No More Learning

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. So early as 1830, Guizot's
Histoire de la Civilisation en France, as an organic part of a
more comprehensive scheme, sought to execute the design which
Voltaire had proposed to himself in his Essai sur les Moeurs. At
a later date, the philosophy of history was incorporated by Comte
in his system of positivism, and, more especially, in social science
(or sociology), as intended to teach the evolution of social life, and
to define the laws which govern its conditions and mutations. The
philosophy of history, thus recast, ignored any but natural laws,
although, not unfrequently, its disciples differed as to what
justified the elevation of a particular experience to the authori-
tative position of a general law. Comte was neither a historian
nor the intellectual progenitor of historians; but one English
writer, at least, was led by his influence to attempt what amounted
to a new departure in our historical literature, since Robertson
and Hallam, while following Voltaire and Guizot respectively, had
not gone far in developing their principles.
Of Henry Thomas Buckle it may be averred that his History
of Civilization in England (of which the first volume appeared
in 1857, and the second in 1861) 'hit the taste of the time,' as
few works of the kind have done-one of these, perhaps, being
Chillingworth’s Religion of Protestants, of which Buckle says that
'the immense success of this great work must have aided that
movement of which it is itself an evidence. ' Buckle's volumes
were little more than an introduction to his subject, the first
dealing, in a way which can hardly be called rambling, but is


## p. 103 (#133) ############################################

11]
Lecky's Earlier Works
103
a
certainly deficient in perspicuity of plan, with the preliminaries
of the theme, which it ends by sketching in outline, while the
second treats, specifically, of two applications of the method of
enquiry adopted. The historical subjects chosen are the history
of the Spanish intellect from the fifth to the middle of the nine-
teenth, and that of Scotland and the Scottish mind to the end of
the eighteenth, century. Both sections of the volume are so
vigorous, not to say racy, in treatment that the success of this
portion of Buckle's work is not wonderful, even if, to some, it
may seem to indicate, as the book did to Milman, that its author
was himself 'a bit of a bigot. ' In his earlier volume, he had pro-
claimed his views of history and historians with the utmost clearness.
The most celebrated historian was esteemed by him 'manifestly
inferior to the most successful cultivators of physical science'; for
the study of man is still in its infancy, as compared with that of
the movements of nature. No believer in a science of history need,
therefore, disturb himself as to the problem between freewill and pre-
destination which, at one time, overshadowed the world of thought;
history, to him, is that of a world from which men and women
are left out'; and what has to be considered is the influence of
physical laws as governing conditions of climate, food and soil.
Buckle's criticism of existing historical methods was, in some
respects, an expansion of the ideas of Comte. Perhaps, in spite
of his great abilities and accomplishments, and his unwearying
devotion, during the greater part of his manhood, to the task he
had set himself, he lacked the historical, and, more especially, the
ethnographical, knowledge requisite for writing a history of civili-
sation comprehending east as well as west, or even for applying
to the earlier ages of English civilisation standards other than
those of his own age and school of thought. He was, as Leslie
Stephen says, a thorough-going adherent of John Stuart Mill and
the empirical school, and adopted its attitude towards history.
The stimulating and, in many ways, corrective effect of his one
important book is not to be gainsaid, nor the share which he had
in placing the treatment of historical problems on a broader and
more scientific basis.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky composed the earliest of the
works by which he rapidly built up a great reputation, under the
unmistakable influence of Buckle, of whom he was, then, an
ardent admirer. He was repelled by Comte, but acknowledged
that Comte had 'done more than any previous writer to show
that the speculative opinions of any age are phenomena resulting


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104
[CH.
Historians
from the totality of the actual influences of that age? ' The
actual firstfruits of Lecky's Dublin training—if we may pass over
a still earlier anonymous broad-minded essay entitled The Religious
Tendencies of the Age—were the impassioned, likewise anonymous,
Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland (1861). Though this
production bore testimony both to his patriotism and to his
eloquence, it fell quite flat; but it was reprinted after he had
become famous and, again, in an enlarged form, in 1903. Its
initial bad luck disheartened the writer, and left him at a loss
whither to turn. Early in the following year, before beginning
a long succession of travels (centring in visits to libraries) in
Spain and other continental countries, he began the work which
was to spread his reputation almost as quickly as Buckle's had
been spread by his History; or, rather, he wrote a treatise, The
Declining Sense of the Miraculous, which, after being printed
separately, formed the first two chapters of his History of the
Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865).
By means of an argument of transparent clearness, conveyed in
a style congenial to the theme, but revealing, here and there, the
author's power of giving expression to strong feeling, it demon-
strates that European progress is due to the spirit of rationalism,
the opposite of that of theological dogmatism, just as the tolerance
demanded by reason is adverse to the persecution engendered by
bigotry. The argument is developed at great length and with a
superabundance of illustration; but neither the writer's youth
nor the nature of his mind inclined him to brevity, and the
interest of most readers in such a subject can only be sustained
by a copious use of concrete exemplification. Lecky's second
work (which always remained his own favourite), The History of
European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869), dealt
with the same field of philosophical enquiry as its predecessor ; but
it differed from the general survey of European ‘illumination' in
undertaking to examine, as it were ab extra, the origin and
growth of moral ideas which dominated a period of European life,
and to show the development undergone by these ideas in the
course of their contact with the actual condition of men and
things. The later book, necessarily, contains a larger amount of
purely philosophical discussion than the earlier, and it brought
upon the author attacks from the utilitarian school.
Lecky, who, at the time of the publication of his second
1 See the estimate of Comte's position in literature in Memoir of W. E. H. Lecky,
by his wife, p. 54, note.


## p. 105 (#135) ############################################

11] Lecky's History of England 105
important work, had barely passed his thirtieth year, now turned
to political, in lieu of philosophical, history. He was always
averse from fragmentary composition, and the nursing of a great
design seems to have been almost a necessity to his years of
maturity, at all events so long as he remained out of parliament.
He felt that he had a good opportunity of airing his Irish
politics in a parallel or, rather, a contrast, between the Scotch
and Irish business'; and the appearance of Froude's English in
Ireland lent a special force to the full treatment of Irish history
which, at the risk of disproportionateness, he intended to offer
in his forthcoming work.
But A History of England in the
Eighteenth Century (1878—90) was designed on the broadest of
bases, and on lines well according with the most comprehensive
demands of political philosophy: being intended, as the preface
states, “to disengage from the great mass of facts those which
relate to the permanent forces of the nation, or which indicate
some of the most enduring features of the national life. Fore-
most stood the history of political ideas and of their embodiment
in political institutions; but economical and social history re-
ceived a measure of attention far exceeding that usually bestowed
upon it in previous histories of the eighteenth century; while
religious history (the rise of methodism, for instance, and the
progress of religious tolerance) were allowed full consideration.
On the other hand, much that possessed 'a biographical, party
or military interest' was, for lack of space, suppressed, although
Lecky was always interested in individual character or genius,
and never wearied in pursuing the successive phases of the history
of a mind like Burke's, with whom, indeed, he had, undeniably,
some intellectual affinity. The Irish chapters, alike in the second
and in the sixth to eighth volumes, are, on the whole, the most
successful in the work, as most completely covering their subject.
Historical writing such as this can afford to dispense with minor
attractions, and to make no pretence of creating interest either
by accumulation of details or by devices of style.
The last volumes of Lecky's History, published in 1890, con-
tained an account of the rebellion and the union, perhaps the
most striking and the most stirring portion of the entire narrative.
When he had finished his great work, he had, although not yet
much more than fifty years of age, become a little tired of
history’; a happy marriage, and consequent new sphere of life,
together with a sense of unbroken success, may have helped to
make him unwilling to resume the historian's pen, although he was
>


## p. 106 (#136) ############################################

106 Biographers and Memoir-Writers [CH. .
assiduous in the revision of the works he had already produced.
His Democracy and Liberty (1896) took him back into the sphere
of political philosophy; its tone is studiously moderate, although
the applications of the principles enunciated to actual politics are
undisguised. The Map of Life (1899) is more distinctly aphoristic
and was, perhaps in consequence, more widely popular. His latest
publication was, as has been seen, a revised edition of his earliest
contribution to history—a study and a science of which he may
fairly be said, about the turn of the century, to have been the
foremost British representative.
B. BIOGRAPHERS AND MEMOIR-WRITERS
Biography, like portrait-painting, has always flourished in
England—whether because of the love of the concrete which
marks our race, or because of the individualism of character as
well as of intellect to which our insularity and our freedom have
been alike propitious. But, although the number of English
biographies is legion, and many of them have not floated away
into oblivion with the outward facts of the lives recorded in them,
few have secured for themselves a permanent place in our litera-
ture. To some of these, already mentioned under the names of
their authors or of the great writers of whom they treated, we do
not propose to return in the present chapter; passing by even such
a masterpiece of English biography as the Life of Sir Walter Scott
by his son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart? . The subject of this
delightful biography is, indeed, itself incomparable ; for which of
our great English men of letters is Scott's equal in blended
humanity and serenity-except Shakespeare, of whose life we
know next to nothing?
Scott's own historical works, apart from the Tales of a Grand-
father from Scottish and French history, comprise the Scottish
history which he wrote for Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia
immediately after he had completed the last of his imaginative
works, Anne of Geierstein, and the rather earlier Life of Buona-
parte. The latter, written in the midst of pain, sorrow and ruin,'
is an extraordinary effort-a twelvemonth's labour extending over
what, on the original model of his works,' would have filled from
thirteen to fourteen volumes ; but its details met with sharp
criticism, and it can hardly be said to warrant Lockhart's pre-
diction that 'posterity will recognise Napoleon's Livy in Scott 2. '
1 Cf. , ante, vol. xn, chap. 1, and bibliography.
? Lockhart himself published a History of Napoleon Buonaparte (1829) and a History


## p. 107 (#137) ############################################

11] Moore. Southey. Sir William Napier 107
His influence upon historical literature, which continued and
immeasurably developed that of Châteaubriand, was of far greater
importance than were his own contributions to it. Perhaps the
most direct and signal expression which it found was in French
literature; Thierry's Norman Conquest, as has been well observed,
could hardly have been written, or at least written as it was, without
Ivanhoe? But, at home, too, the doctrine of local colouring had
impressed itself, once for all, upon historical narrative.
Byron's autobiographical memoirs have perished, perhaps not
unhappily for his fame, inasmuch as he was never written down by
anyone but himself? '; Moore's life of his friend (1830), appended
to Byron's Letters and Journals, however, with all its short-
comings, whether from the critical or from the purely historical
point of view, will never be laid aside. Moore had previously
tried his hand at biography in a superficial but pleasant Life of
Sheridan (1825); at a later date, he wrote a Life of Lord Edward
Fitzgerald, of whom he had no personal knowledge as he had of
Sheridan and Byron. He also left behind him an autobiography,
which was edited, together with his journals and correspondence,
by the willing hand of his friend lord John Russell.
Southey's History of the Peninsular War, already noted
among his other historical and biographical writings: was, to all
intents and purposes, superseded by Sir William Napier's work
on the same subject (1828–40). Napier, in the words of his
biographer, had himself 'nobly shared in making a history which
he afterwards so eloquently wrote. Yet his book, while con-
taining passages of magnificent elan, by reason of its lengthy and
general method of treatment survives chiefly as a military history,
in which character it has few competitors in our literature5.
of the late War, with Sketches of Nelson, Wellington and Napoleon (1832). As to his
editorship of The Quarterly Review, see, ante, vol. XII, chap. viii. For some of his
imaginative works, see bibliography.
i Barante, too, in his Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne, presents himself as under
the same influence. Cf. the entire sec. III of bk. v of Fueter, E. , Geschichte der
neueren Historiographie (1911).
2 Cf. , ante, vol. XI, p. 103.
3 Cf. , ante, vol. XI, p. 167.
The first lord Aberdare.
s of the famous Wellington Despatches, edited by lonel Gurwood (13 vols.
1834—9), which attracted the ingenuous admiration of their author himself, those
which have reference to the Peninsular war are contained in vols. IV to xi (1835–8).
Sir William Napier's Life and Opinions of Sir Charles Napier (1857), though written
in the spirit of a knight errant. . . to vindicate the fame of his brother Charles, as The
Peninsular War had been written to vindicate that of his chief, Sir John Moore,' is
rendered quite unsafe by partisanship, reproducing, as it does, the assertions of his
Conquest of Scinde, and Administration of Scinde, books whose noble qualities are
marred by violence of attack as well as by eagerness of defence. No more fiery spirit
9
)


## p. 108 (#138) ############################################

108 Biographers and Memoir-Writers [CH.
The biographical form of composition was adopted by William
Roscoe in his chief historical works, which included an English
version of one of the best, because one of the sincerest, auto-
biographies of all times, The Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini, a
Florentine Artist : written by himself. Roscoe was drawn to the
study of the Italian renascence by a congeniality of taste and
feeling which he had cultivated, on his own account, from his
youth up, and to which he had remained true through all the
vicissitudes of an active career of business and politics. He thus
became a mainspring of the intellectual movement which led
many English lovers of letters and art in his and the following
generation to turn once more to Italy as the chief fountain of
their inspiration. From his youth onwards, he had cherished the
idea of making Lorenzo de' Medici the subject of his first work;
nor would it have been possible to find any second figure of the
Italian renascence so typical of both its political and its literary
side. The book which, at his own cost, he printed (1796) in
sumptuous fashion was itself short, but furnished forth with
appendixes of excerpts, sparkling in Latin, and with a series of
notes seductive to a learned eye. The unqualified success of
Roscoe's Lorenzo was not, altogether, repeated in his Life of Leo X;
which covered ground, in part, too dangerous to be trodden with-
out censure. But, though the Italian translation of the later work
was placed on the Index, while the original proved by no means
palatable to the adherents of the German reformation, it is a
delightful book and breathes the atmosphere of that Rome from
which Benvenuto preferred to withdraw on the death of the
Medicean pope. In his later years, Roscoe published an interest-
ing volume of further illustrations of his Life of Lorenzo, in defence
of his hero, besides producing an edition of Pope. He had in him
the making of a historian of civilisation, as well as of a merchant-
prince; but life is an unkind task-master, and it is to his honour
that, by the efforts of his own literary genius, he succeeded in
doing much for the humanities which he loved 1.
A later, and, to some moderns, less attractive, phase of the
renascence movement was brought nearer to English readers by the
one larger work published, amidst a number of smaller contributions
to the literature of scholarship and adjoining fields of research, by
ever burnt in the heart of a historical writer; yet he was never more himself than when
inditing an unfrequent apology. -John Campbell's Lives of the Admirals (1742—4) went
through several editions, and an abridgment appeared so late as 1870.
J. A. Symonds' contributions to the history of the Italian renascence, see,
ante, vol. XIII, chap. XIII.
1 As


## p. 109 (#139) ############################################

11] Mark Pattison. Sir James Stephen
109
9
Mark Pattison, the renowned rector of Lincoln College, Oxford.
Yet, his Isaac Casaubon (1875), though an admirable piece of work,
fitly described by Pattison's pupil and friend Richard Copley
Christie as 'the best biography in our language of a scholar, in the
sense in which Pattison', in common with Casaubon and Scaliger,
understood the word,' was not produced till the author found
himself anticipated (by Jacob Bernays) in the life of Scaliger, for
which, during thirty years, he had been preparing. Although much
of what Pattison wrote besides Isaac Casaubon (including the
collected Essays and a characteristic life of Milton in the 'English
Men of Letters' series) is worthy of preservation, it was in his own
posthumously published Memoirs (reaching to 1860) that he made
an addition of surpassing interest to biographical literature. His
express prohibition of the cancelling of a word of these Memoirs,
except a few paragraphs at the beginning which seemed to be of
too egotistical a character, was conscientiously obeyed; and the
result is a book of self-confession—but of the sort that obliges the
writer to confess his opinion of others as well as of himself. He
tells us how it was only at an advanced period of his life that
he had come to understand Goethe's ideal of self-culture, and
the pollution and disfigurement' of it by literary ambition.
Luckily, 'the vulgar feeling that a literary life means one de-
voted to the making of books' so far prevailed with Pattison that
his pen was rarely idle, and that he made himself memorable, not
only in the educational history of his university, but, also, in the
history of learning and letters.
Whatever may be the place of Sir James Stephen among the
historical writers of the earlier Victorian period, he is sure of
remembrance among English biographical essayists. His 'works,'
no doubt (as Charles Lamb might have said), repose, for the most
part, at the Colonial office, which he ruled for many years as
under-secretary. But the fruits of his scanty leisure, gathered in
1849 under the title Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, together
with Lectures on the History of France, the solitary published
memorial of his efforts as William Smyth's successor in the
1 See his notice of Pattison in vol. XLIV, D. of N. B. R. C. Christie was himself a
scholar of the type to which he refers, and produced, besides other scholarly work,
his excellent monograph, Étienne Dolet, the Martyr of the Renaissance (1861). Cf. ,
ante, vol. XII, p. 333.
2 The lectures of William Smyth, who resided at Peterhouse for more than forty
years—the last of four modern history professors belonging to that college, of whom
two preceded Gray-form, together with those of Sir James Stephen, a link between
the earlier and the later days of history teaching in the English universities. At
Cambridge, the call for serious historical study had hardly begun to be raised in
6


## p. 110 (#140) ############################################

110 Biographers and Memoir-Writers [[
CH.
6
modern history chair at Cambridge, display high literary qualities,
with characteristic features of their own. To his legal training,
Stephen owed his introduction to administrative work, and he was
the maker of many constitutions, before, in his Lectures on the
History of France (which extended over the whole period from
the separation of Gaul from the Roman empire to Louis XIV), he
expounded at length the inner political history of that country.
The 'sociological' view of history was an abomination to him.
His early connection, strengthened by marriage, with the evan-
gelical school of religious thought, and, more especially, with
that 'Clapham sect,' to which one of the best known of his essays
offers a lasting tribute, lent force to his religious convictions
and warmth to his moral sympathies. He could not see more
than one side to the conflict between the rise of Christianity and
the decay of the Roman empire, and he perceived the retributive
hand of Providence in the troubles of the church of Rome
following on the persecution of the Albigenses. But, as time
went on, his wide reading, combined with the teachings of ex-
perience, broadened his sympathies, more especially as he did not
transfer his official dogmatism into his best literary work. "The
historian,' he says, “aims at one kind of praise, the lecturer in
history at another. ' In many of his essays, as well as in those of
his lectures which dealt with the Power of the Pen in France,' he
succeeded in blending with a vivid characterisation of real men
something of the imaginative power that projects itself into great
lives of the past.
There was, perhaps, more difference than resemblance in the
gifts which the two sons of Sir James Stephen respectively in-
herited from their father, or which were peculiar to themselves;
but, though Sir Leslie Stephen, in his Life of Sir James Fitzjames
Stephen, naturally dwelt on family features, the elder brother's
interests did not lie in the direction of biographical or other
history? Leslie, on the other hand, among his many claims to an
enduring literary fame, has none superior to those arising out of
Smyth's, or even in Stephen's, time. Yet, Smyth was not only a highly accomplished
man-a poet of some reputation and an excellent talker—but well-read and discerning,
a moderate whig, able to admire Burke without condemning Mackintosh. Thus, his
Lectures on the French Revolution (1840), considering the incompleteness of authentic
materials, may be described as one of the earliest adequate and dispassionate English
treatments of their subject.
1 His chief eminence was that of a jurist; as a Saturday reviewer, he dealt, mainly,
with subjects appertaining to moral, political, or social philosophy. His Story of
Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey (1885) was an exceptional product
of his Indian life.
6


## p. 111 (#141) ############################################

11]
Collections of Lives
III
his work as a biographer, and as the first architect of the greatest
monument of national biography possessed by our literature.
Among collective works narrating in succession the lives of
occupants of particular offices, the precedence belongs to the
biographies of royal personages. Considerable popularity was
attained by Lives of the Queens of England (1840–8), by Agnes
and Elizabeth Strickland, published, by the wish of the latter and
elder sister, under the name of Agnes only. She followed it up by
Lives of the Queens of Scotland and English Princesses con-
nected with the Royal Succession of Great Britain and Lives of
the Bachelor Kings of England, from William Rufus to Edward VI,
to which series her sister Elizabeth was, again, a contributor.
Other series ensued, including both Tudor and Stewart princesses,
and the seven bishops. She was not a powerful writer, but inde-
fatigable in the accumulation of illustrative detail and conscientious
in the use of it. After the completion of Miss Strickland's chief
work, Mrs Mary Anne Everett Green, who, previously, under her
maiden name Wood, had published Letters of Royal Ladies of
Great Britain, brought out Lives of the Princesses of England
(1849—55), on which she had been long engaged. The very large
amount of valuable work done by her as one of the editors of the
Calendars of State Papers at the Record office left her little
leisure for literary activity of her own; but she produced, among
other books, Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria (1857), a volume
based entirely on original research, and collected much material
for a series of lives of our Hanoverian queens, to which was to
have been prefixed a life of the electress Sophia. It is to be
regretted that this plan remained unexecuted, for Mrs Everett
Green had sound historical judgment as well as extensive and
accurate knowledge of our national history, from the Elizabethan
age downwards.
A biographer of royalty, also, was Sir Theodore Martin, whose Life
of the Prince Consort (1875—80), undertaken by queen Victoria's
desire, is founded largely on original papers, in part of great value
for diplomatic history. Martin, who, while an active lawyer, was one
of the most accomplished as well as one of the most versatile men
of letters of his times—essayist, poetic translator and parodist-
also wrote, besides an early memoir of his comrade in satire,
William Edmonstoune Aytoun, a Life of Lord Lyndhurst (1883)
i The story of The Dictionary of National Biography is told in Memoir of George
Smith, by Sir Sidney Lee, prefixed to vol. 1 of the first supplement of the Dictionary
(1901). As to Sir Leslie Stephen, see, post, chap. III.


## p. 112 (#142) ############################################

112 Biographers and Memoir-Writers [CH.
>
a
and a memoir of his own adored wife, the great and beautiful
actress best known by her maiden name Helen Faucit (1900).
The Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury (1860—76) by
Walter Farquhar Hook, dean of Chichester, and previously vicar
of Leeds, form a characteristic memorial of the evening 'leisure'
of a long life devoted to the service of the church whose entire
history is surveyed in this long series of volumes ? .
An even
greater success than that obtained by this series, though partly
of the mixed kind which does not make for edification, attended
the publication of lord Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chancellors
(1846—7) and Lives of the Lord Chief Justices of England
(1849—57). The Lives of Lord Lyndhurst and Lord Brougham,
which followed (1860), filled the cup of remonstrance to overflowing.
(The life of Lyndhurst had, as was just seen, to be, more or less
adequately, written over again by another hand); as for Brougham,
he had found time to add to his innumerable literary offspring his
own Life and Times, which was published posthumously (1871). )
Far more attractive, though their humour is by no means devoid
of occasional causticity, are the pen-and-ink portraits of the
Scottish bench and bar in the first quarter of the century
published in Memorials of His Time (1856), by lord Cockburn,
biographer of lord Jeffrey (1852).
The most important English biography produced in the mid-
Victorian age was David Masson's Life of Milton, narrated in
connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History
of his Time (1859–80). The full title of the book must be given
in order to indicate its range ; since, when the author had, at last,
brought the work to a conclusion, he was warranted in expressing
his satisfaction in having been able to persevere to the very end
in the original plan, omitting nothing, slurring nothing, that the plan
required. ' In a word, this classical book is a history of as momentous
a period of twoscore years as is to be found in the national life of
England-grouped, on the principle enunciated by Carlyle,round the
personal life and labours of one of its greatest men and one of the
greatest of English writers. Everything Milton wrote is here taken
into account: of every important poem or prose-work from his hand
a complete history and a critical analysis are supplied ; and he is
consistently viewed in connection with his times, with the move-
ments which shaped their course, and with the men from whom
those movements sprang, in state and in church, in peace and in
war, in learning and in literature. Whether it be in the fascinating
i Cf. , ante, vol. XII, p. 274.


## p. 113 (#143) ############################################

11]
Masson's Life of Milton.
Church
113
picture of Milton in his youth, pure as the Castalian fount from
which his soul drank inspiration, and rich with ten talents and the
resolve to multiply by cultivating them--or in the complete
review of the prose-works which Pattison and others deplored,
but which Masson preferred to explain—or in the survey of
the last seven years, and of Milton's surroundings in life and
literature, and his solitude in the presence of Paradise Lost—this
biography nowhere loses sight of its subject or contracts it within
narrower limits than are necessary in relating the life of a great
man who, while his name belongs to all times, was himself part of
his own. Though the magnitude of the scheme necessitates frequent
surveys or retrospects, which sometimes look like digressions, but
are not really such, the general arrangement is clear; here and
there, perhaps, the scaffolding is still visible. Masson's style,
rather conspicuously, lacked ease and grace, without possessing
that irresistible note of individuality—the individuality of genius
-which belonged to the style of his friend Carlyle. But, in
candour and sincerity, at all events, the biographer of Milton
was equal to the editor of Cromwell's letters, and he surpassed
the greater writer in assiduity of research and in the simplicity of
his attitude towards the facts of history,
Of the great masters of continental literatures, Dante missed
an English biographer of the highest qualities in Richard William
Church, though the essays on him by this delightful writer and
admirable critic are among the most notable of his literary pro-
ductions, which include short lives of St Anselm and of Spenser? .
Goethe, to whom, from Henry Crabb Robinson, the author of the
Diary, onwards, a growing body of English readers had, largely under
the influence of Carlyle, come to look up with veneration, found in
George Henry Lewes the most widely popular of all his biographers.
Lewes had made a name for himself by his Biographical History
of Philosophy (1845–6), as well as by less ambitious work; in his
Life of Goethe (1855) he produced a work of great literary skill ;
yet it unmistakably lacks the deeper note, which he may have been
well-judged in not attempting to force.
John Forster, by his Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith (1854),
| For Masson's other biographical works, see bibliography. A biographical historian
of considerable merit, who also produced a useful edition of Dryden, was William
Dougal Christie, whose Life of the First Earl of Shaftesbury (1871) deserves com.
mendation as a book of value as well as of capacity, though the ‘rehabilitation of
Achitophel may not be regarded as complete.
? As to dean Church, cf. , ante, vol. XII, pp. 271—2. The distinguished Italian
scholar, Arthur James Butler, published, in 1885, a short Dante, his Times and his Work.
5
E. L XIV.
CH. II.
8


## p. 114 (#144) ############################################

114 Biographers and Memoir-Writers [CH. .
his Life of Walter Savage Landor (1869) and his Life of Charles
Dickens(1872–4), together with some admirable biographical essays
and the first volume of a Life of Swift, took a place in the first rank
of English biographers, and was, for a long time, the friend and
oracle of many eminent English men of letters of his day. In
his earlier years, he had cherished a more concentrated kind of
ambition. So far back as 1830, he had thought of writing the life
of Cromwell; and, although this was not to become the chief work
of his maturity, it was included in his valuable series entitled
Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonwealth (1836–9). The
life of Sir John Eliot was afterwards (1864) expanded by him
into a larger biography, and he had previously (1860) published a
brace of monographs (one of them enlarged from an earlier essay)
based on a careful examination of parliamentary material and
dealing with two critical episodes of the struggle between Charles I
and the Long parliament. Forster had entered deeply into the
spirit of the great struggle of the Stewart age, as is shown by the
essay On English Freedom under Plantagenets and Tudors pre-
fixed to the second of these works. Altogether, whatever may
have been his, in the circumstances very excusable, foibles, his
literary life was one of generous purpose, and of rare energy.
Among the numerous memoir-writers proper of the century,
there can be no doubt that, notwithstanding the habit of self-
depreciation, at times truly pathetic, to which his fastidious and
complicated nature was secretly prone, Charles Cavendish Fulke
Greville bears away the palm. The three series of The Greville
Memoirs (1874–87), which comment on the course of English
politics and society from the accession of George IV to the year
1860, in some measure differ from one another; in the earlier
volumes, the writer adheres to the principle of leaving time to
soften, and even to arrest, his judgments; in the second, and, no
doubt, in the third, series occasional suppression was, in con-
sequence of the relative nearness of events, found necessary by
the editor, Henry Reeve; while, on the other hand, the years
brought with them a gentler tone, together with an occasional
weariness of the great world. For the rest, Charles Greville
was always ready to play the part of mediator as well as that of
confidant; and his essential qualities as a memoir-writer re-
mained to him throughout. He was gifted with an insight into
character hardly surpassed by any of the great predecessors whom
he could never quite keep out of view. His style, though, as it were,
instinctively polished, was free from all desire for epigrammatic


## p. 115 (#145) ############################################

11]
Croker and Creevey
I15
effect; he never says either too much or too little. Neither
personal goodwill nor personal dislike hindered him from perceiving
the failings of Wellington or ignoring the merits of Peel; and the
vagaries of Brougham diverted him too much to allow of his
even here lapsing into caricature. The set characters which, on
the occasion of their deaths, he drew of the former two, and of
personages so diverse as Melbourne, Althorp and Harrowby,
Talleyrand and Macaulay, lord George Bentinck and Charles
Butler, lady Harrowby and Mme de Lieven, Luttrell, Alvanley and
D'Orsay, are all, more or less, masterly, and this list is by no means
exhaustive. When he occasionally tried his hand at a political
pamphlet or letter, neither his force nor his self-restraint deserted
him, and his anonymous book The Policy of England to Ireland
(1845), in which he advocated a policy of concurrent religious
endowments in Ireland, was a rare instance of political foresight
as well as of historical judgment.
The Croker Papers, not published till 1884, when nearly a
generation had passed after John Wilson Croker's death (1857),
and more than half a century since his retirement from active
public life (1832) throw a great deal of light upon the bitter
party conflicts of the twenty-two years during which he held the
secretaryship to the admiralty. In this office, his first important
task was to defend the Walcheren expedition ; but attack rather
than defence was his métier. He was of the inner councils of
.
his party on most of the great political questions of these years,
and among the unconvinced opponents both of parliamentary
reform and the repeal of the corn-laws. But his chief services to
the conservatives (he was the inventor of this name, scouted by
Disraeli, who had no love to spare for him) were rendered in the
pages of The Quarterly Review. The Croker Papers, which are
held together by a very thin biographical thread, derive their
chief interest from the letters comprised in them from the duke of
Wellington, lord George Bentinck and others, and from Croker's
occasional journal addressed to his patron, the marquis of
Hertford.
The Creevey Papers, published in 1903, about seventy years
after the death of the writer or recipient of the letters of which,
together with fragments of diaries, they mainly consist, have no
pretension to rank in historical significance by the side of The
Croker Papers, or in literary value by that of The Greville
Memoirs.