ABSTRACT
The world can see further into Antony Ashley Cooper mind than into the minds of most of those who serve it, for throughout his life he kept a diary that contained a record of the moods, self-questionings and spiritual anxieties that made a storm in his soul beneath the outward peace of his religious faith. Ashley, with his special temptation to morbid brooding, was specially in need of influences that release and refresh a mind that is tense and strained. As pity and care drew deeper lines on Ashley’s noble countenance, his capacity for politics languished. The amount of waste in all things is prodigious, in some instances careless; in some inevitable. Why, the very crumbs and scrapings of finished dishes in a thousand well-fed families would, week by week, sustain a hundred persons”.
