People. It is the whole nation that is ever present to him, as it had been present before to no other historian.

of Bishop Thirlwall or Ranke, shorteven of the accuracy of Gibbon or Carlyle ; but it is not much below the standard of Mr. Grote's care, it is up to that of Macaulay or Robertson, and decidedly above Dean Milman or David Hume. I take famous names, and could easily put a better face on the matter by

His accuracy has been much disputed. When the first burst of applause that welcomed the Short History had subsided, several critics began to attack it on the score of minor errors. They pointed out a number of statements of fact which were doubtful, and others which were incorrect, and spread in some quarters the impression that he was on the whole a careless and untrustworthy writer. I do not deny that there are in the first editions of the Short History some assertions made more positively than the evidence warrants, but this often arises from the summary method of treatment. A writer who compresses the whole history of England into eight hundred pages of small octavo, making his narrative not a bare narrative but a picture full of colour and incident, but incident which, for brevity's sake, must often be given by allusion, cannot be always interrupting the current of the story to indicate doubts or quote authorities for every statement in which there may be an element of conjecture; and it is probable that in some instances when the authorities are examined their result will appear different from that which the author has given them. On this head the Short History, if not perfect, is open to no grave censure. Of mistakes, strictly so called-i.e. statements demonstrably incorrect and therefore ascribable to haste or carelessness-there are enough to make a considerable show under the hands of a hostile critic, yet not more than any one who has read a good deal of history will be prepared to expect. The book falls far short of the accuracy

He puts

writers whose literary eminence is higher than their historical. And Green's mistakes, although as I admit pretty numerous, were (for they have been corrected in later editions) nearly all in very small matters. an event in one year which happened in the preceding December; he calls a man John whose name was William. These are mistakes to the eye of a civil service examiner, but they seldom make any difference to the general reader, for they do not affect the doctrines and pictures which the book contains, and which give it its permanent value as well as its literary charm. Still they are a blemish, and it is pleasant to be able to add that his later and more detailed work, the Making of England, though it contains plenty of debatable matter, as in the paucity of authentic data any such book must do, has been charged with very few misstatements in matters of fact.

In considering his critical gift, it is well to distinguish those two elements of acute perception and sober judgment which were specified a few pages back, for he possessed the former in much larger measure than the latter. The same activity of mind which made him notice everything while travelling or moving in society, played incessantly upon the data of his his torical works, and supplied him with endless theories as to the meaning of a statement, the source it came from, the way it had been transmitted, the conditions under which it was made. No one could be more keen and penetrating in what the Germans call Quellenforschung the collection, and investigation, and testing of the

sources of history-nor could any one be more painstaking. His inaccuracies did not arise from an indolence that left any stone unturned, but rather from an occupation with the idea which sometimes drew his attention away from the details of time and place. The ingenuity with which he built up theories was as admirable as the literary skill with which he stated them. People whom that skill fascinated sometimes fancied that it was all style. But the style was the least part of it. The bright facility in theorising, the power of grouping facts under new aspects, the skill in gathering and sifting evidence were fully as remarkable as those artistic qualities which expressed themselves in the paragraphs and sentences and phrases. What danger there was arose from this facility. His mind was so fertile and so imaginative, could see so much in a theory and apply it so dexterously, that his judgment sometimes suffered. It was dazzled by the brilliance of his invention. I do not think he loved his theories specially because they were his own, for he often modified or abandoned them, and he was always ready to give an eager attention to any one else's suggestions. But he had a passion for light, and when a new view seemed to him to explain things previously dark, he found it hard to acquiesce in uncertainty or patiently to suspend his judgment. Some of his theories he himself dropped. Some others he probably would have dropped, as the authorities he respected have not embraced them. Others have made their way into general acceptance, and will become still more useful as future inquirers work them out. But it may

safely be said of his theories, that whether right or wrong, they were always instructive. Every one of them is based upon some facts, whose importance had not been so fully seen before, and suggests a point of view which is worth considering. He may sometimes appear extravagant-he is

never weak, or silly, or perverse. And so far from being credulous, his natural tendency was towards doubt.

On its imaginative side, his mind was constructive: on its logical side, it was solvent and sceptical. Imagination is doubtless to most men the faculty by whose aid construction takes place; but it is seldom that a strong imagination is coupled with so unsparing a criticism as his was of the materials on which the constructive faculty has to work. Sometimes the one power, sometimes the other, carried the day with him. But his later tendencies were rather towards scepticism, and towards what one may call a severe and ascetic view of history. While writing the Making of England, and the (still unpublished). Conquest of England, he used to lament to me the scantiness of the materials, and the barren dryness which he feared the books would consequently show. "How am I to make anything of these meagre entries of marches and battles which make up the history of whole centuries? Here are the Norsemen and Danes ravaging and occupying the country; we learn hardly anything about them from English sources, and nothing at all from Danish. How can one conceive and describe them? how have any comprehension of what England was like in the districts they took and ruled?" I tried to get him to work in the Norse Sagas, and remember in particular to have entreated him when he came to the battle of Brunanburh to eke out the pitifully scanty records of that great fight from the account given of it in the famous story of the Icelandic hero, Egil, son of Skallagrim. But he answered that the Saga was unhistorical, a bit of legend written down more than a century after the event, and that he could not, by using it in the text, appear to trust it, or mix up authentic history with fable. It was urged that he could guard himself in a note from being supposed to take it for more than what it was,

a most picturesque embellishment of his tale. But he stood firm. Throughout these two last books, he steadily refrained from introducing any matter, however lively or romantic, which I could not stand the test of his stringent criticism, and used laughingly to tell how Dean Stanley had long ago said to him, after reading one of his earliest pieces, "I see you are in danger of growing picturesque. Beware of it. I have suffered for it."

If in these later years he was more cautious, and reined in his imagination more tightly, the change was certainly due to no failing in his ingenuity. Nothing in all his work shows higher constructive quality than the Making of England. He had to deal with a time which has left us scarcely any authentic records, and to piece together his narrative and his picture of the country out of these records, and the indications, faint and scattered, and often capable of several interpretations, which are supplied by the remains of Roman roads and villas, the names of places, the boundaries of local divisions, the casual statements of writers many centuries later. The result is nothing less than wonderful, and will remain the most enduring witness of his historical power. For here it is not a question of mere literary brilliance. results are due to unwearied patience, exquisite penetration, sober weighing of evidence, joined to that power of realising things in the concrete by which a picture is conjured up out of

а

The

mass of phenomena, everything falling into its place under laws which seem to prove themselves as soon as they are stated.

Of his literary style nothing need be said, for every one has felt its charm. But it is not without interest to observe that so accomplished a master of words had little verbal memory. He used to say that he could never recollect a phrase in its exact form, and readers of his history will recall instances in which, speaking

from memory, he has unconsciously varied some recorded expression. Nor had he any turn for languages. German he never knew at all, a fact which makes the compass of his historical knowledge appear all the more wonderful, and though he had spent several winters in Italy, he did not speak Italian except for the elementary purposes of travelling. The same want of mere verbal memory may have borne a part in this, but it was not unconnected with the vehemence of his interest in the substance of things. He was SO anxious to get at the kernel that he could not stop to examine the nut. In this absence of linguistic gifts, as well as in the keenness of his observations he resembled the late Dean of Westminster, who though he had travelled in and brought back all that was best worth knowing from every country in Europe had no facility in any language but his own. Another taste, however, whose absence used to excite surprise in that admirable master of style, I mean the love of music, was present in Green, whose feeling for that most emotional of the arts was deep and fine.

He was not one of those whose personality is unlike their books, for there was in both the same fertility, the same vivacity, the same keenness of sympathy. Nevertheless those who knew him used to feel that they got from his conversation an even higher impression of his intellectual power than they did from his writings, because everything was so swift and so spontaneous. Such talk has rarely been heard in our generation, so gay, so vivid, so various, so full of anecdote and illustration, so acute in criticism, so candid in consideration, so graphic in description, so abundant in sympathy, so flashing in insight, so full of colour and emotion as well as of knowledge and thought. One had to forbid one's self to visit him in the evening, because it was impossible to break off before two o'clock in the morning. And un

like many illustrious talkers, he was just as willing to listen as to speak. Indeed one of the chief charms of his company was that it made you feel so much better than your ordinary self. His appreciation of whatever had any worth in it, his comments and replies, so stimulated the interlocutor's mind that it moved faster and could hit upon apter expressions than at any other time. The same gifts which shone out in his talk, lucid arrangement of ideas, perfect command of words, and a refined skill in perceiving the tendencies of those whom he addressed, would have made him an admirable public speaker. I do not remember that he ever did speak, in his later years, to any audience larger than a committee of twenty. But he was a most eloquent preacher. The first time I ever saw him was in St. Philip's, Stepney, some seventeen years ago, and I shall never forget the impression made on me by the impassioned sentences that rang through the church from the fiery little figure in the pulpit with its thin face and bright black eyes.

What Green did, precious as it is to students and delightful to the public, seems to those who used to listen to him little in comparison with what he would have done had longer life and a more robust body been granted him. Some of his greatest gifts would not have found their full scope till he came to treat of a period where the materials for history are ample, and where he could have allowed himself space to deal with them, such a period, for instance, as that of his early choice, the Angevin kings of England. Yet, even basing themselves on what he has done, they will not fear to claim for him a place among the foremost writers of our time. He has certainly left behind him no one who combines so many of the best gifts. We have historians equally learned, equally industrious. We have two or three whose accuracy is more scrupulous, and their judgment more uniformly

73

But we have no

sober and cautious.
one, and we may not for many years
to come have any one, in whom so
much knowledge and so wide a range
of interests are united to such inge-
nuity, acuteness, originality of view,
and to such a power of presenting re-
sults in rich, clear, and pictorial lan-
guage. A great master of style may
be a worthless historian. A skilful
investigator and sound reasoner may
be unreadable; the conjunction of the
highest gifts for investigation with
the highest gifts for exposition is a
rare conjunction, which cannot be
prized too highly, for it not only ad-
vances history, but it creates a taste
for history, and brings historical
methods as well as historical facts,
within the horizon of the ordinary
reader.

Of the services he has rendered to English history, the first, and that which was most promptly appreciated, was the intensity with which he realised, and the skill with which he brought out the life of the people of England, and taught his readers. that the exploits of kings and the intrigues of ministers, and the struggles of parties in Parliament, are, after all, secondary matters, and important only in so far as they affect the welfare or stimulate the thoughts and feelings of the great mass of undistinguished humanity in whose hands the future of a nation lies. He changed the old-fashioned distribution of our annals into certain periods, showing that such divisions often obscured the true connection of events, and suggesting new and better groupings. And, lastly, he has laid, in 3 his latest books, a firm and enduring foundation for our medieval history by that account of the Teutonic occupation of England, of the state of the country as they found it, and the way they conquered and began to organise it, which has been already dwelt on as the most signal proof of his constructive power.

Many readers will be disposed to

place him near Macaulay, for though he was less weighty he was far more subtle, and not less fascinating. To fewer perhaps will it occur to compare him with Gibbon, yet I am emboldened by the opinion of one of our greatest living historians to venture on the comparison. There are indeed wide differences between the two men. Green's style has not the majestic march of Gibbon: it is quick and eager almost to restlessness. Nor is his judgment so uniformly grave and sound. But the characteristic note of his genius was also that of Gibbon's, the combination of a perfect

mastery of multitudinous details, with a large and luminous view of those far-reaching forces and relations which govern the fortunes of peoples and guide the course of empire. This width and comprehensiveness, this power of massing for the purposes of argument the facts which his art has just been clothing in its most brilliant hues, is the highest of all a historian's gifts, and is the one which seems most of all to establish his position among the leading historical minds of our century.

JAMES BRYCE.