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however lonely I feel at times when I think of this, "I can no other."... Every word I have written,... through the last ten years, went to the same point, to a protest, that is, against the tendency to a merely external political view of human affairs, and to a belief that political history, to be intelligible and just, must be based on social history in its largest sense. I don't doubt that the English ideal of history will in the long run be what Gibbon made it in his day, the first in the world; because it can alone combine the love of accuracy and external facts with the sense that government and outer facts are but the outcome of individual men, and men what body, mind and spirit make them.'

This is, surely, the real justification of the 'Short History.' It has, no doubt, its shortcomings, its lacunæ, even errors, as its author knew well enough.

'I shall do far better work than "Little Book" before I die. . . . It is full of faults, unequal, careless, freakish, with audacity often instead of a calm power, only rising when the subject caught me, and hurrying over topics I didn't fancy. There is a good deal of me in it; but I shall have a nobler, a juster, a calmer me to reflect in other books.'

The style of the book is sometimes flamboyant; there are too many phrases and expressions that smack of the newspaper office rather than the study.

'All through the earlier part,' says Green, 'I see the indelible mark of the essayist, "the want of long breath," as the French say, the tendency to "little vignettes," the jerkiness. . . . I learnt my trade as I wrote on.... You see I should make a harsher critic of my own work than any of my reviewers. I hope I always shall. But I love it too, though I see its faults.'

He perceived, in fact, that there is a fire, a life in the book; it is an organic whole; it gives a consistent picture of the development of the English nation, drawn by a sympathetic and judicious hand.

In 1877, at the age of forty, Green married Miss Alice Stopford, and in her love and companionship he found his stay and support during the rest of his too short life. His health had lately been better, and he was hopeful himself; but he had been trying himself too hard. He never could work save with his might. The Mediterranean winters were not always as mild as they should have been, and he was feeling the long annual exile more and more. His

friends hardly understood how much his friendship for them meant to him, how greatly he desired their presence, how delighted he was with their letters, what interest he took in all they were doing. It was everything to him to have the most devoted of companions always with him; and it was really her tireless care and affection and his own courage that kept him alive and working month after month to the wonder of his doctors. At last, when he could no longer hold the pen, his wife took to writing at his dictation. The long-continued exertion brought on writer's cramp; but still they both persevered, and, in spite of all difficulties, the 'Making of England' (his detailed study of the genesis of the English state) came out, to his great joy. Its companion volume, the Conquest of England,' was all but completed; but before it appeared, the author himself had passed away. 'He died learning was his chosen epitaph; and it was a true one.

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We have lost at least one great book by his untimely death; and the flaws he most deplored in the work he left were largely the results of the illness that dogged him and crippled his hours of work for so many years. But, even as it was, his output was remarkable, both in amount and quality. The 'Short History,' the 'Oxford Studies,' the Making' and the Conquest of England,' represent much toil and much thought rightly directed. They are the outcome of a mind active, well-trained, perspicuous, reasonable; they give their author a settled place among English historians; and they are the fruit of scarce more than half an average working life.

Green not only loved history himself, but he loved to see others working in that great and scantily-tilled field. So far back as 1867 he planned out a Historical Review; and some years later he was offered the editorship of such a periodical by Mr Macmillan, who was willing to start it if he would take charge; but he declined, modestly fearing that the opposition which his leadership might rouse would injure the journal's success. So it was not till three years after his death that a little band of Oxford students got Dr Creighton to co-operate with them, to promise to be editor, and to find a publisher for what in Green's words was to be a purely scientific organ of historical criticism and means of information as to the progress of historical study at home and abroad.' The

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'English Historical Review' has justified Green's aim, and done credit to those who carried out his ideas.

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The Oxford Historical Society' was started not long before Green's death, on lines he had laid down years before. The series of Primers of History and Literature' that he edited and organised has been a great and legitimate success, bringing home to the poorest teacher or student the results of the best scholars' work in many directions, and preparing a reading public to receive and welcome books of more detailed information. He was indeed, throughout his life, a man with practical aims, who saw much more clearly than most students the right way to teach pupils who have never been taught, the right way to make them care about the subjects he cared about and knew to be important, the right way to make them think out things honestly for themselves, without prejudice and without credulity. His series was successful because it deserved success.

His diaries and note-books show how observant he was; how patiently he noted facts and thoughts that would, he felt, be useful to him; how he studied character (not forgetting his own); how he trained himself to write by writing on many different topics-from a country walk to a problem of ethics, a journey or a conversation-as brightly and concisely as he could. A description of the field of Senlac, written on the spot in one of his note-books, is a model of clear topographic exposition; and a set of rough notes on a 'town-and-gown' gives the best sketch yet put down of the aimless, disconnected, sporadic turbulence of an Oxford 5th of November in the sixties or seventies.

It is but just to touch on his remarkable critical powers. Of his brilliancy, of his quickness, his laborious study of his authorities and his clear head, there can be no question. But he had also a potent sense of justice that often curbed his wit and made him restrain his gleeful humour lest he should do an injustice or cause another pain. He took the trouble to think; and so, though some of his verdicts are quite wrong-for he was fallible as the rest of us-many of them are quite excellent. If he undoubtedly misjudges Seeley badly and mistakes Gardiner's attitude towards his subject, he is in no error about Ranke's shortcomings or Mommsen's. His analysis of historic personages often shows remark

ably fine handling. Mr Stephen cites his pictures of Cromwell and of Madame Roland. He thoroughly understood persons so different as Stubbs and Garibaldi, and was enthusiastic about both. He is even fair to that bogey of the advanced Whigs, Napoleon III, though he cannot help rejoicing at his fall.

His keen insight, his skill in controversy, his power of hard hitting made him a formidable antagonist; but he disliked wasting labour on disputes that do not convince. Again and again he strove to get his friend Freeman to be content and cease from further attacks on foes no longer formidable or dangerous. He never feared offending his best friends by remonstrating where he thought friendship required him to speak plainly; and yet, to him who loved those friends so dearly, this was by no means a congenial obligation. Self-sacrifice was an integral part of his daily life, and yet he was one to whom the joie de vivre appealed far more strongly than to most. One can see from his letters how he loved and made good talk; but he was capable of renouncing the insidious pleasures of conversation in order to drudge, not only for the purposes he had set before him as his life's work, but also to provide those who had but scant claims on him with extra pleasures.

One lays down the book of Green's 'Letters' with some pain. There is revealed in them a personality never allowed its full development. This fine spirit was capable of far more than it was allotted to it to accomplish. Ill-health, scant means, small leisure, many cares could not, however, prevent him from doing in his brief life more than would have taxed to the fullest the powers of most of his contemporaries. If he had not been, as he was, a scholar of mark, he would still have been distinguished in his generation, a conversationalist of quite abnormal wit and power, a man of most sympathetic and luminous nature, a sincere friend, a true follower of the best, a champion of all that was good and made for higher things, an abiding memory to all who knew him. As he held, a man should be content if, when he dies, he can be said truly to have done good work and to have had an inmost place in his friends' hearts; and he, at least, knew long ere his own swift death came, that he had achieved so much.

2. SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER.

1. A History of England (1603-1656). By Samuel Rawson Gardiner. Sixteen vols. London: Longmans, 1863-1901. 2. An Introduction to the Study of English History. By the same (in collaboration with J. Bass Mullinger). London: Longmans, 1881.

3. Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution. By the same. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889. 4. Cromwell's Place in History. By the same.

Longmans, 1897.

5. What Gunpowder Plot was. By the same. Longmans, 1897.

And other works.

London:

London:

THE life of a scholar, in so far as it concerns the public, is usually uneventful. The years glide by him as he steadily fulfils some self-selected task. The landmarks of his journey are the discovery of a document, the publication of a volume, or perhaps the tardy conferment of some long-deserved reward. Such a life is too monotonous to recount in detail, and it lies too remote from the common paths of men to attract their curiosity. The interest of Gardiner's life is in the history of a purpose conceived in early manhood, and pursued in spite of difficulties which would have discouraged a weaker man, until its fulfilment seemed near at hand, and only the last stone was needed to crown the fabric.

Born on March 4, 1829, Gardiner was educated at Winchester and at Christ Church. He took a first-class in the school of 'Literæ Humaniores' in 1851, and left Oxford in the same year. For though he had been given a studentship at Christ Church in 1850, theological reasons prevented him from keeping it and from taking the degree of M.A. It was therefore without aid from any institution designed to promote learning that he boldly undertook to devote his life to English history, and chose for his subject the most controverted part of our national annals.

The first two volumes of Gardiner's intended history of England from 1603 to 1660 were published in 1863, and successive instalments, two volumes at a time, appeared

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