The Edinburgh Review: Or Critical Journal

T has been the lot of several of the first historical writers of the present age to be cut off while still engaged on the works which were to be the main foundation of their fame, and to leave behind them mere fragments, mere specimens of an intended whole. The same fate which has left us bare instalments of the greatest works of Arnold, Prescott, and Macaulay has overtaken Sir Francis Palgrave also while he had still advanced but little beyond the beginning of the great task which he had set himself. That it should be so in his case was indeed no matter for wonder. He had already made two beginnings of what may be looked on as really the same work, and had brought neither of them to completion. Neither his quarto History of the English Commonwealth' nor his duodecimo History of England' ever got beyond those first portions of each which were published more than thirty years ago. Sir Francis Palgrave, instead of continuing either, began his work over again on a third plan, and left the third attempt even more unfinished than either of those which had gone before it. His earlier works, unfinished in one sense, because they were designed to be continued, were finished histories in another sense, because both were completed down to a definite period. But the third work, of which the posthumous portions are now before us, though it is carried on several years further than either of its predecessors, is more fragmentary than either. It does not break off at any welldefined point, but it ends abruptly when a remarkable reign has just begun, and it leaves a most important, and, we may

VOL. CXXI. NO. CCXLVII.

add, most probable, theory barely hinted at and not even begun to be worked out. Add to this, not only that large. portions of these volumes have not received the author's last corrections, but that the very crisis of the whole story is left untold. We have William's reign in Normandy and we have his reign in England, but the great event which transferred him from Normandy to England is left out of the history. We have no right to complain if Sir Francis Palgrave found it convenient to write some of the later parts of his history before the earlier. But it is most unfortunate for himself and for his readers that the part which was put off for later composition should be precisely that on which the whole narrative hinges. The first and greatest stage of the Conquest, the landing at Pevensey and the fight at Senlac, have to be supplied from the small history which was published thirty years ago, and which most certainly does not represent the matured state of Sir Francis Palgrave's knowledge and reflection.

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Of the two volumes before us, the second, that is the fourth of the whole series, may be looked on as a finished work, and may be judged accordingly. We gather from Mr. Palgrave's dedication to the Master of the Rolls that some tions in it were contemplated, but not enough to have seriously affected its character. The volume, as it stands, repre'sents, on the whole, his father's maturest judgment on the events narrated.' But of the first volume three chapters only, and those the three which have the least bearing upon English history, were revised by the author. The remainder of the volume, that is the whole reign of William the Conqueror, is all more or less unfinished. Those parts which had been worked into a continuous narrative have not received the author's final revision, while other parts are altogether fragmentary, patched up out of materials left by Sir Francis Palgrave, but never worked by him into shape. Unhappily this is the case with the most important chapter of the whole work, that on the results of the Conquest. That chapter contains hints which make us long to see them worked out at length; but it contains little beyond hints. With the most important piece of dissertation thus utterly fragmentary, and with the most important piece of narrative altogether wanting, we have indeed the spring taken out of our year.

It follows then that no part of the work, except the fourth volume and the first three chapters of the third, is a subject for criticism strictly so called. The remaining parts it is our duty to examine, to accept or reject the statements and views which

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