This book contains the lectures on which Acton’s reputation chiefly rests, delivered from his chair at Cambridge during the last years of his life. “Concentrated and yet elliptical in style, pregnant with long thought, purged of his earlier ferocity, and yet charged with moral feeling expressed sometimes in phrases of lapidary scorn, they show us Acton in his last stage, when the struggles with Rome are quiescent, the History of Liberty is abandoned, the universal history is in contemplation.”