No More Learning

Macaulay's essays were not republished
till 1845. The collection then approved by him contained all his
contributions to periodical literature which he decided to preserve
in this form, but not all that are of interest from a literary or
biographical point of view; and to the essays contained in it has
to be added the notable series of articles contributed by him to
The Encyclopaedia Britannica (on Atterbury, Bunyan, Goldsmith,
Johnson and the younger Pitt). His speeches (published, in self-
defence, as corrected by himself, in 1854) are touched upon below;
the code of Indian criminal procedure, the completion of which
was chiefly his work (1837), falls outside our range.
His literary fame rests on his Essays and his History. The
essays, taken as a whole, mark an epoch both in the literature of
the essay, and in historical literature. As a rule, they consist of
reviews, not of the book of which the title is prefixed to the essay,
but of the subject with which the book is concerned, treated from
whatever point of view may commend itself to the author. Thus,
they are so many detached pieces of political or literary history, or
of that combination of both in which Macaulay delighted and
excelled, generally taking a narrative form and preferentially
enclosed in a biographical framework. The qualities to which
they owe their chief attractiveness may, without pedantry, be
i See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. VI.


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62
[CH.
Historians
1
described as appertaining to the art, rather than to the science,
of history. The style and general manner of treatment rise or fall
in accordance with the subject and with the mood of the author,
and that to which he desires to dispose the reader—'historical
articles,' he says himself, 'may rise to the highest altitude or sink
to the levity and colloquial ease of Horace Walpole. This is my
theory. ' That he did not carry it out to the full, was due to the
limitations of his own literary genius. Character-drawing was his
forte: he had learnt this from the great masters in verse and prose
of his favourite later seventeenth, and earlier eighteenth, centuries,
and, at times, seemed almost to better the instruction. As to style,
he was capable of gorgeous pomp of speech, of dazzling splendour
of rhetorical ornament; to sublimity, he could not rise. His wit
was trenchant and, at times, irresistible, and his satiric power was
never at a loss; but his humour sometimes lacked delicacy and his
sarcasm the more refined shades of irony. His essays have much
to charm and even to fascinate; but to the psychological criticism
of the later French masters they are strangers.
It would, of course, be a great error to regard Macaulay's
essays as uniformly open to such criticisms as the above; there
are, necessarily, great differences between the earlier and the later
in a collection extending over something like a score of years.
The earliest of the Edinburgh articles—that on Milton—at once
attracted attention to the new writer. Yet, though the passionate
tone both of admiration and of invective in Macaulay's essay is
that of youth, the gorgeous rhetoric and the audacious substitution
of paradox for philosophical conclusion are not peculiar to this
stage of his productivity. In one of the very last—though not
quite the last—of these essays, that on Addison, Macaulay is
manifestly master of a mellowness of tone and calm dignity
signally appropriate to a subject to which his whole heart went
forth. Yet, the same inexhaustible flow of illustration is here,
again, accompanied by the same indiscriminate profusion of pre-
determined praise and blame-nothing, in literary, or in other,
respects, can be too good for Addison, and nothing too bad for Pope.
In an extremely acute, though not hyper-sympathetic estimate
of Macaulay's literary qualities, J. Cotter Morison divides the
whole body of his essays and other smaller pieces into subject-
groups; and, if we accept this distribution, there will hardly be
any doubt as to which of these groups bears away the palm. Of
the essays on English history, several may rank among his very
finest work; and the essayist is on sure ground, and at his best, in


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11] Macaulay's Essays and History 63
the two essays on Chatham, separated, in their dates of production,
by ten years, but forming, together, a biographical whole worthy
of its great national theme. There is, however, one other section
of the group which calls for even more special attention. These
are the two essays on Warren Hastings and on Clive, to both of
which historical criticism must take exception in particular points,
but in which the genius of the historian for marshalling facts often
remote and obscure, and for presenting the whole array with mag-
nificent effect, achieves an almost unprecedented triumph. In the
essays on foreign history, Macaulay was less successful; that on
Frederick the great had little value before Carlyle, and less
afterwards; while the subject of Ranke's Popes made too great
demands upon Macaulay's powers as a philosophical historian.
Finally, while, of the controversial' essays, the author himself
judiciously thought fit to exclude more than one from republica-
tion, the critical, especially if the delightful late essay on Temple
and one or two others of a mixed kind are included, form the most
numerous series in the collection. Macaulay's power of recalling
not only the great figures of literature, but, also, the surroundings
and very atmosphere of their lives, will keep such articles as that
on Boswell's Johnson favourites, though the censure of Croker
may be fully discounted and the belief have become general that
Boswell was no fool. In the article on Bacon, on the other hand,
the essayist was at his worst, and, in the main argument of the
philosophical portion of the essay, stands self-condemned. The
whole indictment was, at first anonymously, refuted by James
Spedding, in Evenings with a Reviewer, or Macaulay and Bacon
(1848), and, in a more comprehensive sense, by the whole of that
distinguished critic's Life and Letters of Bacon (1861–74), one of
the ablest as well as one of the most elaborate of English biographical
monuments. In Macaulay's contributions to The Encyclopaedia
Britannica, written towards the close of his life, the historical
element is dominant; but they show unabated literary power.
When, in 1848, the first two volumes of The History of
England, to which Macaulay's ever-growing public had looked
forward for many years, at last appeared, and were received with
unbounded applause, it was already a less extensive plan to which
the great achievement would clearly have to be restricted. His
hopes of carrying on the work, in the first instance, to the
beginning of the régime of Sir Robert Walpole—a period of
over thirty years—and, thence, peradventure, a century, or even
further, beyond, gradually became dreams; and, in the end, he


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64
[CH.
Historians
would have been happy could he have brought down the history
consecutively to the death of his hero, William III, instead of the
narratives of that event and of the preceding death of James II
remaining episodes written in anticipation. After India, parliament
and official life had claimed him, and it had not been till 1847 that
he had found himself wholly free. In 1849, he declined the professor-
ship of modern history at Cambridge, and, though he returned
to parliament in 1852, the broken state of his health determined
him, in 1856, to withdraw altogether from public life. In the
previous year, vols. III and iv of his History had been published and
received with great, though no longer unmixed, favour. He had not
quite finished his fifth volume before his death, at the end of 1859.
Macaulay's History remains a great book, and one of the
landmarks of English historical literature, albeit, strictly speaking,
but a fragment, and neither without shortcomings nor free from
faults. His innate conviction that historical writing is a great
art, whose object it is to produce an effect serviceable to virtue
and truth by the best use of the materials at its disposal, led him
to devote an almost equal measure of assiduous attention to the
collection of those materials and to the treatment of them.
Research, prosecuted indefatigably, through many years, in the
byways quite as diligently as in the highways, among pamphlets
and broadsheets, backstairs reports and the rumours of the
streets, enabled him to paint pictures of English life and society,
more especially the famous general survey which closed the pre-
liminary portion of his History-full of colour and variety, to
a degree wholly without precedent. Research of the same kind
among historians and memoir-writers of an age in which obser-
vation of character, a chief heritage of the drama, had been
carried to a completeness never reached before supplied the
touches and the turns by which he was able to distribute light
and shade over his biographical passages and personal portraits,
and to impart to his entire narrative a generous and rich
colouring like that of the choicest tapestry. At the same time,
it cannot be denied that, while, in this never-ending process
of research, like a great advocate gifted with the faculty of
sweeping everything into his net except what he has no desire
to find there, he never lost sight of facts that would be of use and
of value to him, he, on occasion, omitted to bring in facts adverse
to his conclusions. Hence, he sometimes fell into grievous errors
which he was not always at pains to correct when they were
pointed out, and which have thus remained as flaws on the surface


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11] Macaulay's History of England 65
of the marble? And, even when there is no question of error,
the grandeur of his theme, sometimes, carries him away into
a treatment of its main personages, if not of its most important
transactions, resistlessly influenced by his sympathies and anti-
pathies. Hence, William of Orange, the hero of the epic, and his
unfortunate adversary, James II, are drawn with much the same
imaginative partiality.
But, besides Macaulay's inexhaustible store of materials, and
the apposite use which his prodigious power of memory enabled
him, at all times, to make of them in prompt profusion, other
causes contributed to the overwhelming popularity of his History.
One of these was his power of construction—the arrangement
of the narrative and the ordering of its parts and stages.
Where else, in our own literature, at all events, shall we find
a similar mastery over what may be called the architecture of
a great historical work, in which learning, imagination and moral
purposes have alike been factors? The art of telling a story-
here, the story of a crisis in the destinies of a great nation-
depends on this, as well as on the details of composition. In
the latter respect, Macaulay's pre-eminence is unchallenged; and
generation upon generation will continue to admire the luxuriance
of a diction capable of changing suddenly into brief pithy
sentences, that follow one another like the march of mailed
warriors, and the vis vivida of a style which enchains the atten-
tion of young and old, and wearies only because of an element
of iteration in its music. The great whig, protestant and
patriotically English History, with its grand epical movement,
its brilliant colouring and its irresistible spirit of perfect harmony
between the writer and his task, is, thus, one of the literary
masterpieces of the Victorian age.
1 The more important criticisms of Macaulay's facts and deductions are enumerated
by Sir Leslie Stephen in his article on Macaulay in D. of N. B. vol. XXXIV (1893).
(See bibliography. ) The most comprehensive of these are to be found in John Paget's
New • Examen' (1861), supplemented by two additional papers of minor moment.
Paget justly observes that Macaulay's habit of citing a number of authorities, frequently
without specifying dates or pages, is most trying to the reader who wishes to verify.
This way of dealing with evidence is conspicuously misleading in his accounts of
Marlborough and of Penn, each of which, as a whole, must be set down as a gross
misrepresentation, even if particular objections, such as the confusion of George Penne
with William Penn, may be held not to be absolutely proved. In Macaulay's treatment
of the problem of responsibility for the massacre of Glencoe, his partisanship is too
palpable to allow of the reader being deluded even by the doubtful use made of
Gallienus Redivivus. The prejudice shown against Claverhouse is more excusable,
and the correctness of the picture of the Highlands, although certainly one-sided,
is, at least, debatable.
CH. II.
5
6
E, L, XIV.


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66
[CH.
Historians
.
The career of Sir Archibald Alison as a historical writer
resembles lord Macaulay's in the rapid (though, in Alison's
case, not sudden) rise to abnormal popularity, but differs from
it in other respects, and, above all, in the gradual dwindling of
his reputation into that of the writer of a useful summary, whose
opinions on most subjects may safely be assumed even without
consulting him. Alison, herein, again, like Macaulay, was a
successful essay-writer as well as historian ; in quantity, at least,
his contributions to Blackwood's Magazine can hardly have been
þrivalled. In 1829, he planned a history of the first French
revolution, partly under the influence of Cléry and Huc's account
bf the last days of Louis XVI, and still more under that of
impressions and ideas which had occupied him since his visit-
the first of many—to Paris in 1814. After his History of Scottish
Criminal Law had appeared in 1832—3, in the latter year the
first two volumes of his History of Europe from 1798_to_1815
followed. He was not daunted by the silence of the great reviews,
or by the indifference of most other criticism ; and the remaining
eight volumes of the work came out at regular intervals—the last
being completed by him (with some solemnity) in time for publi-
cation on Waterloo day, 1842. Later editions followed, both at
home and in the United States ; and the work was translated
into French, German and Arabic. Its success was unbroken, and,
in 1852, he began a Continuation of the History from 1815 to that
year, which he finished in 1859. In spite of the wide popularity of
the original work, the Continuation met with a cold reception from
historical critics and was again strangely ignored where it might
have been expected to be congenially welcomed. The researches
on which it rested were, necessarily, less extensive than those which
had been made by Alison for his earlier volumes : the archives of
Europe had scarcely begun to reveal the secret history of these
later years. Although, as a whole, the work cannot fairly be said
to have fallen flat, its political and social pessimism came to be
taken as a matter of course; and the whole of The History
of Europe is now falling into oblivion. Not the least interesting,
though the most prolix, of its author's lesser productions is his
(posthumously published) Autobiography (to 1862). His life (he
long held the sheriffship of Lanarkshire) had been as honourable
as it was successful, and singularly attractive in its domestic
relations, and he was a good judge of both men and manners.
We saw above how the study of our national history in its
foundations, or, in other words, of medieval English history in


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11]
Sir Francis Palgrave
67
its documents, including, in these, the institutions and the language
of the people, had begun with Sharon Turner, but that he proved
unable to present the results of his labours adequately in an
organic historical narrative. Sir Francis Palgrave, who, besides
first strongly impressing upon Englishmen the value of this study,
by his own example pointed the way to a free original use of the
national records by historians of imaginative and constructive
power, was a writer to whom the attribute of genius can hardly
be denied. Of Jewish extraction (he changed his patronymic
Cohen in middle life), he had, while carrying on the work of a
solicitor, long been interested in literary and antiquarian studies,
and, besides occasionally contributing to the great quarterly
reviews, had, in 1818, edited an Anglo-Norman political chanson.
In 1822, he came forward with a plan for the publication of the
records, which met with the approval of the Record commission ;
and, from 1827 (in which year he was called to the bar, where he
was chiefly occupied with pedigree cases) to 1837, he edited for it
a series of volumes. In 1831, he brought out a History of the
Anglo-Saxons (the first volume of a History of England) in 'The
Family Library,' and, in the following year, The Rise and Progress
of the English Commonwealth, covering the same period, of which it
furnishes a fascinating as well as lucid review. The book, deservedly,
had a great success ; nor was anything else so good of the kind
produced before John Richard Green. In 1834, he published
An Essay on the Original Authority of the King's Council.
In 1837, he proceeded still further in the line of popular treat-
ment in Truth and Fictions of the Middle Ages: the Merchant
and the Friar. In the next
In the next year, he was appointed deputy-
keeper of the reconstituted and reorganised Record office. The
duties of this post, held by him during the remainder of his long
life, he discharged with great zeal and energy, issuing a series
of twenty-two annual reports. Of his chief work, The History
of Normandy and of England, the earlier volumes did not appear
till 1851 and 1857 respectively, and the last two not till after
his death, which occurred in 1861. He had thus, without either
haste or pause, laboured so as to earn for himself a meed of
recognition from the historian who was to take up his work in
the same field, though from very different points of view.
Freeman pronounced Palgrave the first English writer of great
original powers who had devoted himself to the early history
1 In a review of The History of Normandy and of England in the London Guardian
of July 1851, cited in Stephens's Life and Letters of E. d. Freeman, vol. 1, p. 116.
5—2


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68
[CH.
Historians
of his own country, and judged his faults to spring from the
exuberance of a mind of great natural gifts.
Palgrave's treatment of early English history was not only the
earliest on a scale commensurate with the importance of the
subject ; but it, also, was the first attempt, on such a scale, to
deduce ruling conclusions from a study of the development of
legal principles based on those which controlled the life and
conditions of the Roman empire. The monarchical power
founded on these conceptions was, as he held, what domi-
nated the growth of the Germanic kingdoms—so that ‘Clovis'
and Offa were representations of imperial ideas; but, in England,
it was the free judicial institutions of the Germanic communities
which, in their turn, interfered to prevent these traditions from
leading to absolutism, and called forth the beginnings of our
constitutional life. Palgrave regarded the series of conquests,
usually supposed to have successively changed the essential con-
ditions as well as the forms of our national life, as anything
but subversive in their effects; and, even with regard to the
English conquest, was confirmed in this view by his paradoxical
belief that, for the most part, the Britons were Germanic, not
Celtic, in origin-Belgic Kymrys, whose neighbours and kin are to
be found on the continent as Saxons and Frisians! This tenet
illustrates the occasional audacity of Palgrave's speculations ;
and the general notion of the dominating influence of the Roman
imperial idea reached its height in him, before it was overthrown
by the endeavours of the Germanist school, which was in the
ascendant before the close of his historical labours. But the
inspiriting and stimulating effect of those labours has, of late,
been undervalued rather than overrated; and an enduring
memorial of their value has long been a desideratum, which is
now in process of being supplied.
The date of John Mitchell Kemble's most important contribu-
tion to historical literature was earlier than that of Palgrave's
by a year or two; and, in the purpose to which he diverted
his researches he connects himself with the Germanist school
rather than with what may be called Palgrave's imperialist
tendency. Kemble—though he appears to have known nothing
of Waitz—is essentially Germanistic in the groundwork of his
teaching; and, in the preface to his best known work, The
1 Cf. Vinogradoff, P. , op. cit. pp. 11 ff.
? For a full statement of the origin and development of this school or group,
see ibid. pp. 36 ff.


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11] John Mitchell Kemble. Freeman
69
Sacons in England (1849), written at a time when the founda-
tions of existing European politics seemed giving way on all sides,
declared his opinion that to her institutions and principles of
government, bequeathed to her by Teutonic ancestors, England,
in a great measure, owed her pre-eminence among nations, her
stability and her security. No doubt, this work and, even more
so, the Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici by which it was pre-
ceded, and the less important collection of later state papers,
which followed it, were the productions of an antiquary rather
than of a historian; The Saxons in England offers a series of
dissertations on materials, unwelded into an organic whole.
The writer has little interest in the traditions of the conquest
handed down by the Chronicle and Bede; what concerns him
is the gradual evolution of institutions, mainly of Teutonic origin,
although these began to spread among us while Britain was still
under Roman dominion, and the population was even more largely
Celtic than its lower orders continued to remain. In Kemble's
view, the social changes that accompanied the gradual establish-
ment of these institutions were due to the conditions and new
forms of landed proprietorship. Kemble, though he had no legal
training, like that of certain other English historians of this age,
by his study of the charters came to understand that the English
system of land laws has an importance for English history not less
than the Roman had for that of Rome; and this insight he owed,
in the first instance, as he owed his perception of the Germanic
origin of that system, to his Old English lore. Rarely has so great
and direct a service been rendered to historical science by philo-
logical scholarship?
The ruling principles of English historians of the Germanist
group found their clearest and most vigorous exponent in Edward
Augustus Freeman, the central figure of the Oxford historical
school of the Victorian age-unless that title be disputed on behalf
of Stubbs, to whom Freeman's loyal friendship would have gladly
yielded precedence. In a sense, Freeman's method supplemented
Kemble's rather than followed it; for, in technical phrase, it was
the written monuments rather than the sources—the records
rather than the remains-on which Freeman based the con-
clusions repeated with unwearying persistency in his numerous
books great and small, and in countless essays and reviews. He
would not hear of Palgrave's paradox as to the kinship between
the Romanised Celts and the English invaders, and attributed to
As to Benjamin Thorpe, see, ante, vol. II, p. 344.


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70
[CH.
Historians
>
these a conquest which, with the exception of certain parts of the
country, meant extirpation. On the other hand, the Norman
conquest, of which he became the historian, seemed to him to have
brought about no fresh change of an analogous kind, and to have
fundamentally affected neither the nature and character of the
population, nor the course of the national history. In the consecu-
tive doings of the nation in war and in peace, in its enterprises
and exploits as well as in its legislation and system of government
in both church and state, its Germanic nature and character manifest
themselves. Obviously, however, the historian, whose own interest
is restricted to these relations, and who makes no pretence of
entering into the social life of the people in any of its aspects
save, in a more or less restricted measure, those of language,
literature and architecture, omits a strong link in his argument.
Injustice would be done to the force with which Freeman
explains and illustrates his general position, were it not added
that he calls in the powerful aid of the comparative method, for
which he was exceptionally qualified by his acquaintance with
much of the medieval history of non-Germanic lands, as well as
by his familiarity, noted in an earlier volume of this work, with
the history, and the constitutional history in particular, of Greece
and Rome. His training as a historical student may, in some
respects, have been self-training only, and his advocacy of the
principle of the unity of history may have suffered from his lack
of intimacy (on which he was wont to insist) with periods which
'were not his own' or to which he had not come down. ' Yet,
through him, comparative history first became a living thing
to English students, and the unity which he proclaimed with
missionary zeal was gradually accepted as a reality, in spite of
the time-honoured nomenclature of the schools
Freeman's literary activity seems extraordinary even to those
who had some personal cognisance of part of it. His historical
studies, at first, took a largely archaeological turn, and his early
literary efforts consisted, in the main, of contributions to The
Ecclesiastick and The Ecclesiologist, varied by Poems, legendary
and historical, published in conjunction with G. W. Cox. He
was, however, preparing for historical efforts in a wider field;
by a fortunate chance, a university prize competition, on the
1 See, ante, vol. Xn, chap. XIV.
It was as he listened to Arnold's Oxford lectures, in 1841 and 1842, that the idea
of the unity of history first dawned upon the future successor of the historian of
Rome in his modern history chair.


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11] Freeman's Earlier Writings 71
effects of the Roman conquest (1845–6), led him to read the works
of Thierry, Lingard and Palgrave; and he carried on the study of
the subject after he had had 'the good luck not to get the prize. '
He was, also, early intent upon the acquisition of a pure and
simple style, of which, as a historian, he was certainly master.
There was never much grace, and still less play of humour, about
what he wrote ; but his manner of writing, which he seems, in a
measure, to have modelled on Macaulay, was almost always forcible
and, in general, dignified; and, at times, he could rise to a certain
grandeur free from dogmatic admixture.
Although long interested in the question of the study of
history at Oxford, and author of a series of lectures published
under the title History and Conquests of the Saracens and of an
earlier History of Architecture, besides having become, from
about the year 1860 onwards, one of the pillars of The Saturday
Review, it was not till a little later that he reached the full
height of his powers as a historian. His reviews and other articles
in weeklies (The Saturday and The Guardian in particular), as
well as in monthlies and quarterlies, are, to a large extent, and
where their intent was not essentially controversial, chips from
the block at which he was working of the same material and
texture, homogeneous with his chief books in life and thought,
and little differentiated from them in style. His pen was, in fact,
as much his own in his journalistic as in his other productions,
in other words, his periodical articles, though, for the most part,
unsigned, invariably presented his own opinions? . His literary
activity, especially from 1859 onwards, was simply astounding?
In 1863, before he had completed the preparations for his
Norman Conquest, he brought out the first and, as it proved, the
only volume of a work which, had it been carried out on the lines
he had laid down for himself, might have become, in his younger
friend lord Bryce's words, 'a very great book,' and which, as it
is, has been, by some, more highly prized than any other of his
writings. The History of Federal Government, which Freeman
had designed as a comparative history of federalism in ancient
Greece, in the medieval foundation of the Swiss confederation, in
1 He broke off his long connection with The Saturday Review when he came to
differ from the general views of that journal on near-Eastern politics. His Hellenic
sympathies bad confirmed him in opinions at which he had arrived after much
reflection, and, from the time when he published in The Edinburgh for April 1857)
his article entitled The Greek People and the Greek Kingdom, they never wavered
through good or evil report.
* See his son-in-law's, dean Stephens's, excellent Life and Letters for details.


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72
Historians
[CH.
the intermediate growth of the united provinces of the Nether-
lands and of the Hansa and in the modern creation of the United
States of America, was, however, not carried beyond the earliest
of these stages? . He soon came back to his first love, if, with
his power of duplicating his tasks, he had ever swerved from
it. The appearance, in 1865, of his Old English History for
Children-children of twenty-four, it was, with some point, re-
marked-showed in what direction he was again concentrating his
labours and the travels which accompanied them; and, in 1867,
the first volume of The History of the Norman Conquest was
actually published? The last volume (the fifth) did not appear
till 1876.
Freeman's Norman Conquest accomplished what Palgrave had
planned, but only partially carried out. Into the later work,
mistakes may have found their way, even into salient passages of
the narrative, and into the account of the tragic catastrophe of
Senlac itself; and its general effect may suffer from a certain
lengthiness of which few historians writing on such a scale have
been able altogether to free themselves—least of all Freeman,
who had accustomed himself to the privilege of having his say
out. But any such objections are cast into the shade by the
merits of the work. It is admirably arranged on a converging
plan, which, in the second volume, brings the reader to the reign
of Edward the Confessor, so far as the banishment and death of
earl Godwine, the real hero of the tale ; while the affairs of
Normandy are brought up to William's first visit to England,
and thence, to Edward's death and the coronation of Harold,
the second hero of the story. Volume III relates the conquest
proper with epic breadth, and volume iv the reign of William in
England. Finally, in volume v, the history of the Norman kings
is summarised to the death of Stephen and the coronation of
Henry II, and chapters follow on the political results of the
Norman conquest, and its effects on language, literature and
architecture. The narrative, which closes with a summary of the
Angevin reigns, is enriched by a series of excursuses on particular
points and episodes, on geographical sites and local remains.
Lucid in arrangement, the work nowhere fails to manifest the
1 Cf. , ante, vol. XII, pp. 315—316.
2 In 1869, Freeman began his Historical Geography; but it was not published till
eleven years later. The idea of the work was excellent, and had not hitherto been
elaborated in an English form. As to the execution, of parts of the work, at all events,
opinions differ. Perhaps, his general historical knowledge was not of the minute sort
required for working out the details of the plan.


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II]
Freeman's Norman Conquest
73
spirit in which it was composed—that of a lofty patriotism in-
separable from an ardent love of freedom. His Swiss studies
reflected themselves in several passages of The Norman Conquest;
and he became more and more convinced of the absolute identity
of all the old Teutonic constitutions. ' Thus, he was fortified in his
contention that the Norman conquest left the free national life of
England, in its essentials, unchanged.
In 1882, Freeman published The Reign of William Rufus
and the Accession of Henry I, thus carrying out the design
which he had in his mind when summarising these passages of
English history in the last volume of his Norman Conquest. Here,
again, the narrative involved a twofold task; its main interest,
however, lay in ecclesiastical affairs, a field with which he took
pleasure in occupying himself, but which had also engaged the
attention of other eminent historians. These rolumes ended his
labours on the Norman conquest of England; but, although he
never composed his contemplated life of Henry I, he did not
abandon the subject of the Norman conquests in Europe. 'Palermo
follows naturally on Winchester and Rouen. ' But, of his sojourns
in Sicily, and of his history of that island, which he was also to
leave half-told, we have already spoken?
In 1884, Freeman at
last found himself in the chair of modern history at Oxford; but
this acknowledgment of his eminence as a historian came too late
—at least too late for him to fit his teaching into the system of
historical instruction then flourishing in his university. This was
a mortification to him ; for no man of letters or learning ever
bestowed more attention on the academical, as well as on the
political, ecclesiastical and county administrative, life around
him. Still, his actual work as a historian remained, to the last,
the determining interest of his life ; and, in the midst of the
prosecution of it, death overtook him on the Spanish coast, at
Alicante, in March 1892.
In the death of Freeman, English historical literature suffered
a most severe loss. He had many great qualities—with, perhaps,
the defects of some of them; but these failings were most palpable
in controversy, in the conduct of which he lacked a due sense of
proportion, and was apt to become tiresome, and, at times, unjust.
As to his general historical manner, he has been frequently charged
with pedantry; but there is some element of misapprehension in
the cavil. For, though his habit of reiteration (deliberately adopted)
added to the positiveness of his manner, and thus imparted even
1 Ante, vol. xn, chap. XIV, p. 316.


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74
[CH.
Historians
to passages of his Histories too strongly dogmatic a flavour, he
was always perfectly clear and to the point, and declared that
‘history has no technical terms'-adding that he had sometimes
wished it had, 'to frighten away fools. ' He was apt to be lengthy,
and lord Bryce once told him that he had caught too much of the
manner of the cxixth Psalm ; but he was not diffuse by nature.
It was the cause the cause of truth—which led him to spare no
man or interest or opinion, and, least of all, to spare himself.
The close association of the names of Freeman and Stubbs,
and, with theirs, of that of a third but younger Oxford historian,
John Richard Green, was, at one time, a frequent theme of
academical jest; but, indeed, nothing would have been stranger
than that a bond of intimate intellectual sympathy should have
failed to unite men who, in the same age, devoted themselves to
the study and exposition of the national history, if not always
from the same point of view, at all events on a common basis of
historical principles and with the same purpose of proving the
continuity of the national life. And, certainly, the recognition
in English historical literature of that continuity was signally
advanced by their fellowship.
William Stubbs, successively bishop of Chester and of Oxford,
was Freeman's junior by two years only, but made his mark as a
historical writer nearly a decade later than his friend. For some
years, however, before the publication of his chief contribution
to English constitutional history, Stubbs, who, from 1850, lived
a life of tranquillity in his Essex rectory Navestock, enjoyed a
high reputation with those interested in the progress of the Rolls
series. To this collection, begun in 1857, he contributed, in 1858,
Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum, an endeavour to exhibit the course
of episcopal succession in England. By inclination and habit, he
was an antiquary, who came to interest himself more especially
in chronology and genealogy; but he edited perhaps the most
important of the publications undertaken for the series, the
Itinerarium and the Epistolae Cantuarienses of the reign of
Richard I, besides many others, including the Gesta Regis Henrici
of Benedict of Peterborough (1867) and Memorials of St Dunstan
(1874), for which he wrote luminous prefaces, displaying both
independence of judgment and high literary quality. In 1866,
having previously held the librarianship at Lambeth, Stubbs was
appointed by the earl of Derby to the modern history chair at
Oxford ; and having, as he said, been for seventeen years a country
parson, he now became for eighteen years an Oxford professor. In


## p. 75 (#105) #############################################

11]
William Stubbs
75
neither capacity did he allow himself any respite in his historical
labours, steadily pursuing those lines of study to which he was
attracted by the highest motives, never concealed by him. His
principal achievement in the department of ecclesiastical history
was The Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents of Great Britain
and Ireland, edited by him in conjunction with A. W. Haddan
(1871—8); in the same connection may be mentioned, though
they were of later date, his five Appendices to the Report of
the Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts, drawn up in 1883 after
attendance on seventy-five meetings of the commission.
In 1870, Stubbs first came before a wider public, and earned
the gratitude of students of English constitutional history by
arranging and editing Select Charters and other mustrations
of English Constitutional History (to the reign of Edward I).
The introductory notes to this volume, together with the opening
sketch of the evolution on which the collection was intended to
throw light, are models of succinct and luminous exposition.
This book, which is not likely to fall out of use, was followed,
in 1874–8, by The Constitutional History of England in its
Origin and Development, which has long been regarded as the
accepted guide to a study signally advanced by it. The subject
of the work, the evolution of English institutions from Old English
times to the beginning of the Tudor monarchy, where Hallam had
begun his investigations, is treated after a full and comprehensive
fashion, military history, and what may be called foreign politics,
being excluded. Inevitably, conceptions of English constitutional
history which still commended themselves to Stubbs have been
changed or have vanished in the course of the period during which
his work has, on the whole, held its ground; the mark theory, the
stand-by of the older Germanistic school, has been so greatly
modified as to have been, in a large measure, abandoned, and,
according to its actual meaning, Magna Carta is no longer held
by trained historians to secure the right of trial by jury to every
Englishman. Many points and passages of English constitutional
history, too, which have been cleared up by more recent enquiry-
the whole relations of the forest to English life, and the true story
of the rising of 1381—have recently been shown to have been
insufficiently treated by Stubbs? . But, just as Stubbs's work is
comprehensive in its range and purpose, rather than specially
a
See Petit-Dutaillis, C. , Studies and Notes supplementary to Stubbs's Constitutional
History, parts I and II (originally published as notes to the French translation of the
work); English translation by Rhodes, W. E. , Manchester, 1908—14.


## p. 76 (#106) #############################################

76
[CH.
Historians
concerned with particular or novel points, so its value is dependent
on the solidity and effectiveness with which the main historical
position is worked out-the sober and moderate position that
the English constitution is the result of administrative conception in the
age of the Normans of local self-government found in the age of the
Saxons 1.
Thus, it is a work which admits of being improved without being
discarded, and which it would be folly, because of its inevitable
deficiencies, to cast aside as out of date.
John Richard Green, though of a younger generation than
either Freeman or Stubbs, was not only, in his labours, closely
associated with both, but, to Freeman, he stood in a relation of
intimacy which made the younger man the chosen companion,
philosopher and friend of the older, while he was regarded with
an almost equally affectionate, if, perhaps, more critical, interest
by Stubbs, who, from the first, gave much attention to the design
of A Short History of the English People. On the morrow of the
actual publication of this book, Green (really very wideawake
already) awoke to find himself famous; and Stubbs pronounced
that he ‘knew no one who had the same grasp of the subject and
the same command of details combined. ' Himself the most
accurate of writers, he was not in the least perturbed by the
onslaughts made on Green's incidental lapses. The previous
literary career of the author of A Short History had been that
of a periodical writer of extraordinary freshness and ability. In
none of his contributions to The Saturday Review (which
extended from 1867 to 1872, with one or two later articles) was
he so successful as in the half-descriptive, half-historical ‘middles,'
which species Freeman, more or less, had originated, but which,
in Green's hands, was brought to a mastery not reached by
anyone but himself: these were afterwards republished under
the title Studies from England and Italy (1876). In addition,
he wrote a number of “social' middles, which flowed spontaneously
from his facile pen, and were, in part, reminiscences of clerical life
in its humorous, as well as in its serious, aspects. He had quitted
Oxford 'with the full intention of becoming the historian of the
church of England,' and it was through a lecture on Dunstan that
he first arrested Freeman's attention. His design was, character-
istically, changed into that of the history of the development of
Christian civilisation in England, and, before very long, into first
1 Cf. Vinogradoff, op. cit. pp. 23–24.


## p. 77 (#107) #############################################

11] 7. R. Green's Short History 77
thoughts of a short history with a still more comprehensive scope.
Soon after the first forming of this plan, he was made aware of the
seeds in him of an all but incurable disease.
Still only gradually, he made up his mind to devote the span
of life which might be his to the writing of history ; and it was
to English history that he felt he had a clear calling. Other
schemes and occupations were laid or left aside; he resigned his
London incumbency; and, while spending successive winter seasons
in Italy, gave himself up altogether to his task. In 1874, A Short
History of the English People appeared, and met with a success
unprecedented since the days of Macaulay. The extraordinary
popularity of this book is not due altogether to Green's narrative
and descriptive power—which always addresses itself to the
relations of the scene to the human actors in it and to the
wonderful brightness of the work. It is, also, due to his recog-
nition of all the elements in the national life which contributed
to the progress of the national history, and, especially, of the
intimate connection between the political, economical and social
and the literary and artistic life of the people. And, above all,
it is due to the sympathetic pulse which beats in every page, and
which is more than anywhere else noticeable where he gives
expression to his immense and indignant interest, almost recalling
that of the psalmist, in the poor.
The treatment of the several sections of Green's Short History
shows inequalities, and the narrative is not free from blemishes
of taste as well as errors of fact, to which the author was prepared
to plead guilty ; for, notwithstanding the buoyancy of his spirits
and the vivacity of his conversation, the genuine modesty of Green
revealed itself to all who knew him otherwise than superficially.
The book was not really well-suited for the purposes of a school-
book, to which it was largely applied ; but, though the student
of English history who remains a stranger to the work is not to
be congratulated, it has satisfied higher ends than those of mere
imparting of knowledge. That it assisted greatly in spreading
and sustaining a living interest in our national past, and in making
it intelligible as an organic whole of which the working continues,
cannot be doubted; and rarely has a single-minded ambition been
more swiftly or more amply fulfilled.
Aided by the devotion of his wife, Green lived to produce two
distinct elaborations of parts of the theme of his Short History,
entitled respectively The Making, and The Conquest, of England.
It was in these branches of his studies that he was specially able


## p. 78 (#108) #############################################

78
[CH.
Historians
to apply his power of tracing and delineating the geographical
aspects of national historical growth, with which no other historian
had dealt so fully and so ably before him. He died, in his forty-
sixth year, at Mentone, after a heroic struggle against the disease
to which he succumbed.
Of later English historical scholars who have taken a con-
spicuous part in examining the foundations of medieval political
and social life, without confining themselves to this field of
research and exposition, our mention must be of the briefest.
The writings of Sir Henry Maine belong to legal and political,
rather than to historical, literature, and his great reputation as
a philosophical jurist, due, in the first instance, to his work
entitled Ancient Law and strengthened by his legislative services
as legal member of the council of India, rose to its height when,
after his return home, he successively held two important pro-
fessorial chairs-of jurisprudence and of international law. His
lectures entitled Village Communities in the East and West
(1871) developed, with a breadth and luminousness peculiar to
the author and on a comparative basis largely supplied by his
knowledge of India in especial, the conclusions of Maurer and
Nasse. A second course, entitled The Early History of Institutions
(1875), applied the same method to a still more extensive field
of research. His lectures on international law, which entered
into the question of arbitration as a preventive of war, Maine,
unfortunately, did not live to see through the press. His method
was a remarkably attractive one; but he lacked the time, and,
perhaps, the inclination, for the closer investigation required for
a historical treatment of certain of his subjects.
To economic history proper is to be assigned the best known
voluminous work of James Edwin Thorold Rogers, A History of
Agriculture and Prices in England from 1259 to 1793 (1866–
1902); but he was also well seen in general political history, and
was a friend and follower of Cobden. 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


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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.