No More Learning

XIV.
CH. I.
4


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CHAPTER II
HISTORIANS, BIOGRAPHERS AND POLITICAL
ORATORS
A. WRITERS ON MEDIEVAL AND MODERN HISTORY
a
In a comparison of English historical literature in the nineteenth
with that in the eighteenth century, nothing is more striking than
the advance and the expansion of the study of the national past.
As was remarked in an earlier volume? , Hume’s was the first history
of England by a native historian worthy to be classed as literature;
and, after him, the subject fell largely into the hands of professed
political or ecclesiastical partisans. Robertson's History of
Scotland is not wholly exempt from such a charge ; Smollett's
continuation of Hume is certainly open to it; and no other
work in the field of national history can be said to have been
produced in the course of the century which has survived it
except as material for subsequent use. A reason for the un-
productiveness, on this head, of the closing years of the eighteenth
century, and the early years of its successor, might, of course, be
sought in the great national struggle against the French revolution
and the conquering power to which it gave birth. This struggle
finds its counterpart in the endeavours of the romanticists to
break up the literary and artistic solidarity of classicism, and to
trace the diversity of actual life in the specific features presenting
themselves in national, provincial or local institutions, forms of
government, social ways and manners. Scott, more than any other
writer in verse or prose, by his incomparable historical novels,
taught English historians to reproduce in their works the atmo-
sphere of the times and the colouring of the localities which they
desired to recall. The lesson was reinforced by two different
currents of studies and interests. The first was a result of the
1 For writers on ancient history and early ecclesiastical history, see, ante, vol. xi,
chap. xiv.
? See, ante, vol. 2, p. 280.


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CH. 11]
New Currents—Sharon Turner
51
diligent enquiry into the
origines of our national institutions
and their effect upon our national life which formed part of the
něw movement of the new century-in other words, of the
beginnings of historical criticism". In the study and literary
treatment of the national history, this research concentrated itself
in the labours of what has been called the Germanist school whose
adherents strove to show
the extent to which modern constitutional ideas were connected with
medieval facts, and the share that the German element has had in the
development of institutions and classes,' and 'succeeded in establishing the
characteristically Germanic general aspect of English history, a result
which does not exclude Roman influence, but has to be reckoned with in all
attempts to establish definitely its bearing and strength 2?
The second current, again, was one which affected England in
common with all other western nations, but which acted upon her
life and literature in a way peculiar to herself. In the period
roughly circumscribed by the revolutionary years 1830 and 1848—9,
social questions, concerned with the economic conditions of the
people at large, assumed an unprecedented prominence; and
these led to a study, very little followed before, of the economic
influences under which nations arise and have their being. Other
sciences were called upon to contribute towards an understanding
of the foundations of popular life, the materials out of which it is
formed and the reasons which determine its progress or decay.
Historical research, animated by a living interest in the present,
rather than by a romantic yearning for a revival of the past, thus
came to demand, and find, new fields for its labours.
The first name to be mentioned among writers of English history
from the close of the eighteenth century onwards is, unmistak-
ably, that of Sharon Turner. Born and educated in London",
he was, as a boy, attracted to the study of northern literature
through a version, in Percy's Five Pieces of Runic Poetry,
of that Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrok which is held to have
first suggested the study in England of Norse antiquity“ He
1 Cf. , ante, vol. XII, chap. xiv.
2 See P. Vinogradoff's illuminating introduction to Villainage in England : Essays
on English and Medieval History (Oxford, 1892).
3 He was a pupil at James Davis's academy in Pentonville, and his literary career
illustrates the value of the attempts made in these academies to supply instruction
in modern subjects. Cf. the syllabus of courses in history and geography by Priestley
at Warrington (where he worked from 1761 to 1767) appended to Parker, Irene, Dis-
senting Academies in England (Cambridge, 1914); and see, generally, ante, vol. x,
pp. 381—3.
4 See, for some account of the literary influence of the Death Song upon Sir William
Temple and others, ante, vol. x, pp. 221-4.
4-2


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52
[CH.
Historians
early abandoned the active pursuit of the legal profession, and,
in 1795, settled for many years in the neighbourhood of the
British Museum, long the constant resort of his strenuous leisure.
Here, the Old English MSS in the Cottonian library became his
chief study, and it was on his researches in these and similar
sources that was founded his History of England from the
earliest period to the Norman Conquest, produced from 1799 to
1805, after sixteen years of preparatory labours. It was well
received by Palgrave and other authorities, but was also subjected
to unfavourable criticism, which, in one instance, called forth a
vindication from the authorOn the whole, the success of the
work was such as to encourage him to produce, in steady sequence,
a continuation from the Norman conquest to 1500, and a further
continuation, covering the reign of Henry VIII, with a political
history of the commencement of the English Reformation,' which
he afterwards carried on to the death of Elizabeth. The latter
portions of the work, published in 1829, under the collective title
The History of England, failed to command a popularity
equalling that of their predecessors. The reformation period, in
particular, had, as we shall see, been recently treated by Lingard,
some of whose ecclesiastical views, indeed, Sharon Turner was
desirous of controverting. But his volumes dealing with Old
English times, though they share his general characteristics of
great amplitude and sententiousness of expression, have the dis-
tinctive note of original research both wide in range and assiduous;
nor can he be refused the credit of having pointed the way in
which Kemble and Thorpe followed, and thus made it possible for
Palgrave and Freeman to construct their great works. It was in
Sharon Turner that the interest was first awakened which led to
the appointment (in 1800) of the first Record commission, whose
composition, unfortunately, rendered its efforts of but little effect,
till, mainly through the efforts of (Sir) Harris Nicolas, it was
superseded in 1836) by the new commission, of which Palgrave was
the soul. Sharon Turner himself cannot rank as a great historian;
and it might, perhaps, be questioned whether his proper place is
among historians at all. His early volumes are marred by a
cumbrous method, a tedious style and an antiquated philology; yet,
a survey of their contents suffices to show the breadth of their
author's design and the indefatigable industry expended upon its
execution. His place in literature he owes, not to service or
circumstance, but to his courage and energy in research, which
i See bibliography.


## p. 53 (#83) ##############################################

11]
John Lingard
53
enabled him, first among English writers, to make his countrymen
aware of the elements of future national greatness revealed in the
life of our immigrant forefathers.
Some time before the new movement in English historical
studies, which had derived a strong impulse from what had, of
recent years, been done in France and Germany! , can be said to
have been fairly at work, two writers had produced historical works
of national significance. John Lingard's History of England,
indeed, had been in preparation for about thirteen years, before,
in 1819, the first three volumes of the work appeared, bringing
it to the end of the reign of Henry VII, a point very near the
critical part of the narrative, if its avowed more special purpose
be considered. Lingard's earliest book, The Antiquities of the
Anglo-Saxon Church, had been published so early as 1806. Here
is observable, together with a determination to base statements of
historical facts upon original authorities, the desire, which became
the mainspring of his History and, it is not too much to say, the
object of his life, to convince his countrymen of their mis-
conceptions as to the Roman catholic faith and its influence upon
the action of its adherents. He was himself born and bred as a
catholic (although his father was a protestant by descent), and
owed practically the whole of his training to Douay, where, it is
stated, no instruction was given in history. On the dispersion of
the college at Douay, Lingard spent some time in the centre of
English catholic affairs. He became acquainted with Charles
Butler, author of The Book of the Roman Catholic Church and
long active in promoting the abolition of penal laws against
catholics. These efforts, as implying long participation in church
affairs, were vehemently opposed by John Milner, afterwards
titular bishop of Castabala and a ruthless adversary of Lingard
and the moderate catholic party. Lingard was all but deterred
from carrying out his design of writing a history of England,
which he had cherished during the latter part of a collegiate life of
nearly thirty years. Declining the presidency of Ushaw college,
where he had held the arduous post of vice-president-as he
afterwards refused a mitre-he, in 1811, took up the humble
1 In France, where the spirit that pervaded the labours of Mabillon and his fellow-
Benedictines had never been wholly extinguished, the École des Chartes, which marked
the beginning of a systematic training in the study of medieval documents, dates from
1820, though it had to pass through a period of uncertainty, and even of temporary
extinction, before its revival nine years later. In Germany, the publication of Monu-
menta Germaniae Historica, the first modern collection of medieval sources edited with
all the appliances of modern critical scholarship, began in 1826.


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54
[CH.
Historians
a
a
duties of the mission at Hornby near Lancaster; and here he
remained, almost continuously, during the rest of his life, which
ended there, forty years later, in his eighty-first year. The remote
northern presbytery became a sort of literary centre, in which he
was periodically visited by Brougham and other leaders of the
northern circuit, and whence he exercised an influence over the
conduct of catholic affairs, which neither Milner's intrigues nor
the frank differences of opinion between Wiseman and himself
could extinguish. This influence was due to his History of
England, which appeared in the critical period of catholic
affairs preceding the Emancipation act and, at Rome, was held
to have largely contributed to the change in public feeling which
had made that act possible. Whether or not pope Leo XII, as
Lingard believed, not long before the completion of his History,
intended to acknowledge his services by raising him, sooner or
later, to the cardinalate, such a recognition of endeavours equally
free from blind partisanship and from adulation would have done
honour to the church which he loved and served.
Lingard's first three volumes at once achieved what, in the
circumstances, must be reckoned a remarkable success. It is not
too much to say that this was mainly due to the use made by the
writer of his study of original MSS, both at home and in Rome,
and to the straightforward and lucid style of his narrative. Few
historians have written so little ad captandum as Lingard,
whether in this or in later, and more contentious, portions of
his work; if there is in him little warmth of sympathy, neither is
there any vituperative vehemence. No historian has ever better
trained himself in the art of avoiding the giving of offence; and
none was less likely to be run away with' by ardent admiration
for those fascinating historical characters in which fanaticism is
often intermingled with devotion to a great and noble cause.
On the other hand, there never was a more vigilant recorder of
facts than Lingard, or one whom criticism was less successful in
convicting of unfounded statements; it was not his way to take
anything in his predecessors for granted, and he wished his work.
to fulfil the purpose of a complete refutation of Hume, without
the appearance of such a purpose!
1 This is brought out in John Allen's review in The Edinburgh Revicw (April 1825,
vol. XLII), where Lingard is blamed for his anathema against the philosophy of history,
which he is pleased to term the philosophy of romance,' but which is either a sacrifice
to cant or the result of his dislike of Hume. Allen's second review of Lingard (June
1826) dealt specially with the St Bartholomew, a problem which may almost be described
as still under treatment; and it was in reply to this that Lingard issued his Vindication


## p. 55 (#85) ##############################################

11] Lingard's History of England 55
In the subsequent volumes of his History, Lingard's skill and
judgment were put to the severest of tests, and it is not unjust
to him to say that the history of the reformation, or that of
a particularly complicated section of it, was never written with
more discretion than it was by him. On the one hand, he
refused to shut his eyes, like some other judges of conservative
tendencies, to certain aspects of the conflict—the dark side of
monasticism, for instance. On the other, he declined to launch
forth into discussions of the general consequences of the English
reformation, and allowed the course of events—of which, in his
account of the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, he was able to add
many new elucidations—to tell its own story. Even in relating
the critical struggle between Elizabeth and her Scottish rival, he
hardly becomes a partisan; while his narrative of the reign of
James I plainly marks the end of Roman catholicism as an organic
part of the national life. The later volumes of the History
followed in fairly regular succession, the last (vol. VIII) appearing
in 1830, with a notable account of the antecedents of the revolution
of 1688, including the character of James II. Lingard moved more
easily as his work progressed, as well as in the careful revisions to
which he subjected it and in which he freely entered into an
examination of views opposed to his own, Macaulay's among them.
While his protestant assailants found no palpable holes in his
armour, he maintained his own position in the catholic world,
consistently holding aloof from ultramontane views and shaping
his course as seemed right to him. Yet, his conviction that he had
signally contributed to the change in educated public opinion in
England as to his church and her history, though the intention
implied is compatible with perfect veracity of statement as well
as perspicacity of judgment, cannot be said to imply that search
after truth for its own sake which is the highest motive of
the historian. Lingard's tone is not apologetic, but his purpose
avowedly is ; and, while his work retains its place among histories
of England based on scholarly research, conceived in a spirit of
fairness and composed with lucidity and skill, it lacks alike the
intensity of spirit which animates a great national history and
the breadth of sympathy which is inseparable from intellectual
(1826). Southey's criticisms of the reformation volumes in The Quarterly Review
(December 1825, vol. XXXIII) were expanded in his popular Book of the Church, which
led to a literary controversy between its author and Charles Butler. On the catholic
side, the irreconcilable Milner was provoked by the account of the earlier part of the
reformation, and in vain attempted to procure the condemnation of the book at Rome.
1 The last edition revised by himself bears the date 1854–5.


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56
[CH.
Historians
independence. Lingard’s book, it should be added, is a political
history only, and sheds no light on either the literary or the social
progress of the nation.
It was only at a relatively advanced stage of Lingard's career
as a historian-in 1835—that he made acquaintance with the
historical work of his contemporary Henry Hallam, a typically
national figure among eminent English writers of history? Eton
and Oxford, although they had helped to form the man and give
him free access to what was best in the social, political and
intellectual life of his generation, had done little else to equip him
for the career which he preferred to bar or parliament. Inasmuch
as he enjoyed, throughout life, ample leisure and easy conditions of
existence, he could take his time about both reading and writing;
but he used these opportunities with a conscientious thoroughness
such as no class-room training or examination-room system could
have surpassed in effectiveness. The 'classic Hallam,' as Byron
chose to call the Edinburgh reviewer whose sole avowed pre-
tensions to fame had, so far, consisted in his contributions to Musae
Etonenses (1795), spent more than a decade in preparing his first
book, which, on its appearance in 1818), revealed itself at once as
what every production of Hallam's maturity became as a matter
of course-a 'standard' work of historical literature and learning
In A View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, he
undertook to subject to a philosophical survey the course of
European history, as a whole, during the ten centuries from the
great popular migrations to the formation of the chief states of
modern Europe, and, at the same time, to consider the special
growth of each particular state. In this truly comprehensive
essay, Hallam showed himself both too restrained and too sure-
footed to lapse into mere generalities, although the work cannot,
of course, rank with Guizot's rather later Histoire de la Civilisa-
tion en France, which, though unfinished, also overshadowed the
same writer's earlier and more concise Histoire générale de la Civi-
lisation en Europe. The chapter on England in The Middle Ages
,
* It is curious, in view of the high reputation of Hallam's name with successive
generations of historical students, that the only biographical account of him worth
notice should be Mignet's, in Éloges Historiques (Paris, 1864). This is remarked by
Sir Leslie Stephen in his article on Hallam in vol. xxiv D. of N. B. (1890), where
a few additional facts, likewise due to family information, are supplied.
2 Hallam's way of asserting his sureness as to facts was overpowering in con.
versation; and Thomas Campbell described him as, though devoid of gall and
bitterness, yet a perfect boa-contradictor. ' (Campbell's Life and Letters, ed. Beattie,
W. , vol. 111, p. 315. )
6


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11]
Henry Hallam
57
unmistakably announces the future historian of the English
constitution, with his consciousness of the value, for an insight
into the political and social development of a nation, of an enquiry
into the continuous growth of its laws. For the rest, the limits
of Hallam's gifts as a historian are manifest in the earliest of
his works; but, together with them, there becomes apparent the
unflinching severity of his moral judgment, the most distinctive
note of, what Mignet calls him, “the magistrate of history. '
In 1827 was published the best known of Hallam's works-
best known, because of the clearness and solidity that still keep
it a text-book of the subject which it treats, and which, to the
large majority of students of English history, is the sum and
substance of all that compels their interest in the national past.
We may regret, especially in view of the great internal changes
undergone by this country in the epoch of Hallam's later man-
hood, that he should have fixed the death of George II as the
terminus ad quem of his Constitutional History of England; and
we may wish, since he would thus have widened the point of view
of a long succession of English learners of history, that he had
drawn the line of the book's terminus a quo at the beginning of
the middle ages instead of at their close; albeit, in this respect,
his own Middle Ages, in some measure, and the later works of
Stubbs and others most effectively supplemented his labours, and
gave true unity to the whole subject. Hallam's own political
opinions, however, would hardly have carried him as a historian
through the periods of revolution in France and democratic reform
at home; he distinctly dissociated himself from the Reform bill
movement of 1830—2, and showed a distrust of the multitude
which even Sir Archibald Alison's could hardly have surpassed;
while his heart was with the constitutional progress which, after
the violent interruption of the Civil war and the ensuing inter-
regnum, was consummated in the revolution of 1688, and crowned
by the passing of the Act of settlement. In other words,
Hallam was a whig of the 'finality' school; what he approved
and admired in our laws and institutions was their power of
endurance, after they had resulted from centuries of conflict with
the pretensions of the prerogative, which came over with foreign
conquest, while the principles of the nation's laws were rooted in
its own past. This conflict forms, as it were, the heart or nucleus
of his story; nor does it lose anything of its sternness or of its inner
consistency in his hands. His style is without fascination, charm
or richness; but it is raised above a mere business tone by the
తరుములు ముందు ముందుకు


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58
[CH.
Historians
sense manifest beneath it of great issues worthy of arduous
struggles; so that it never wearies, just as the great interests
of life which it befits a man to cherish—the cause of the common-
weal and of personal freedom-never grow stale. Of these things,
Hallam's work is, as it were, the representative; what lies beyond,
it ignores. Hallam’s Constitutional History was, at a later date
(1861–3), adequately continued by Sir Thomas Erskine May, who
had made a name for himself by his standard work, The Rules,
Orders and Proceedings of the House of Commons (1854). His
Constitutional History is distinguished both by the admirable
perspicuity of its arrangement and by the decisive clearness of its
tone. Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867) will be
briefly noticed elsewhere.
When, in his last great book, Hallam once more passed out of
the domain of politics into that of literature, and undertook, with
impartial eye and undeflected judgment, to furnish an Introduction
to the Literature of Europe during the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and
Seventeenth centuries (1837-9), it was as if he desired to bequeath
to the world of letters the knowledge he had garnered during a
long life. He had remained a stranger to few fields of literary
study and become familiar with most of the homes of European
civilisation, since its new birth in the land which he had probably
loved next to his own, and which, in his later years, had been
specially endeared to him by its varied associations with the two
sons whose names will always be remembered with that of their
father. The work, which, to this day, few literary students would
be willing to spare, illustrates, more than any other of his produc-
tions, the equity as well as the acumen of his critical conclusions ;
but the form it takes is too compressed for it to satisfy more
exacting demands. Without being reticent where candour is
called for, or shallow where great depths have to be sounded, it
offers a model of an introductory survey that needs to be filled up
with the comments and illustrations of the best kind of cicerone-
ship; and, though necessarily it must fail more and more to
satisfy in parts, it will, as a whole, long challenge supersession.
At one time, it might have seemed as if, in the charmed circle
of the whigs, one of its most honoured members, who, early in his
career (1791), had, not without credit, crossed swords with Burke,
were, after he had entered into the second and less eccentric phase
of his political opinions, destined to take a leading place among
English historians. But Sir James Mackintosh, who, like Macaulay,
· See, post, pp. 142—3.
>


## p. 59 (#89) ##############################################

11]
Mackintosh. Macaulay
59
was tempted from home by public employment in India, was with-
out the intellectual energy of his junior, and less indifferent than
he to the attractions of clubs and society. Moreover, like many
lesser men, he could never quite settle down to one particular line
of study and production, and the claim of philosophy seemed, on
the whole, the strongest upon his mind. On his homeward voyage
from Bombay, in 1811–12, he had begun an introduction to a
history of England from the revolution of 1688 to that of 1789;
but he speedily entered parliament, and, for some time, held a
professorship of law and general politics at Haileybury. Towards
the end of his life (1830), he published a much-read Dissertation
on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, chiefly during the 17th
and 18th Centuries! Thus, little leisure was left, or sought,
for the History of England expected from Mackintosh's pen;
and, besides a volume bearing that title, contributed by him to
Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia, he only produced an unfinished
History of the Revolution in England in 1688, which was un-
satisfactorily edited by William Wallace, with a continuation, to
say the least, ill-suited to either the book or its subject. This
performance is chiefly known by Macaulay's essay upon it—not
itself one of his choicest efforts-and by the scandal which ensued.
Mackintosh, notwithstanding the honour and glory which he
enjoyed among a large circle of his contemporaries, can, as a
historian, hardly be regarded as more than a precursor of
Macaulay, to whom we accordingly turn.
Thomas Babington (lord) Macaulay's youthful Edinburgh
essay on Hallam's Constitutional History, with all its enthusiasm,
indicates very clearly the qualities which distinguish him from the
author of that work, whose whole spirit, he says, is 'that of the
bench, not that of the bar. ' For himself, he was, among modern
historians, the greatest of advocates; as his early essay History?
shows, he had drunk too deeply of the spirit of the ancient
masters and had too closely studied their manner of narrative
6
It was this essay, first produced as a supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
which gave rise to James Mill's bitter Fragment on Mackintosh (really an apology
for Bentham). The reply to Macaulay's attack upon Mill's essay on Government
(1829) was written by John Stuart Mill; Macaulay's retort, The Westminster Reviewer's
Defence of Mill, followed in the same year.
It was pablished in The Edinburgh Review for May 1828, as a notice of
Henry Neele’s The Romance of History: England, and reprinted in vol. 1 of his
Miscellaneous Writings, posthumously published in 1860. This essay asserts that
'in an ideal history of England Henry VIII could be painted with the skill of a
Tacitus’; and the skirmishes of the Civil War would be told, as Thucydides could
have told them, with perspicuous conciseness. '


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60
[CH.
Historians
and characterisation not to be desirous of reproducing, with their
picturesqueness and point, the intensity of feeling wbich inspired
their art, and to take pride in his partisanship as he gloried in his
patriotism.
Born in 1800, Macaulay almost grew into manhood with the
great events of the second decade of the century, and first took
thought of his History at the time of one of its greatest political
struggles. Sir George Trevelyan's biography of his venerated
kinsman, besides bringing home to every reader the truthfulness
of its portraiture of a man who justified the opinion formed, in
his boyhood, by Hannah More as to the transparent purity and
sincerity of his nature, shows that his services to his country and
the empire were far from being absorbed in those which, with
voice and pen, he rendered to his party; and that, in heart and
soul, he was, from first to last, the man of letters whose fame grew
into an enduring national possession. The path of distinction
opened early for him in literary as well as in political work; to
a forensic career, he was not drawn, notwithstanding his oratorical
gifts, his marvellous power of memory and what has been well
described as his extraordinary sense of the concrete. He was the
most indefatigable of workers, both from motives highly honourable
to him (he was an excellent son to his father, Zachary Macaulay,
a chief pillar of the anti-slavery movement, and, through life, a
devoted brother) and from xatural disposition, and he could say
for himself that when I sit down to work I work harder and
faster than any person that I ever knew. In the earlier half of his
life, he found himself obliged to earn money to supplement the
income from his Trinity fellowship and, subsequently, from his
commissionership in bankruptcy; and when, in 1830, he began his
History of England, he did not think it possible to give himself
up to preparation for what might prove an unremunerative task.
Thus, though, as it proved, nearly thirty years were yet before
him, he abstained from entering at once upon a work which he
might still have carried out on a scale such as that which he
originally contemplated when fixing the death of George III as
ulterior limit; and he became a regular contributor to periodical
literature, Knights Quarterly Magazine and The Edinburgh
Review in particular. An article proposed by him to the latter
journal, after a visit to France at the time of the revolution of
1830, having been rejected through the intervention of Brougham
(never Macaulay's friend), he planned a history of France from the
restoration to the accession of Louis-Philippe, but did not carry it


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11]
Macaulay's Essays
61
to quite one hundred printed pages—in which condition it was
afterwards discovered. When, in 1834, he accepted a seat on the
India council, and, during his residence in India (where he never
became domesticated) to 1838, devoted to literature such leisure as
he could command, The Edinburgh Review, again, gathered its
ripe fruits. On his return home, now in possession of a sufficient
income, a parliamentary career once more offered itself to him;
and, though he had already begun his History of England, he, in
1839, accepted office under lord Melbourne. In 1841, the whig
ministry fell
, and the opportunity of the History seemed to have
once more arrived; but he turned aside, for the moment, to com-
pose his Lays of Ancient Rome (1842)? The volume evinced his
approval of Niebuhr's celebrated theory as to the chief source of
the history of regal Rome; yet, notwithstanding the applause
obtained for it by its martial impetus and swing, the artificiality
inseparable from such tours de force is beyond disguise. It will
probably long be loved by the young, and by all for whom graphic
force and an easy command of ballad metres constitute poetry. In
more experienced readers, it fails, as Mignet observes, to produce
the illusion of reality. 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


## p. 68 (#98) ##############################################

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.


## p. 69 (#99) ##############################################

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.


## p. 71 (#101) #############################################

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


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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.