BORN IN 1823, in the third year of George IV's reign, Goldwin Smith
lived to see the accession of George V in 1910. As a boy of nine he
remembered the excitement over the passage of the First Reform Act,
and as a ten-year-old the abolition of slavery. His memory went back
to the days when gentlemen wore knee-breeches and powdered hair, the
stocks and the curfew were both common, the night-watchman still
called the hours through the streets, and the morning fires were lit in
the bedrooms with the flint and steel of the era before matches. "I
opened my political eyes," he wrote Lady Dilke during the Boer War,
"on the great promises of moral progress, peace and all the political and
social beatitudes after the Reform Bill of 1832. I shall close them on
a great relapse." ¹ In after days he liked to recall that he had heard
Addington, Prime Minister of England in 1802, talk of Pitt, and remem-
bered Lord John Russell who had seen Napoleon at Elba. The Duke of
Wellington, who lived in the next parish, was long familiar to him as a
neighbour, riding about the countryside with a little cape over his
shoulders, and leaving immense calling cards for his friends. Goldwin
Smith lived to deplore the hazards created by the influx of horseless
carriages in the once peaceful streets of Toronto.

A born controversialist, he devoted most of his energy, throughout
his eighty-six years, to supporting causes in which he believed and
attacking abuses which he detested. He never lacked convictions, nor
suffered from doubts as to their rightness. Controversy, when conducted
temperately, he thought no evil. In John Morley's opinion no one--not
even Disraeli himself--was Goldwin Smith's equal in pungent con-
troversy. Complete freedom of discussion, "unchecked by threats either
of faggots or of frowns," seemed to him the only guarantee against the
possible bad consequences of human speculation and the only test of
truth. ² For more than half a century he was associated with most of the

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