Lord Morley, in his _Recollections_, quotes Disraeli’s comment on one of the first Parliamentary speeches of John Stuart Mill. Mill had not gone far when Disraeli murmured to a neighbour, “Ah, the Finishing Governess.” Perhaps something of the character inferred was transmitted from Mill to his disciple. John Morley had the frostiest of spinsterhood’s views on the importance of being merely immaculate; he could bear the reproach of barrenness, but shuddered at that of impropriety. Like many maiden aunts, having no political children of his own to think about, he took an interest in other people’s; we have seen how assiduously he looked after the little Benjamin of Mr. Gladstone’s extreme age. But a maiden aunt is not like a mother, who can never escape from the children. The maiden aunt can always disappear when she likes to Harrogate or Cheltenham, there to flirt decorously with other interests. It was thus with John Morley. While he was always ready to lose his seat rather than depart by one jot or tittle from his principles, he felt no more call to stand by his party than the maiden aunt does to stand by the nursery when it has mumps. Liberalism suffered badly from mumps between 1896 and 1903—years during which John Morley was on the whole quite pleasantly engaged. He said what his position demanded during the South African War, but in such sort that his old and dear friend Chamberlain complimented him both on his moderation and his courage in championing an unpopular cause. Meanwhile “C.-B.,” with his “methods of barbarism,” was hardly safe from mob attack. Yet nobody thinks of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as more than a quite ordinary politician of the more honest kind, and everybody thinks of Lord Morley as a stoic hero. For the rest, immersion in the _Life of Gladstone_ enabled him to escape without reproach from much active participation in the feuds which rent his party. That great work was finished in 1903, just at the time Liberalism was beginning to revive and reintegrate. No other member of the party had passed through the bad time with less personal discomfort. But the penalty—if penalty it were—had to be paid. In 1896 John Morley was distinctly _Papabile_. In 1903 nobody could conceive him as Pope.