ABSTRACT
George Saintsbury was from his University days, as the late Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton, recorded in his memoirs, a devout High Churchman, and so he remained to the end. Saintsbury's talk flowed from subject to subject—literature to politics, politics to cigars, and he and the stranger agreed as to the inability of most people to distinguish a good from a less good cigar. The meeting of the old friends quickened their minds, and if Lang was witty and capricious and eloquent Saintsbury quite held up his end. He came back the following year to receive the degree of LL.D., and it was then that he proposed to write a volume on the First Half of the Seventeenth Century in the series which he had planned to take the place of Hallam's Literature of Europe.
