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.