Sidney Low

"In the days of my early acquaintance with Henley, some fourteen or fifteen years ago, I could never look at him without wondering why none of his artist friends had taken him for a model of Pan. They say he was like Johnson, and like Heine; and he had something of both. But to me he was the startling image of Pan come on earth and clothed—the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river, with halting foot and flaming shaggy hair, and arms and shoulders huge and threatening, like those of some Faun or Satyr of the ancient woods, and the brow and eyes of the Olympians. Wellnigh captive to his chair, with the crutch never far from his elbow, dragging himself when he moved, with slow effort, he yet seemed instinct with the life of the germinating elemental earth, when gods and men were vital with the force that throbbed in beast and flower and wandering breeze. The large heart, and the large frame, the broad tolerant smile, the inexhaustible interest in nature and mankind, the brave, unquenchable cheerfulness under afflictions and adversities, the frank appreciation and apology for the animal side of things, all helped to maintain the impression of a kind of Pagan strength and simplicity."

"When men live in small communities, ... they cannot avoid personal participation in some public functions. So it was in the older rural England, before the organic social changes of the last century. Where a family might go without its winter firing, if the Lord of the Manor prohibited the cutting of turf and the collection of wood, every tenant would be a self-appointed member of a Commons Preservation Society. Much satire has been wasted over the Parish Pump; but one can understand the interest that humble installation must have possessed for the little group of households, which had to draw their own water from it daily in their own buckets. There were civic duties to discharge as well as civic rights to vindicate."

"It is impossible to maintain that these attributes [caution and progress] have been constant in the two great English parties. The Conservatives or Tories have often been progressive; the Liberals or Whigs stationary or retrogressive. Macaulay, in his famous reply to Lord Mahon, maintained that the Whigs had always kept in advance of the Tories, even though the whole nation might have moved onwards, just as the forelegs of the stag are always leading.But in fact both parties have passed and repassed one another, and have frequently exchanged places and influence; each by turn has had its phases of protection and free trade, imperialism and insularity, democracy and oligarchy, socialism and individualism. During the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, and down to the accession to power of William Pitt, the Tories, with some justice, boasted that they were the representatives of popular rights and national interests as against the aristocratic Whig cliques; and until the outbreak of the great war with France, it was the Whigs who were usually the party of foreign adventure and expansion, while the Tories had rather a stronger leaning towards peace and retrenchment and economic progress. Political reform has never been a Liberal monopoly; and social reform has found its champions at least as often in the Conservative ranks as in those of their rivals. On the other hand, the Conservatives, until the Beaconsfield Ministry of 1874, were not specially identified with the maintenance of the Empire; and in the 'fifties and sixties, under Lord Derby and Disraeli himself, they were less ardent vindicators of English pretensions abroad than the dominant section of the Liberals under Palmerston.Thus it is a difficult, perhaps even an impossible, task to draw a dividing line from age to age between the two parties, on the basis of doctrine. But the fact is that Englishmen, in their public as in their private life, have no great regard for abstract generalisations. They are careless about measures and much more particular about men. Fidelity to persons, rather than to principles, is the spirit of our party life."