Maggie's Farm

Lord Acton was deeply involved in the greatest events of his times, often on the losing --but still today arguably 'noble cause' side --such as the establishment of the doctrine of papal infallibility, where he led the unsuccessful intellectual opposition of the English-speaking Catholic laity, and the American Civil War (see especially his postwar correspondence with Robert E. Lee on the topic of centralized state power and the inevitability of tyranny) where he led British sympathy toward the state's rights element of the southern rebellion.

A great compliment to his character is in the affection and respect of even such rarified sensibilities as that of the poet Matthew Arnold ("Gladstone influences all round him but Acton; it is Acton who influences Gladstone"), author of the magnicent Dover Beach --one of the vanishingly few English-language approaches to the themes of complexity of man and nature that it took Shakespeare entire plays to illuminate. If Acton is associated at all with the poem's final stanza (see below), that alone is near enough to make him one of the great Englishmen.

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Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Beach

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2005/jan/18/20050118-105242-1441r/

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(sorry, cannot hyperlink --apparently Herr Obersturmbahnfeuhrer Colonel-General Redletter Spammeister at this moment is awake and on patrol along the ramparts of Castle Vigilant Stoopid)