accorded to him. Though the rank of a Cardinal-Archbishop is officially unknown in England, his name appeared in public documents—as a token, it must be supposed, of personal consideration—above the names of peers and bishops, and immediately below that of the Prince of Wales.
In his private life he was secluded. The ambiguities of his social position and his desire to maintain intact the peculiar eminence of his office combined to hold him aloof from the ordinary gatherings of society, though on the rare occasions of his appearance among fashionable and exalted persons he carried all before him. His favourite haunt was the Athenæum Club, where he sat scanning the newspapers, or conversing with the old friends of former days. He was a member, too, of that distinguished body, the Metaphysical Society, which met once a month during the palmy years of the Seventies to discuss, in strict privacy, the fundamental problems of the destiny of man. After a comfortable dinner at the Grosvenor Hotel, the Society, which included Professor Huxley and Professor Tyndall, Mr. John Morley and Sir James Stephen, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Tennyson, and Dean Church, would gather round to hear and discuss a paper read by one of the members upon such questions as "What is death?" "Is God unknowable?" or "The Nature of the Moral Principle." Sometimes, however, the speculations of the society ranged in other directions. "I think the paper that interested me most of all that were ever read at our meetings," says Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff, "was one on 'Wherein consists the special beauty of imperfection and decay?' in which were propounded the questions 'Are not ruins recognised and felt to be more beautiful than perfect structures? Why are they so? Ought they to be so?'" Unfortunately, however, the answers given to these questions by the Metaphysical Society have not been recorded for the instruction of mankind.
