"Twenty years ago, late at night, in his library at Cannes, he expounded to me his view of how such a history of Liberty might be written, and in what wise it might be made the central thread of all history. He spoke for six or seven minutes only; but he spoke like a man inspired, seeming as if, from some mountain summit high in air, he saw beneath him the far-winding path of human progress from dim Cimmerian shores of prehistoric shadow into the fuller yet broken and fitful light of the modern time. The eloquence was splendid, but greater than the eloquence was the penetrating vision which discerned through all events and in all ages the play of those moral forces, now creating, now destroying, always transmuting, which had moulded and remoulded institutions, and had given to the human spirit its ceaselessly-changing forms of energy. It was as if the whole landscape of history had been suddenly lit up by a burst of sunlight. I have never heard from any other lips any discourse like this, nor from his did I ever hear the like again."
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Historians from EnglandMembers of the Parliament of the United KingdomBritish peersUniversity of Oxford facultyNon-fiction authors from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
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Sources
James Bryce, Studies in Contemporary Biography (1903), pp. 396–97
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton%2C_1st_Baron_Acton
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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1st Baron Acton (10 January 1834 – 19 June 1902) was an English Catholic historian, commonly known as Lord Acton.
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