No More Learning

His Protests of the Lords
(1875) is an interesting, as well as a valuable, piece of work.
The social history and life of the English peasantry, in his own
East Anglia, was the subject of a study by Augustus Jessopp,
which, under the name Arcady for better for worse (1887),
attracted wide attention; he was an ecclesiastical historian of
learning and breadth of view, and lived a long and unselfish
scholar's life.
The subject of English village communities was specially studied
by Frederic Seebohm, who died in 1912. So far back as 1867, he


## p. 79 (#109) #############################################

11]
Frederic William Maitland
79
had first become known to students of English history by an
attractive volume entitled The Oxford Reformers of 1498—Colet,
Erasmus and More—which renders full justice to Colet's share in
the renascence movement on the basis of the letters of his whole-
hearted friend and admirer Erasmus. But the researches which,
at a later date, he carried on during his long residence in Hert-
fordshire, and of which the first published result was his well-
known book The English Village Community (1882), had re-
ference to problems of early land-tenure and of the social system
evolved from it which largely occupied the minds of medievalists
in our own and other countries, and which represent a reaction
from the theory of the Germanic origin of the village com-
munity to that of its primary indebtedness to Roman influence.
Seebohm's investigations were not confined to English, but
afterwards extended, in particular, to Welsh, conditions of life.
In Frederic William Maitland, who, after a brilliant, but all too
short, career as teacher of English law and writer on English legal
history, was taken away when at the height of his intellectual
powers, his contemporaries, as of one accord, had come to recognise
a foremost authority on the studies with which he had identified
himself. Rarely has a more modest self-estimate (he judged
himself, for instance, incapable of narrative history) coexisted
with more fascinating mental and personal qualities, more pene-
trating insight into theory, a rarer art of illustrating it by the use
of practical example and a quicker and pleasanter wit. His power
of epigram was considerable, and imparts a delightful spontaneous
sparkle to his writings on subjects in the treatment of which few
readers expect diversion to be blended with instruction! He
had inherited from his father, Samuel Roffey Maitland, a vivid
interest in English history and a thorough independence of
judgment? . After giving himself up at Cambridge to philosophical
reading, he had, during eight years, acquired a full experience of
the practice of the law, but preferred its historical side, and
further equipped himself for the work of his life by an assiduous
study of continental legal history. Savigny's influence was,
1 See, for some illustrations, Smith, A. L. , Frederic William Maitland (1908).
2 S. R. Maitland, who during part of his life was librarian at Lambeth, in an early
work on the Albigenses and Waldenses (1832), treated the pretensions of Joseph
Milner's Church History with much contempt, and, in later publications, attacked
both him and Foxe, the author of The Book of Martyrs. The elder Maitland's
numerous contributions to The British Magazine, of which he became editor, gave
much offence to the evangelical party; but they have gained high praise both by their
learning and by their force of style. See bibliography.


## p. 80 (#110) #############################################

80
[CH.
Historians
necessarily, very strong upon him, and he began a translation of the
great Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter which he never
completed. As the purpose of his labours gradually shaped itself
in his mind, and he resolved upon accomplishing for the history
of English, what Savigny had achieved for that of Roman, law,
he perceived the necessity of associated effort, if this end was to
be reached. He thus became the founder, and, afterwards, the
director, of the Selden society, to whose publications he con-
tributed nearly half of those issued in his lifetime. The history
of common law had never been taken in hand after Bracton and
Blackstone ; and the very language of the law of the later middle
ages had been left without dictionary or grammar?
Maitland did not claim to be a palaeographer ; but he taught
himself by teaching others, and came to be esteemed an expert on
MSS and in the criticism of texts. In his own first important
production, Bracton's Notebook (1887), he claimed for a British
Museum MS the character of a collection of materials for the
famous treatise De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae. By such
researches as these, many of which were published by the Selden
society, and the whole range of which his paper entitled The
Materials for English Legal History: showed him to have under
his ken, he prepared himself for the publication, in conjunction with
his friend Sir Frederick Pollock, of their History of the English
Law before the Time of Edward I (1895). This book, which at
once took rank as the standard authority on its subject, deals
chiefly with the latter part of the twelfth, and with the thirteenth,
centuries—'a luminous age throwing light on both past and
future. ' But Maitland's attention was by no means absorbed by
this period of the laws and institutions of England. His essays
entitled Domesday Book and Beyond belong to a relatively late
date in his career (1897), and touch on debatable ground. In his
Selden volume Bracton and Azo (1895), he had discussed the
relations between English law and the corpus juris to which,
indirectly if not directly, the English judge had been held to be
deeply indebted. The general subject of these relations possessed
the greatest interest for him, and connected itself with the special
question of English canon law, which he discussed in six essays
entitled Roman Canon Law in the Church of England. Much
1 See Maitland's chapter (xx) in vol. 1 of the present work, 'The Anglo-French Law
Language. '
? See his introduction to the edition of The Mirror of Justice by his friend
Whittaker, W. J. (Selden society's publications, vol. v).
3 1, 11, in The Political Science Quarterly (New York, 1889).


## p. 81 (#111) #############################################

11]
Maitland. Mary Bateson
81
a
controversy followed, and Maitland briefly reverted to the subject
in the course of a very judicious contribution to The Cambridge
Modern History' entitled "The Anglican Settlement and the
Scottish Reformation. His Rede lecture (1901) entitled English
'
Law and the Renaissance, with its humorous half-outlook on
the future, will not easily be forgotten.
His reputation as a teacher had long been established ; so
far back as 1887, he had delivered a course of lectures entitled
The Constitutional History of England, which extends over five
periods from the death of Edward I to the present day, and,
though analytical in form, combines, with a clear statement of
principles, an abundance of illustration, while showing a wonderful
alertness and ability of, as it were, entering into the minds of his
hearers. The course was not published till 1908, and furnishes the
fittest memorial of Maitland's capacity as a lecturer. The Oxford
Ford Lectures (1898) dealt with the growth and definition of the
idea of a corporation, an abstraction admitting of being rendered
impressive by means of concrete illustrations, such as always had
a peculiar fascination for him. In his last years, in the face of
obstacles such as few scholars have braced themselves to resist
and overcome, Maitland continued to read and write, even in his
distant winter home. He proved his literary skill in a charming
life of Leslie Stephen ; but, most of his time was, when possible,
given to The Year Books of Edward II (1307-10)a series
begun late by him but carried through three successive volumes.
These monuments take the student back straight into the middle
ages, whose life they conjure up out of the dust of the law-
courts. Maitland's introduction to the first volume could only
have been written by one who had acquired a complete intimacy
with his material.
With Maitland's work that of Mary Bateson is closely con-
nected, although it was to Creighton that she owed the impulse
to historical research. As a medievalist, she more especially
occupied herself with monastic and municipal history; her earliest
writings, including an article entitled The Origin and Early
History of Double Monasteries, belonged to the former field of
study; and she edited Records of the Borough of Leicester, The
Charters of the Borough of Cambridge (with Maitland, 1901) and
two volumes entitled Borough Customs in the publications of the
Selden society. Her papers entitled The Laws of Breteuil showed
her original power of dealing with the sources of municipal
i Vol. 11, chap. XVI (1903).
E, L. XIV.
CH. II.
6


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82
[CH.
Historians
institutions, and she had thoroughly trained herself in medieval
bibliography. Whatever subject she treated, she wrote on it with
simplicity, directness and independence of judgment-qualities
which were part of her nature.
Among historical scholars of mark whose original work was
largely based on their labours at the Record office, John Sherren
Brewer and James Gairdner should be mentioned together. The
former, after having, in his earlier days, been subject to the in-
fluence of the Oxford movement, was much associated with
F. D. Maurice, whom he succeeded in his chair at King's college,
London. He made his mark as a writer in connection with the
earlier instalments of a work on which he remained engaged
during the whole of the latter part of his life—the calendaring,
for the Rolls series, of the state papers of Henry VIII, in a
succession of volumes to which he furnished introductions,
published posthumously as a separate work, The Reign of
Henry VIII to the death of Wolsey, under the editorship of
Gairdner. Brewer enjoyed a widespread reputation as a high-
minded and trustworthy historian, and as an accomplished and
many-sided man of letters. He did not profess to be writing a
history of the reign of Henry VIII ; but his few introductions,
together, amount to what is much more than a digest of the
transactions of the period—a survey of it by a writer of extensive
reading and remarkably clear judgment. His editions of works
of authors among whom are both Roger and Francis Bacon,
and his ever-welcome contributions to The Quarterly Review,
posthumously collected under the title English Studies, suffi-
ciently exhibit the intellectual versatility of the least dry-as-dust
of archivists.
James Gairdner, who was a public servant at the Record office
for more than half a century, used to say that what he knew he
had taught himself; and no scholar has ever passed through a
more conscientious training. He carried on Brewer's Calendar of
Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII to its com-
pletion in twenty-one volumes, further edited the documents of
the preceding two reigns, together with chronicles and other
monuments, and, in 1872–5, produced a standard edition of
The Paston Letters. But he, also, made many original contri-
butions to the study of English history, which were published in
divers collective works, and reprinted in his own and James
Spedding's Studies in English History (1881); and, in addition
to a remarkably fair and by no means paradoxical, Life of


## p. 83 (#113) #############################################

11] James Gairdner. Froude 83
Richard III, produced a short and equally original biographical
estimate of Henry VII. The remainder of his writings are con-
cerned with ecclesiastical history. Long studies in this field
of research had matured in him conclusions as to the English
reformation and its precursors, differing, in many respects, from
current protestant opinion, but always resting on a careful and
well-considered treatment of authorities. The editor of the nearly
finished (fourth) volume left behind him by Gairdner of his Lollardy
and the Reformation considers that, in writing the section of The
History of the English Church, of which Gairdner's later work
was an unfinished enlargement, he (though already at an advanced
age) believed himself to be fulfilling a duty'; and he, certainly,
had the cause of truth at heart. His sympathies, at the same
time, were strongly on the side of authority, as is evident from
his earlier essays on the Lollards, as well as from that entitled
The Divine Right of Kings?
Before we pass on to the treatment of later periods of English
history, we pause at the name of James Anthony Froude. He
holds a position so peculiar to himself in our historical literature
that it is difficult to assign to his name its appropriate position in
an enumeration of our principal nineteenth century writers on
history. His true place would be near that of Carlyle; whom,
during the greater part of his literary life, he consciously followed
as his master, whose way of looking at history he made his own,
and the biography of whom was among the noteworthiest of his
books. He had begun to write with quite other models before his
eyes; but, although he very early disengaged himself from the
controlling influence of Newman, it impressed itself, if upon
nothing else in him, upon his style as a writer. His contribution
to Lives of the English Saints—a life of St Neot, erstwhile prince
Athelstan of Kent-undertaken at Newman's request, is chiefly
remarkable for the effect on the writer of the requisite investiga-
tion of his subject; but it, also, shows his interest in history, and
English history especially, as a desirable university study, of which
he thinks the statute-book might (perhaps in an abridged form)
usefully be made a foundation. Then came the intellectual
i See W. Hunt's preface to vol. iv of Lollardy and the Reformation (1904), p. ix.
• Reprinted in vol. 1 of the Studies mentioned above, which contains, together with
Spedding's review of the conduct of James I in connection with the Overbury affair,
a contribution by Gairdner to the history of Lollardy, The Historical Element in
Shakespeare's Falstaf. Students of the first two Lancaster reigns owe a great debt
to the labours of James Hamilton Wylie, whose History of the Reign of Henry V
was, in substance, completed before his death.
6-2


## p. 84 (#114) #############################################

84
[ch.
Historians
experiences which put an end to his connection with academical,
and with clerical, work, and in the midst of which he found
a friend in Kingsley (to whose sister-in-law, the Argemone of
Yeast, he gave his hand). In 1849, he was introduced to Carlyle;
and, soon afterwards, he settled down to a literary life at Plas
Gwynant in Wales and Bideford in Devon. Here, he began, and
carried on during many years, his History of England from the
Fall of Wolsey, which, first intended to reach to the death of
Elizabeth, actually closed with the dissipation of the Spanish
Armada
The earliest sample of the spirit and style in which Froude
addressed himself to his task had been a recapitulation,
published in The Westminster Review (1852) under the title
England's Forgotten Worthies, of certain original narratives
of a daring and adventurous sort. That the seed thus sown
did not fall on barren ground is shown by the fact that the
paper inspired in Kingsley the idea of Westward Ho! and
supplied Tennyson with the theme of The Revenge. That this
stirring article breathed the antipathies as well as the sym-
pathies that were to mark the forthcoming History, suggests
itself from the terse description of king James I as 'the base son
of a bad mother. But, though Froude's reputation already
'
stood high in a chosen circle of friends, and, though Carlyle
watched the progress of the History with genuine interest—he
may, indeed, be said to have been largely responsible for its
central idea, the insufficiency of any but extraordinary men (such
as Henry VIII, in the first instance) for the management and
direction of extraordinary times—the success of the book must
have taken its author by surprise. He was too intent upon his
own aims and, also, in the right sense, too much of a man of the
world, to pay much attention to either praise or blame; but, that a
historical work of such amplitude should command the interest of
a wide public, while Macaulay's History was still in progress, and
,
that a book which could not but offend many, and startle more,
should sustain this interest throughout its voluminous course,
was, certainly, a very uncommon literary experience. Beyond a
doubt, the primary cause accounting for this result must be sought
in the style and method of the writer. Froude's style combined
fullness of matter with charm of manner; for his study of original
1 The Nemesis of Faith (1849) intended by Froude as a 'tragedy') was widely
accepted as having a didactic purpose and containing the confession of his own
faith. Cf. , ante, vol. XII, p. 292.


## p. 85 (#115) #############################################

85
6
II) Froude's History of England
documents both at home and abroad (notably at Simancas) was
most assiduous. His form of narrative was Herodotean rather
than Thucydidean; but the British reading public, especially since
its literary appetite has been fed largely on fiction, likes breadth
of exposition, and Froude's long paraphrases of original documents
commended themselves to readers in search of the real. His method
was, intentionally, the reverse of scientific; "there seems, indeed,'
he wrote', 'something incongruous in the very connexion of such
words as Science and History. ' His own style, beyond a doubt, is
all but irresistible to those who enjoy the union of facility of form
with wealth of colouring; and in variety of invective he is un-
surpassed, at least among writers whose good taste is only
exceptionally overpowered by sentiment? .
This is not the place in which to revive the memory of the
attacks which, during its progress, were made upon Froude's
History, certainly one of the best-abused books of any age of
literature. Besides long and severe charges of partisan mis-
statement, brought by representative historical writers against
his treatment of the monasteries question and of other important
topics, he was, from the first, exposed to a running fire of hostile
criticism on the part of The Saturday Review; and, from 1864
onwards, these censures grew into a systematic assault, which even
the friends of E. A. Freeman, who was mainly responsible for it,
would have gladly seen brought to a speedier end. These attacks,
which, excessive and, occasionally, even erroneous though they
were, proved fatal to Froude's reputation as a historian, had their
origin, partly in differences of ecclesiastical opinion, but, mainly,
in faults that were, or had become, engrained in his historical
writing-looseness of statement, incorrectness of quotation and
constant bias of opinion and sentiment. The true charge to be
brought against him lies, not in his neglect of authorities, but in
the perversity, conscious or unconscious, of his use of them. And
this, again, was due, not so much to a preconceived partisanship,
as to a conviction that the truth lay, away from popular notions,
in the conclusions at which he had independently, and, sometimes,
paradoxically, arrived. The uprightness of Henry VIII and the
wickedness of those who stood in his way, or in that of the
movement which Henry fitted into his policy, had to be proved
coute que coute; and proved, in this sense, it was, to Froude's
i See · The Scientific Method Applied to History,' in Short Studies, vol. 11.
: The list of animals to whom Mary queen of Scots is, in turn, compared in
Froude's History, is that of a small menagerie.


## p. 86 (#116) #############################################

86
[CH.
Historians
own—and to Kingsley's satisfaction. Of queen Elizabeth, in
his later volumes, he declined to make a heroine; and, if they
have a central figure, it is Burghley's, unless it be Burghley's
archfoe, 'far away' beyond the seas and mountains.
Froude's later works on historical subjects did not add to his
reputation as a historian; but nothing that he wrote could fail
to attract attention, and little to provoke controversy. The
English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1872—4) grew out
of lectures delivered in America concerning a people whom, in a
way, Froude liked, but on whose national life he looked with scorn-
ful bitterness. No other of his books met with more convincing
rejoinders, among which Lecky's? is the most notable. His later
Spanish studies on the topics of one of the earliest, and of one
of the latest, episodes in his History, uphold the conclusions
there reached. To the brief period of his Oxford professorship
(in which, in 1892, he succeeded Freeman) belong The Life
and Letters of Erasmus, English Seamen in the Sixteenth
Century and The Council of Trent (1894–6). The first-named
of these, although good reading, both where it is Erasmus and
where it is Froude, did not escape the usual fate of his writings.
Froude, whose productivity had never ceased either during or
after his editorship of Fraser's Magazine (1860—74)-most of his
best occasional contributions to which are included in his delightful
Short Studies (1867)—was, for many years, one of the most con-
spicuous figures in the English world of letters. In 1874, he
definitely entered into that of politics. After his return to England,
he continued to take an active interest in affairs, both Irish and
colonial, and visited, in turn, the Australian colonies and the West
Indies, describing both expeditions in books which caused almost
as much ferment as anything previously written by him. But the
chief literary productions of his later years were those bearing
on his great friend and master, Carlyle? The second of these,
his History of the first Forty Years of Carlyle's Life, together
with its predecessor, the History of Carlyle's Life in London,
remains, for better and for worse, one of the most interesting of
English biographies.
Proceeding from Froude to his Oxford successor, we pass not
only from the study of the Tudor to that of the Stewart age.
In the whole field of modern history—as well as in that of modern
English history in particular-no higher praise is due to any writer
1 In vol, u of his History of England in the Eighteenth Century.
? See, ante, vol. Xin, chap. I.


## p. 87 (#117) #############################################

11]
Samuel Rawson Gardiner
87
of the century than should be accorded to Samuel Rawson Gardiner,
if the supreme criterion be absolute devotion, not only in the letter
but in the spirit, to historical truth, and if this be held to show
itself in a fairness of judgment that takes into account, with the
circumstances and conditions in which men of the past, great or
ordinary, lived and acted, those in which they thought and felt.
Gardiner was not, and, if his method of composition be taken into
account, hardly could be, a brilliant writer; as with his lecturing,
so his written narrative seemed to spin itself continuously out of
a full store of maturely considered facts and necessary comments,
reaching, without strain, the end of chapter or volume, as of
lecture or course.
When he resolved to write the history of the great English
revolution of the seventeenth century, he was not bound to
the service of any political or religious party, or under any
personal obligation beyond that of making his living. In 1856
and 1858, respectively, he became, as he continued through
life, unless his necessary lecturing and teaching interfered, a
regular reader at the British Museum and the Record office; and,
from that time forward, the principal purpose of his strenuous
labours was the writing of his History. But he knew that an
account of the revolution must be based on an examination of
its causes; and, thus, he began with preparing his History of
England from the Accession of James I to the Disgrace of Chief
Justice Coke, which appeared in 1863. In the previous year, he
had brought out, for the Camden society, a documentary volume
entitled Parliamentary Debates in 1610. Henceforth, his great
work advanced by regular instalments of two volumes, till it had
arrived at the threshold of the Civil war, when a completed
section was republished, in ten volumes, as The History of
England from 1603 to 1640. Its second part, the history of
the revolution proper, made its appearance in two successive
subsections, of which the second carried the history of the
commonwealth and protectorate to the year 1656, an additional
chapter dealing with the parliamentary elections of that year
being published posthumously. Thus, by a hard fate, he was
unable to finish his great task. But, up to the point actually
reached, it had been accomplished, without faltering or failure, in
accordance with the original plan and with the mastery over
material which, throughout, had marked his work.
Gardiner's History of England, though pursuing a chrono-
logical method, is in no sense annalistic in either conception or


## p. 88 (#118) #############################################

88
[CH.
Historians
treatment. As Firth, who continued the work, says, Gardiner 'did
not confine himself to relating facts, but traced the growth of the
religious and constitutional ideas which underlay' the greatest
political conflict ever known to these islands. Firth is equally
justified in dwelling on the completeness with which his prede-
cessor treated the different parts of his theme, neglecting neither
the military and naval, nor the economic and social, sides of the
national development. Gardiner made no pretence of tracing
literary or artistic growth, though his remarks on Milton and
those on Massinger show that it was not only the political element
in their writings which called forth his interest.
Throughout his occupation with his chief work, Gardiner
found, or made, time for the production of much useful historical
literature of an unpretentious sort, besides rendering services
of high value to the Camden and other historical societies, and
as contributor to collective historical undertakings of various
kinds. His little volume entitled The Thirty Years' War, together
with his Camden society volumes, Letters and Documents illus-
trating the Relations between England and Germany, 1618–20,
show how exceptionally he was qualified to become the historian of
a struggle destined, as it would seem, to remain without a fully
adequate historical treatment of all its component parts. Gardiner's
lectures delivered at Oxford in 1896 under the title Cromwell's
Place in History, admirably exemplify his manner as a teacher.
With the great Protector, he claimed some family connection; but,
of Cromwell, as of every other character of the past, he spoke as
intent only on understanding both the man and his actions.
Reasons sufficiently obvious explain why the period of English
history which Macaulay once hoped to reach, and of which the
later and most stirring years were, at first, too near to lend them-
selves to a judicial historic survey—the Hanoverian period, as it
has to be called-long attracted but few writers of independent mind
or higher literary qualities. According to the form of most of his
books, William (generally known as archdeacon) Coxe belongs to
the class of writers of historical memoirs, for the composition of
which he had abandoned that of a comprehensive work on the
historical and political state of Europe. He obtained a large amount
of unpublished material, and put this together with understanding
and skill, on a sufficiently broad basis to make his books useful as
general guides to the political history of their times. His well-
established whig principles are specially manifest in his Memoirs of
Sir Robert Walpole (1798), which, perhaps, is the least likely of his


## p. 89 (#119) #############################################

II]
Earl Stanhope
89
works to be altogether superseded. The later Memoirs of the Duke
of Marlborough (1818—19) have, probably, been not less largely
read; but the task, from the biographical point of view, was a
more complicated one, and Coxe's treatment cannot be regarded as
adequate, although no later life of Marlborough has proved alto-
gether successful! . His House of Austria (1807), nowadays,
needs only to be taken up to be laid down again as altogether
defective.
Philip Henry, fifth earl Stanhope, during his membership of
the house of commons as viscount Mahon, rendered good service
to the literary profession in general by his introduction of the bill
which became the Copyright act of 1842, and to historical studies
and interests by his initiation of the National Portrait gallery
(1856) and of the Historical MSS commission (1869), on which he
was one of the first commissioners. His own contributions to
historical literature were of a solid and enduring nature; he laid
no claim to a place among great writers; but students of the
national history, from the war of the Spanish succession to the
great Napoleonic war, owe him a real debt. His industry was
great; his judgment excellent if not infallible; and his candour
unimpeachable. His narrative, if it does not enchain, commends
itself by moderation and dignity of tone. He enjoyed rare oppor-
tunities, of which his readers had the full benefit, of access to
unpublished sources; and although, as his Miscellanies attest, full
of curiosity as to points of detail, he never lost himself in minutiae,
or let slip the main threads of his narrative. His earliest work
was The History of the War of the Succession in Spain, 1702–14
(1832), founded mainly on the papers of his ancestor, the high-
minded statesman who played an important part in the war-
a well-written book of much interest, which created a consider-
able impression, with the aid of an essay by Macaulay, between
whom and lord Mahon a long-continued friendship ensued.
It was followed by The History of England from the Peace of
Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles, 1713 to 1783, which remained
the standard history of England for this period, though, more
or less, it left aside certain aspects of the national life and
progress afterwards treated by Lecky, and cannot be said to
furnish a definite narrative of momentous episodes such as
the American war of independence. In 1870, earl Stanhope
added a beginning or introduction to his History, entitled
1 The late viscount Wolseley's Life, to the Accession of Anne (1894) has a mainly
military interest. For Coxe's other works, see bibliography.


## p. 90 (#120) #############################################

90
Historians
[CH.
The reign of Queen Anne up to the Peace of Utrecht. Though
it served its turn, it could not but seem a meagre performance
to readers whose favourites, both in historical composition and in
fiction, had, with brilliant success, illustrated this particular era
of English political, literary and social history. Before this, in
1861—2, Stanhope had produced a much superior work, in which
the unpublished material at his command had once more stood
him in excellent stead, the Life of the Younger Pitt, a biography
to which he addressed himself with thorough sympathy and which
will not easily be altogether superseded. Stanhope's lesser contri-
butions to English historical literature are numerous and valuable,
and the whole harvest of his life reflects high credit on his name.
His principal work is, in a measure, supplemented by William
Nathaniel Massey's History of England during the reign of
George III, which reaches to 1802. It is the work of a moderate
liberal, who had no sympathy to spare for the political ideas of
king George III.
Two English historical writers who, though in very different
ways, came into close contact with important political ideas of the
nineteenth century, and, more especially, with those concerning the
progressive development of the British empire, were, at not very
distant dates, conspicuous personages in the life of the universities
of Oxford and Cambridge respectively. Each in his way a master
of style, Goldwin Smith and Sir John Robert Seeley differed
fundamentally from one another in the political conceptions which
pervaded their historical writing. In 1858, Goldwin Smith was made
a member of the commission on national education. When, in 1859,
the earl of Derby appointed him regius professor of modern history
at Oxford, he had gained much experience as an academical re-
former and political journalist, but had his reputation as a historian
still to make outside his university.
Two years later, he published
a volume entitled Lectures on Modern History. The most historical
of these, On the Foundation of the American Colonies, had, at the
same time, a distinct political bearing, and, in 1862—3, was followed
by a series of letters contributed to The Daily News, and after-
wards reprinted with additions, under the title The Empire, which,
in his most forcible style, advocated the separation of the British
colonies from the mother-country and their establishment as inde-
pendent states. This became the governing idea of his political
activity, which, at the same time, shaped his later personal life.
In 1862, he produced another volume, not less striking in manner
and style, entitled Irish History and Irish Character. Five
facer?
*


## p. 91 (#121) #############################################

11]
Sir J. R. Seeley
91
notan
histoned
cainen
years later, he published an admirable series of historical essays,
originally produced as public lectures, and called Three English
Statesmen (Pym, Cromwell and Pitt). Before this, the great
American civil war, during the progress of which he visited the
states, had found in him an enthusiastic supporter of the cause of
the north. Having, in 1866, been compelled by a severe personal
trouble to resign his Oxford chair, he, two years afterwards, trans-
ferred himself, with his political aspirations and disappointments,
at first to Cornell university, in the United States, and thence, in
June 1871, to Toronto. There, for nearly a generation longer, he
continued to carry on an incessant journalistic activity. The
books he sent forth were not of much importance; and, notwith-
standing the fascination of his style, always clear and dignified,
the letters from him printed in The Manchester Guardian and
elsewhere gradually became like the voice of one crying in the
wilderness. He can only be classed among historical writers by
a courtesy which will hardly be refused to him. He could not
keep the spirit of political controversy out of anything he wrote;
and, in truth, that spirit was part of his genius.
The career of Sir John Robert Seeley, who, though less
intimately connected with public life, and less gifted for taking
a personal part in it than Goldwin Smith, exercised a far more
enduring influence upon imperial politics than he, was of the least
eventful. At Cambridge, he won high distinction as a classical
scholar; but his great ability in argument was only known to
a few; and when, being then professor of Latin in London, he
was discovered to be the author of Ecce Homo, published in 1865,
the admiration excited by the book, amidst an outburst of con-
troversy, was largely due to its literary qualities? . Paradoxically
enough, it led to his appointment, in 1869, as regius professor of
modern history at Cambridge. His inaugural lecture was published,
together with some other lectures and essays delivered by him in
the north, in a collection of Lectures and Essays (1870).
Seeley's standpoint as a historical teacher and writer was clear
to himself from the first. In the opening sentence of the most
successful of his works, The Expansion of England, he cites
'a favourite maxim of mine,' that history, while it should be
scientific in its methods, should pursue a practical object. ' This
object was practical politics. As a new type of sophist, he set
himself the task of training, by his lectures and conversation,
1 See, ante, vol, mn, chap. XII, p. 297. His edition of the first decade of Livy,
with its excellent introduction, is mentioned, ibid. p. 493.


## p. 92 (#122) #############################################

92
[CH.
Historians
the statesmen of the future; the time was not far distant when
his applied history would serve to impress upon the nation political
lessons of which it seemed to him to stand in need. But he was
aware that, while engaged upon this task, he must prove his fitness
for it by the production of a historical work of solid merit; and
this he was enabled to do by the publication of his Life and
Times of Stein, or Germany and Prussia in the Napoleonic
Age (1878). The work, which was the fruit of great labour,
though hardly of what could justly be called original research,
might have filled, at least for a time, a gap in the historical
literature of the age in question; for it appeared midway between
the monument of the great statesman piled up by Pertz and the
later elucidations of his career, and of its bearings upon German
and European history, by Max Lehmann and others. The success
to which Seeley's volumes attained was little more than a success
of esteem : although he had attentively studied his subject, he was
hardly quite at home in the whole of it; and, though clearly, and,
in parts, effectively, written, the work failed to establish itself as
one of those great political biographies which may be supplemented
or corrected, but are quite unlikely to be ever superseded.
In 1883, Seeley put forth the series of Cambridge lectures
on the foreign policy of Great Britain to which he gave the title
The Expansion of England in the Eighteenth century. Few
political historians have more felicitously carried out the avowed
purpose of combining a lucid and connected narrative of a period
of the past with a statement of conclusions bearing directly upon
political problems of the present. Imperialism, the very opposite
system to that cherished by Goldwin Smith and those who thought
with him, was here demonstrated to be the ideal which it behoved
the British nation to accept and apply as the moving factor in the
determination of the future of British dominion. And this dogma
was proclaimed at a time when, in British and colonial political
life, a parting of the ways still seemed possible; so that no half-
historical, half-political essay was ever more opportunely timed, or
more effectively directed to its purpose.
Seeley's last work, The Growth of British Policy, was not
published till after his death, which took place in 1895. This book
is described by its editor, G. W. Prothero, as an attempt to put
English history into a new framework, showing how foreign policy
affected every stage of its progress. It was intended to be, in
substance, an introduction to the history of British policy in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; but the author had to trace


## p. 93 (#123) #############################################

11) Nineteenth Century English History 93
the current of his narrative back to Elizabeth, who, as he puts it,
was married to her people, whereas James I and Charles I were
only married to Anne of Denmark and Henrietta Maria. Seeley
avowed it to be his object as a teacher, not to interest his hearers
or readers in particular men or deeds, but to show them what
results the national action of former times had brought about for
ourselves and our children after us, and thus to interest them more
and more 'to the close. ' 'It is impossible,' he candidly added, that
the history of any state can be interesting, unless it exhibits some
sort of development? .
'
The history of the British empire in the nineteenth century
has, of necessity, employed many pens; but its documentary
materials were only in part accessible, and the difficulty of dis-
sociating historical narrative from political purpose or 'tendency'
was only to be avoided with difficulty. Harriet Martineau, whose
manifold contributions to political and social literature, as well as
to journalism and fiction, have found notice elsewhere in this
work? , in 1848 entered upon the onerous task, begun and aban-
doned by Charles Knight, of A History of England during the
Thirty Years' Peace, and, notwithstanding a serious interruption,
accomplished it before the end of the following year. 'Always,'
as was well said of her, 'a little before her time,' she related the
history of an age whose striving after reform was its most marked
characteristic in a spirit of moral and intellectual sympathy with
its ideas, accompanied by a clear critical estimate of the sum of
its achievements; home politics were her chief, but by no means
absorbing, concern, and she treated men as well as measures with
her habitual candour.
We come nearer to the present age in The History of England
from 1830, first published in 1871—3, by William Nassau Moles-
worth, vicar of Rochdale and a reformer who dwelt and worked very
near the fountain-head. His unpretentious, but lucid, book, justly
exercised a wide popular influence. Finally, mention should be
made of Sir Spencer Walpole, who, in his History of England
from 1815 (1878—86) and its continuation, The History of Twenty-
Five Years, 1856 to 1880 (1904—8)3, showed himself alive to the
great value of a clear grouping of events and transactions according
to the sides of the national life on which they bear, and of the
6
>
1
1 The Expansion of England, p. 119 (edn 1883).
2 Cf. , ante, vol. XIII, chap. XI.
3 The last two volumes of this were published posthumously, ander the supervision
of Walpole's friend, Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall.


## p. 94 (#124) #############################################

94
[CH.
Historians
demonstration thus afforded of the changes in national policy
brought about by the progress in the conditions and ideas of
successive generations. He repeatedly contrasts this method with
the biographical ; but he did good work in both kinds of historical
composition. His intelligence and clearness of mind, and his
freedom from political partisanship, together with his unusually
varied administrative experience, fitted him for his chief historical
task, which he carried through successfully, though without con-
spicuous power or brilliancy. His observations on financial
problems are marked by special lucidity.
Though purporting not to be more than the narrative of an
episode in the political and military history of the period,
Alexander William Kinglake's Invasion of the Crimea (1863—87)
justified the labour of many years devoted to the work by one
of the most brilliant, but by no means one of the most prolific,
prose-writers of the earlier Victorian period. His Eöthen (1844)
is still read as a singularly delightful record of personal im-
pressions derived from near-Eastern travel. His magnum opus,
based on the papers of lord Raglan, placed by his widow in
Kinglake's hands, was at once an apologia and an accurate and
exhaustive narrative of its subject, elaborated with endless care
and with the aid of personal observation (he was present at the
battle of the Alma), and Homerically ample in its presentment.
The opening volumes, with their examination of the causes of the
war and their splendid indictment of the author of the coup
d'état, formed a magnificent portico to the edifice; but the scale
of the whole is excessive, and, more especially since the plan
of the book left it incomplete as a history of the war, it has failed
to secure a place among great historical works.
Among nineteenth-century historians of Scotland, the prece-
dence, at all events by right of seniority, must be accorded to
Patrick Fraser Tytler, who was a joint founder of the Bannatyne
club with Scott, and had been a college friend of Archibald
Alison. Tytler had historian's blood in his veins", and many years
of his life were devoted to the composition of his History of
Scotland (1828–43), an undertaking first suggested to him by
Scott. The History plunges in medias res with the accession of
1 His father, Alexander Fraser Tytler (who afterwards took the judicial title
lord Woodhouselee) was at one time professor of history at Edinburgh, and wrote
several historical works; his grandfather, William Tytler, wrote an apologetic enquiry
into the charges against Mary, queen of Scots, which held the field till the publication,
in 1869, of John Hosack's much-read Mary Queen of Scots and her Accusers, followed,
in 1888 (posthumously), by a summary of her case.


## p. 95 (#125) #############################################

11]
Scottish History
95
a
Alexander III, Wallace and Bruce following close, with Bannock-
burn, and with a thanksgiving that Scotland was spared the doom of
Ireland. But a learned enquiry into the state of ancient Scotland
displays much antiquarian research, and offers a more graphic
treatment of the theme than was, at the time, to be found in any
other writer. The narrative ends, almost as abruptly as it began,
with James VI's farewell to Scotland on his, in a literal sense,
ill-omened departure for his larger kingdom. The History, which
is written in a grave and simple style, deals with matters both
of church and state in a vein of genuine Scottish patriotism, and
can hardly be said to be altogether obsolete. Tytler, who was
the author of further historical works, rendered great service to
historical study in both England and Scotland by taking a leading
part in the suggestion of the calendaring of state papers, instead
of the publication in full of mere selections of documents.
John Hill Burton's History of Scotland, from 1688 to 1745,
of which the first portion appeared in 1853, was enlarged by
successive additions of earlier periods, and, after Tytler's death,
was, in 1870, finally published as extending from Agricola to the
last Jacobite rising. Burton, after showing great activity as a
periodical writer, editor and journalist, had, in 1846, published
The Life and Correspondence of David Hume, of whose
economical writings he had made a special study, and had
followed this successful effort with some lesser productions in
Scottish biography. He afterwards reprinted some of his con-
tributions to journalism in the two most popular of his books,
The Book Hunter (1860) and the very interesting Scot Abroad
(1862). His History of Scotland justified his appointment as
Scottish historiographer-royal; but, although the fruit of long
and unwearying research, it is ill-arranged and loose in compo-
sition, and only held the field because of the absence of a
competitor in command of the same abundance of material. As
editor of two volumes of The Scottish Registers, he rendered
an enduring service to the study of Scottish history, which was
continued by David Masson. Burton's History of the Reign
of Queen Anne (1880), though containing curious matter, is as
little satisfactory a piece of work as ever came from a historian's
hands; but it was the last larger effort of a long and laborious
lifel.
1 In Burton's successor as Scottish historiographer-royal, William Forbes Skene,
author of Celtic Scotland (1876—80), the antiquary was blended with the historian.
For his chief works see, ante, vol. xa, chap. xv, p. 518.


## p. 96 (#126) #############################################

96
[CH.
Historians
The last Scottish historian whose name calls for mention here
is Andrew Lang, whose recent death (1912) put an end to an almost
unexampled continuous flow of varied literary work! It is, perhaps,
as a historian, in a broad sense of the term, that he will be best
remembered. His gift of narrative stood him in good stead even
with so wide a canvas as that of his History of Scotland from the
Roman Occupation (1890—7), which he lived to complete, though
it was hardly carried out with the requisite sustained power. On
the other hand, he excelled in the historical monograph, where his
great and, perhaps, most notable critical gift had full play; and, if
there was an element of 'mystery' in the subject of his story,
he felt most thoroughly at home in it. Like Scott, whom, as
himself a child of the Border, he loved with his whole heart,
he was irresistibly drawn to the lost causes of history-above all,
to the Stewart cause; but his critical acumen rarely deserted him
in any field, and, while he was deeply versed in mythology, his
footing was sure on the doubtful ground between history and
legend, and his own favourite among his innumerable productions
was his Life and Death of Jeanne D'Arc (1908).
Among Irish historians, Lecky holds an undisputed pre-
eminence, but of him we shall speak immediately in a wider
connection. Like him, John Patrick Prendergast took up the
defence of his countrymen against the aspersions of Froude ;
but, though he bore a name associated with the sufferings entailed
by the Irish policy of Cromwell, and had himself the reputation
of being a nationalist, he was not under the influence of the
sentiments of seventeenth century 'toryism. His works on Irish
affairs, of which The History of the Cromwellian Settlement
(1863) is the best known, form a very important contribution to
the political history of Ireland, and led to his appointment as one
of the commissioners for selecting official papers from the Carte
MSS in the Bodleian. In 1887, he published Ireland from the
Restoration to the Revolution Sir John Thomas Gilbert was of
English descent, but born in Dublin and brought up as a strict
catholic. In addition to papers on the antiquities of his native
city and country, his researches, which made a generally acknow-
ledged mark on the progress of the studies to which he was devoted,
include The History of the Viceroys of Ireland (1865) and The
History of the Irish Confederation and the War in Ireland,
1641—9 (1882—91), with a great body of work on the documents of
Irish history from ancient times to the early years of the nineteenth
I Cf. , ante, vol. XIII, chap. vi.


## p. 97 (#127) #############################################

11] Historians of India : James Mill 97
century. Caesar Litton Falkiner, who had made the Irish land
acts a subject of special study, and, in 1898, was appointed an
assistant land commissioner, collected and discussed, in studies
and essays published before his early death, much original
material of Irish history in the eighteenth, and, afterwards, in
the seventeenth, century. His seventeenth-century work on the
Historical MSS commission was both voluminous and valuable.
Turning to the historians of British India and the colonies,
we are met on the threshold by the name of James Mill, whose
place in the history of English thought has been discussed
elsewhere? By his History of India (1817), he was the first to
accomplish, on a scale and with a breadth of treatment befitting
the theme, a history of India under British rule. For the critical
side of his task, he was signally endowed by nature, prepared by
philosophical study and trained by continuous practice as a writer,
more especially in The Edinburgh Review (1808–18). On the
other hand, he had never been in India ; and, as he freely con-
fessed, 'if he had any, had a very slight and elementary
acquaintance with any of the languages of the East. ' He in-
geniously deprecated the force of these objections by arguments
from analogy ; but their fallacy was sufficiently exposed by the
learned Sanskrit scholar Horace Hayman Wilson, who edited the
fourth edition of Mill's History (1840—8), and continued it
from 1803 to 1835. He, also, charges Mill with having, in
what is the most originally conceived section of the work-
book II, Of the Hindus, where it is proposed to summarise,
in some 350 pages, their laws and institutions, religion, literature
and art-displayed the kind of contempt which is not always
based on familiarity ; though, in the opinion of Mill's biographer
Bain, if these strictures upon the natives really tended to increase
the difficulties of British rule in India, this effect was more than
outweighed by that of Mill's unsparing criticism of all who had
à share in founding and extending our Indian empire. The
more strictly historical portion of the work is distinguished by
a lucidity of method which, in dealing with masses of matter
distributed over a vast area and, in part, reaching back across
1 See, ante, chap. 1. Earlier English historians of India bad treated the subject
from particular points of view. Orme's military history belongs to the eighteenth
centory (cf. , ante, vol. x, pp. 293—4); John Bruce, a political historian of note, who had
formerly furnished Pitt's government with reports on measures taken for the defence
of the country from the days of the Spanish Armada downwards, and had then
been appointed keeper of the State paper office and historiographer to the East
India company, published the history of that company (1816).
E. L. XIV. CH. II.
7


## p. 98 (#128) #############################################

98
[ch.
Historians
a great interval of time, is invaluable to the student. Mill, as a
historian, had no example to follow in the school of thinkers to
which he belonged-least of all in Bentham, whose knowledge of
history is not to be reckoned among his strong points. On the
other hand, Bentham severely blamed the style of Mill's book,
and he does not stand alone in his censures? Of later writings,
a penetrating insight into the course of Indian history, as a whole,
distinguishes those of Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall, whose imaginative,
as well as philosophical, mind could not rest content with viewing
such a subject as India, with which a long and distinguished
official career had familiarised him, under its political, or under
any one exclusive, aspect only. His Rise and Expansion of the
British Dominion in India (1893) grew, as it passed through
many editions, into an important work of research ; he also wrote
;
a short life of Warren Hastings, and a full biography of lord
Dufferin. His Asiatic Studies deals chiefly with Hindu religion
in its successive phases.
Colonial history attracted fewer students in the mother-
country during the earlier, than during the later, part of the
century. Among more recent writers, it seems right to make
special mention of John Andrew Doyle and of Edward John
Payne, both of whom were born in 1844. The former gained the
Arnold prize at Oxford for an essay on the English colonies in
America before the declaration of independence, and the chief
production of his literary life treated the same theme. The latter
devoted the historical labours of his later years to English and
other European colonies and to America in general. His compre-
hensive undertaking A History of the New World called America
(1902–9) was, however, but partially carried out. Sir Arthur
Helps gave to colonial history so much of his busy leisure as was
1 Mill, also, contributed to the Supplement to The Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1816—23) a number of important essays belonging to the domain of politics and
political philosophy rather than to that of history. They are analysed in chap. v of
Bain's biography of Mill (1882). Among his numerous critical writings may be noted
an early article (in The Annual Review for 1808) on Charles James Fox's fragment
on the early part of the reign of James II, published in the same year. Mill compares
its high moral tone, to the disparagement of modern historians, with that of the
ancient masters, Thucydides, Tacitus and Livy, and deprecates the modern mode
of philosophical history as containing, besides its philosophical element, little beyond
. a dry statement of vulgar historical facts. '
2 See, also, ante, vol. XIII, p. 202.
3 Sir Charles Dilke's Greater Britain (1866–7), while possessing both historical
and political significance, made its appearance as a book of travel, and is noticed as
such in chap. VII, post:


## p. 99 (#129) #############################################

11]
Mandell Creighton
99
left for historical research. His Spanish Conquest of the New
World did not, however, attain to an enduring success, though
the separate biographies in which he reproduced portions of the
work could not fail to be popular.
We have reserved, as the first of two particular groups, some
of the ecclesiastical historians of the united kingdom not already
noted in an earlier volume? Mandell Creighton, though his
.
career connected him closely with several of the historians
mentioned in earlier pages of the present chapter, cannot him-
self be appropriately classed as mainly a medievalist, although
his chief historical work is, in part, concerned with the close of
the middle ages in the very centre of their ruling ideas and
influences. Modern Oxford has produced no more accomplished
historian than Creighton, who united with a power of work of
which it was not in his way to make show an insight into the
force of ideas and the play of character which, in writing as well
as in speech, enabled him easily to compass what he prized more
than aught else—the establishment of his influence over others.
On the other hand, although the cynicism at one time affected
by him was superficial only, and was cast aside in face of the most
serious purposes of his life, he was without the moral enthusiasm
which, in different ways, reveals itself in writers so unlike one
another as Freeman and Gardiner. In his History of the Papacy,
this lack shows itself, not so much in the allowances made for the
corruption and other vices of the times in which the lot of some of
the pontiffs was thrown, and through which neither a Borgia nor a
Medici could be expected to walk unspotted, as in the indifference
exhibited towards the chosen spirits of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries on whom depended the preparation and the prosecution
of the great work of religious reform. Creighton was, perhaps,
less extensively read in the history of early sixteenth-century
Germany than in the Italian portions of his subject; but what
is missing in his fifth volume is not perception or even fairness
of judgment (such as marks the contrast between the ideals of
Raffaelle and those of Luther); it is, rather, a fellow-feeling with
the consciousness of the mighty issues of the struggle which gave
its extraordinary force to the movement set on foot by Luther.
Nothing, on the other hand, could better illustrate at once the
irony and the pathos of history than the characters, as here
drawn, of the reformation popes—Leo X, who could not see why
1 Ante, vol. XII, chap. XIV.


## p. 100 (#130) ############################################

Іоо
[Ch.
Historians
i
>
1
his improvements were insufficient, and Adrian VI, who could
understand the necessity of real reforms from within, but was
unable to give effect to his insight.
Creighton's History of the Papacy during the period of the
Reformation (1882–94), which should, at the least, have been
carried on to the council of Trent, ended with the sack of Rome.
But the book is neither a fragment nor a torso, and, at all events
in its earlier volumes, sufficiently illustrates the qualities which the
historian brought to bear upon the composition of it, and which
made it something more than a supplement to Ranke's greater
work. The book could not satisfy the demands of lord Acton,
who would have preferred an indictment of the papacy for its
historic shortcomings; but it helps to explain, without seeking
to palliate, and forms a memorable contribution to the history
of learning. His style was well suited to his method of treatment,
being wholly free from pedantry and artificiality, and sensitive to
any of those lapses into exaggeration which were one of the chief
faults noted by him in his favourites, the Italian humanists of the
pontificate of Nicholas V.
Before Creighton addressed himself to his chief historical work,
he had found many outlets for his critical powers, and had success-
fully practised the art of epitomising on subjects so different as
a history of Rome and a life of Simon de Montfort. After he had
exchanged his Northumbrian parish for the chair of ecclesiastical
history at Cambridge, he engaged anew in varied historical work,
wrote a life of cardinal Wolsey, a history of his native town, Carlisle,
and, later, a biography of queen Elizabeth, which attracted much
favour. He was, also, associated, from 1886 to 1891, with The
English Historical Review—a critical journal the foundation of
which had, at various times, occupied the minds of J. R. Green
and other younger historians, and of which Creighton was
judiciously chosen as the first editor. It marked a very distinct
advance in the method, as well as in the spirit, of English
historical study, and maintained itself, without serious difficulty,
on the level on which, with the co-operation of lord Acton
and others, it had been placed at the start. But, in 1885,
Creighton's appointment to a canonry at Worcester had marked
the beginning of the high ecclesiastical career that awaited him,
and for the sake of which his historical labours had, ultimately, to
be relinquished. The last volume of his Papacy was brought out
while he held the see of Peterborough. But his work there and in
London (whither he was transferred in 1896) must, like the episcopal
>


## p. 101 (#131) ############################################

II]
Writers on Later Church History
History or
life of Stubbs, be left out of sight in this place? . His continued
interest in historical studies is shown by the fact that, in 1896,
the year of his appointment to London, he wrote the introduction to
The Cambridge Modern History, in place of his friend lord Acton.
A younger author in the same field of historical research, but
more especially in earlier periods, which he was acknowledged to
have mastered with wholly exceptional completeness, was William
Edward Collins, during the last seven years of his life bishop of
Gibraltar. A writer on English church history of a different
type was John Henry Overton, who died as canon of Peter-
borough and had long been a Lincolnshire rector. His and
Charles J. Abbey's history of The English Church in the Eigh-
teenth Century (1878) is a useful book, which has helped to
remove prejudices ; while his William Law, Non-juror and
Mystic (1881) is, perhaps, the most attractive among his many
large-hearted and well-written contributions to our later religious
history. William Richard Stephens, who died as dean of Win-
chester, was author of various contributions to church history
and joint editor, with William Hunt, of The History of the
English Church, to which he contributed the second volume (from
the Norman conquest to the accession of Edward I); and he wrote
the lives of his father-in-law, dean Hook, and of Freeman.
Thomas Graves Law, who, in his later years, was librarian of the
Signet library at Edinburgh, by some of his writings threw light
on interesting passages in the history of English catholicism in the
later Elizabethan period, more especially on the conflicts between
Jesuits and seculars (1889) and on the archpriest controversy. He
was a man of high ability, and distinguished by broad-mindedness
as well as by learning?
In Scottish ecclesiastical history proper, the palm must be
assigned to an earlier writer, Thomas McCrie, an original seceder'
from the established church. Through his Life of John Knox
(1812), as the subtitle of the book indicates, he sought to throw
light upon the history of the Scottish reformation.
It was
followed by The Life of Andrew Melville, and the two books,
which were supplemented by material belonging to a later period,
became standard narratives of the greatest historical movement
in Scottish national life. McCrie further contributed to the
history of the reformation two less exhaustive works, on its
1 It is told in the second volume of Mrs Creighton's Life and Letters of her
hasband (1904).
• He was, also, eminent as a biographer, and edited The New Testament in Scots.


## p. 102 (#132) ############################################

I 02
Historians
[ch.
progress and suppression in Italy and in Spain. Whether, had
he carried out his design of a life of Calvin, it would have proved
equal to his life of the great Scottish reformer, it is, of course,
impossible to say; but few ecclesiastical historians were better
qualified for essaying even so thorny a theme.
The history of civilisation cannot rightly be described as a
product of the nineteenth century; yet, on the one hand, the
immense advance made in the course of that century in the methods,
as well as in the range, of scientific studies, and, on the other, the
unprecedented interest which, from about 1830 or 1840 onwards,
began to be taken by historians, as well as by politicians, in the
life and social conditions of the people at large, gave a wholly new
impulse to the cultivation of this field of enquiry. Its originator
was, of course, Voltaire ; and, though, throughout the nineteenth
century, this branch (if it can be called a branch) of history was
vigorously carried on by writers of various kinds in Germany,
France never lost her hold upon it.