By Rev. H. A. HAWEIS, M.A.

Before the publication of Mr. Green’s “Short History,” 86,000 copies of which have been sold in England alone, Mr. Green, although a voluminous essayist in the Saturday Review, was absolutely unknown by name to the general public. It is not true, as was asserted in a leading journal, that the success of his book surprised his friends. In 1863, the clergyman whom he followed at Holy Trinity, Hoxton, said to me, “I think we have a giant among us in Johnny Green.” “I made up my mind about that,” I replied, “the very first night I saw and spoke to him.” Mr. Freeman, Prof. Stubbs, Dr. Stanley, and, I may say, Archbishop Tait, all knew of his powers before he became famous at a leap, and I venture to say not one of them was surprised at his success. I think he was more surprised himself.

He was filled with a great love of historical study, but was generally diffident about his own work. “I read it over,” he said to me in the old days, when I was favored with copious extracts; “and I write and re-write, and wonder after all whether it is worth much—whether any one else will read it!”

His own standard was so high, his knowledge so great, and his critical friends, Freeman, Stubbs, Brewer, etc., so accomplished, that he was inclined to be generally very modest about his own rank as an historian, and at times even wavered in his general design.

When I first knew Mr. Green, he was revolving a work which should deal, I believe, with the Plantagenet period, illustrate the story of the Great Charter, and the making of the English political constitution. The first fragment he put into my hand in type was Stephen’s Ride to London.

At the instance of Mr. Macmillan, the publisher, he abandoned the magnum opus for a season, and taking, in one wide sweep, the whole of English history, produced that unique and popular narrative which raised him immediately into the very first rank of historians.

I remember his anxiety to bring the book within the reach of the masses, to make it a cheap book, his battle with the publisher on that ground, and his final victory.

This intense sympathy with the people, no doubt, had to do with those innate democratic and republican tendencies in Mr. Green which so alarmed the Quarterly Review, but they were immensely quickened by his many-sided experiences in the East-end of London.

In those Hoxton and Stepney districts, where he was my fellow curate, and my constant friend and companion for two years, he was learning to know the English people. He had read about them in books. In Stepney he rubbed elbows with them. He had a student’s acquaintance with popular movements; but the people are their own best interpreter; and if you want to understand their ways in the past, you can not do better than study our present poor-law guardian, navvy, artisan, East-end weaver, parish Bumble, clerk, publican, and city tradesmen, in the nineteenth-century flesh.

Mr. Green never worked more vigorously at his history than when he was busy reading its turbulent popular movements, and mixed social influences, secular and religious, in the light of mechanics’ institutes, poor-law difficulties, parochial squabbles, and dissenting jealousies. The postponement of his history until the harvest of this precious experience had been fully reaped, gave him that insight into the secret springs of popular enthusiasm, suffering, and achievement which makes his history alive with the heart-beats of our common humanity, instead of mouldy with the smell of moth-eaten MSS. and dead men’s bones.

That slight nervous figure, below the medium height; that tall forehead, with the head prematurely bald; the quick but small eyes, rather close together; the thin mouth, with lips seldom at rest, but often closed tightly as though the teeth were clenched with an odd kind of latent energy beneath them; the slight, almost feminine hands; the little stoop; the quick, alert step; the flashing exuberance of spirits; the sunny smile; the torrent of quick invective, scorn, or badinage, exchanged in a moment for a burst of sympathy or a delightful and prolonged flow of narrative—all this comes back to me, vividly! And what narrative, what anecdote, what glancing wit! What a talker! A man who shrank from society, and yet was so fitted to adorn and instruct every company he approached, from a parochial assembly to a statesman’s reception!

But how enchanting were my walks with him in the Victoria Park, that one outlet of Stepney and Bethnal Green! I never in my life so lost count of time with any one before or since.

Green would live through a period. Two hours on the Venetian Republic, with every conceivable branch of allied history, literature, and politics thrown in, yet willing to listen and gather up at any moment; infinite speculations at other times on theology, philosophy; schemes for the regeneration of mankind; minute plans for the management of our East-end districts; anecdotes of the poor; rarer veins of sentiment and personal criticism.

I have sometimes, after spending the evening with him at my lodgings, walked back to St. Philip’s Parsonage, Stepney, toward midnight, talking; then he has walked back with me in the summer night, talking; and when the dawn broke it has found us belated somewhere in the lonely Mile-end Road, still unexhausted, and still talking.

At such times we have neither of us undressed all night—that was so especially in the cholera times—but I would go back to St. Philip’s and sleep on a sofa till breakfast-time.

In those days we were both feeling our way, through similar experiences, to conclusions of a somewhat different nature; but the memory of many precious hours of soul-communion remains with me, as something sacred and beautiful beyond words. I think at such times we grow in mind and develop in character in days and nights, more than in months and years of slower vitality and lessened intensity.

In 1866 the cholera broke out in the East-end of London. Mr. Green was then Incumbent of St. Philip’s, Stepney, and I had just removed to a curacy at the West-end; but his position at this time was very lonely, and I was glad to go out to be with him whenever I could. I am sorry to say that in the general cholera panic a good many who ought to have remained at their posts forsook them, and this made the work very heavy for people of any means and influence who still felt bound to reside in the affected districts.

Although Mr. Green’s parish did not suffer as heavily as some, yet in some streets the mortality was very great. The dead could hardly be got away quickly enough. The neighbors often refused to touch them. I have known Mr. Green take an active part in sending off the cholera beds for burning, and getting the corpses out of the houses. The only people who seemed willing to help him were the lowest women of the town. These poor girls rallied round the active and public-spirited clergyman; and it was no uncommon thing to see Mr. Green going down the lowest back streets in Stepney, on his way to some infected house, between two women of the town, who had volunteered with him on such sad and perilous service to the dead and dying, as was daily to be done, and was daily being left undone, in those dismal times.—The Contemporary Review.