THE HISTORIANS AND BIOGRAPHERS.

Carlyle was so much besides being a historian, and seems, when we look back from a distance of sixty years, so clearly the leader of thought in the early part of this period, that it has been deemed advisable to treat him by himself. But even without him the volume and the quality of historical work accomplished during those forty years is very great. Besides Macaulay, who surpassed Carlyle in popular estimation, Thomas Arnold, Grote, Thirlwall and Froude were all men who, in most periods, might well have filled the first place in historical literature.

Several reasons may be assigned for the concentration of talent upon history. In the first place, the circumstances of the time made an examination of the foundations of society imperative. This necessity reveals itself everywhere, in poetry, in philosophy, and in theology, as well as in history. The cry is on all sides for reconstruction; and there is a growing sense that the reconstruction must take place upon a groundwork of fact, discoverable only by a study of the past. The pre-Revolutionary writers had relied upon a priori theory, but the immediate results were so different from their anticipations that their successors were little disposed to repeat the mistake. Modern history teaches above all things the lesson of continuity. Institutions change and grow, but they never spring up suddenly like a Jonah’s gourd; and even revolutions only modify, they do not annul the past.

Science too has had a powerful influence, and the success of the scientific method has encouraged the application of a method similar in principle, though necessarily different in minor points, to the facts of history. The last two generations have witnessed a great extension of the principle of induction in the sphere of history; and as the first step in a complex process of induction is the accumulation of masses of facts, we have here perhaps an explanation of some of the weaknesses of the modern school of history. It is apt to lose itself in detail. The reach of Tacitus or of Gibbon seems no longer attainable, because their successors must know everything, and can with difficulty restrain themselves from stating everything. Some one, doubtless, whether he be called a philosopher or a historian, will ultimately assimilate the masses of information thus laboriously compiled, and the world will once more have the principal results compactly stated and in orderly sequence. Buckle’s experiment proves that it is possible to attempt this too soon; but at the same time the welcome that experiment received is an indication that we shall not be permanently satisfied with the fragments and aspects of history which alone the new method as yet yields. Unity of treatment is ultimately as essential in history as codification is in law; and it is essential for much the same reason. The old proverb tells us that the wood may be invisible by reason of the trees.

We may trace the influence of science also in the greatly deepened sense of the importance of origins. In science the chief triumphs have been won by tracing things to their beginnings; in physical structure to atoms and molecules, in animal life to nerve cells, protoplasm, or whatever is simplest and most primitive. Exactly the same effort is made in modern history; and nothing is more distinctive of it, in contrast with the comparatively superficial historical school of the eighteenth century, than the determination to trace the starting-point and original meaning of institutions. Ages which had been previously left to legend and myth have been patiently investigated, and it is to them that we are now referred for the explanation of our own times.

But not only has the ideal of history changed; the material from which it is written, old in one sense, is to a large extent new in the sense that it is now for the first time accessible. The men of earlier times, even when they had the industry and the will for minute investigation, had seldom the means. The vast increase of accessible documents has caused history to be written afresh, to an extent best measured by the fact that, except those who rank as original authorities, Gibbon alone among historians prior to the present century still holds his ground.

Thomas Babington Macaulay felt these modern influences, though not quite in their full force. He was the son of Zachary Macaulay, celebrated for his exertions in the Anti-Slavery crusade. At Cambridge, whither he went in 1818, young Macaulay had for contemporaries a very brilliant set of young men, including Derwent and Henry Nelson Coleridge, Moultrie, Praed and Charles Austin, ‘the only man,’ says Sir George Trevelyan, ‘who ever succeeded in dominating Macaulay,’ the man who weaned him from the Toryism in which he had been brought up, and ‘brought him nearer to Radicalism than he ever was before or since.’ A constitutional incapacity for and hatred of mathematics was punished by the omission of his name from the Tripos list of 1822. He had been ‘gulfed.’ Nevertheless, in 1824, he was elected to a Fellowship of Trinity College. He was called to the bar in 1826, but never took seriously to the law as a profession. He had received an earlier call to another profession, and during his stay at Cambridge he had been a frequent contributor to Knights Quarterly Magazine. But we may date from 1825, when his essay on Milton appeared in the Edinburgh Review, the opening of his career in literature. For many years afterwards he was a frequent and certainly the most effective contributor to the review.

Macaulay’s connexion with Jeffrey’s review was profitable in several ways to himself as well as to it. He gained money, and fame, and political connexions which determined the course of his life for many years, and which by doing so unquestionably influenced his historical work. Through the influence of Lord Lansdowne, who had been struck by his articles on Mill, Macaulay became, in 1830, member for Calne. He soon made his mark, rather as a speaker of set speeches than as a debater. His speeches have much the character of his essays, the rhetorical style of which is not ill adapted to verbal utterance. The clearness which Macaulay never failed to give made the rhetoric effective. His great knowledge, and especially his wonderful command of historical illustration, enabled him often to clinch his argument where abstract discussion would have failed. The most telling passage in one of his best known speeches, the speech on copyright, is a long list of concrete instances of the effect of the proposal he was advocating as contrasted with that of the proposal he was combating. At the close, with well-founded confidence, he challenges his opponent to match it. While therefore Macaulay had but a small share of the highest faculty of the orator, the power to sway the passions of his audience, he had in a high degree the power to interest their intellect. For neat, crisp statement, apt and copious illustration, and effective rhetoric occasionally rising into eloquence, his speeches have few equals.

As a reward for his services in the cause of reform Macaulay was appointed a member of the Supreme Council of India. In 1834 he sailed from England, and he resided in India till the beginning of 1838. Soon after his return to England he was elected M.P. for Edinburgh, and in 1839 was raised to the Cabinet as Secretary at War. But he gradually became absorbed in his history and devoted less and less time to politics. His defeat in 1847 in the parliamentary election for Edinburgh contributed to wean him still more from public life. He was hurt, and the smart of wounded pride is apparent in the most beautiful verses he ever wrote. They were composed on the night of his defeat, and they declare that the writer’s true allegiance belongs to that Spirit of Literature who, when all the ‘wayward sprites’ of Gain, Fashion, Power and Pleasure have passed away, draws near to bless his first infant sleep. The verses are transparently sincere. Macaulay’s love for letters was the passion of his life; and, acting on such a character as his, the unmerited rebuff dealt by Edinburgh proved a turning point in his career. He retired into private life, and though after the repentance of Edinburgh in 1852 he sat again for his old constituency, it was with the fixed intention not to immerse himself in parliamentary work, and above all not to accept office. He was now completely absorbed in his history; and as he gradually became conscious of the greatness of his task, and felt that life was slipping away with only a fragment of it accomplished, he grudged more and more any deduction from the time which, he foresaw, must be too short at best. For his previously excellent health had broken down soon after his election, and he never fully recovered it. He resigned his seat in 1856. In the following year he was raised to the peerage as Baron Macaulay of Rothley, and he died on December 28th, 1859, leaving his history a fragment.

The works of Macaulay are remarkably easy to classify and not very difficult to appraise. They fall under four heads,—speeches, essays, including the biographical articles contributed to the EncyclopÆdia Britannica, the History of England, and poetry.

The speeches have been already noticed. The essays, which are described as ‘critical and historical,’ are only to a very minor degree critical. The well-known paper on Robert Montgomery, irresistibly amusing in its severity, is exceptional in the fact that, starting with a literary subject, it treats that subject throughout from a literary point of view. In most of his essays, as he himself confessed, Macaulay escapes as soon as possible from criticism and glides into history. This is the case even in the essay on Milton, who would have enchained him to criticism if anyone could. Where he is really critical, Macaulay always shows the qualities of good sense, sound judgment and extensive knowledge; but few will think that he shows any remarkable fineness of critical faculty. On occasion he could characterise a style exceedingly well. His contrast between the simple, nervous and picturesque expression of Johnson’s familiar letters and his Latinised pomposity when his sentences are done out of English into Johnsonese, cannot be forgotten; and his treatment of Bacon’s style is as sound and excellent as his treatment of Bacon’s philosophy is mistaken and false. But his mind was of too positive a type to admit of the finest kind of criticism. He saw nothing in half-light, and he was deficient in sympathy. His criticism of the Queen Anne writers, whom he knew best, will not bear comparison, in respect of insight and sensitive appreciation, with Thackeray’s criticism of them in the English Humourists.Macaulay’s strength lay elsewhere; and though he carried into all he did the deficiencies revealed by his criticism, as well as deficiencies due to political prejudice and personal bias, yet all faults are forgotten, for the time at least, in admiration of wide knowledge, boundless energy and brilliant style. Macaulay’s extensive reading, backed by his wonderful memory, served him well. His knowledge was always at hand. If he wanted a reference or an allusion he could in a moment supply it. Yet his quotations, references and allusions are never pedantic, nor are they allowed to clog and weight his style. They serve their proper purpose of illustrating and enforcing his point. He defends his position by parallel after parallel, contrast after contrast. It was this wealth of illustration that forced acquiescence from men of less knowledge among his contemporaries; it is the suspicion that the parallels are not always accurate, and the contrasts not always sound, that has since caused so many of his conclusions to be regarded with suspicion. But frequently the historical illustrations are poured out, not to defend any thesis, but simply because they crowd spontaneously into the writer’s mind; and some of the most effective passages in Macaulay’s writings are of this character. Take, for example, the well-known passage from Warren Hastings beginning, ‘The place was worthy of such a trial,’ or the description in the History of the spot where the dust of Monmouth was laid. Less crowded with historical names and details, but still deriving most of its charm from the same cause, is the almost equally well-known paragraph in the essay on Ranke’s History of the Popes, beginning, ‘There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church.’ There is a rapidity, fire and vividness in such passages by which we may in great measure account for Macaulay’s popularity. He had no more marked literary gift. It shows itself even more spontaneously in his letters than in his formal writings; and the letters have sometimes moreover a touch of humour rare in the works he intended for publication. Few things of his are more purely delightful than the letter to his friend Ellis, describing the division in the House of Commons in 1831, when the Reform Bill was carried by a majority of one: ‘You might have heard a pin drop as Duncannon read the numbers. Then, again, the shouts broke out, and many of us shed tears. And the jaw of Peel fell; and the face of Twiss was as the face of a damned soul; and Herries looked like Judas taking his necktie off for the last operation.’

It is true that the vivid colouring of the essays sometimes becomes too glaring, that the characters, especially when they have relation to politics, are apt to be too dark or too bright for human nature, and that the writing is throughout that of a partisan. But if this detracts from it is far from destroying their value; and Macaulay’s biographer is pardonably proud of their popularity, and insists, with justice, that it is an element in their greatness as well as an evidence of it.

The first two volumes of the History of England were published in 1848, and the third and fourth in 1855, while the fifth was left unfinished at Macaulay’s death. The history repeats in great measure both the merits and the defects of the essays. Written with a steady eye to permanence, it is far purer and more perfect, better proportioned, more restrained and more harmonious than they; but it is marked still by the same limitations. We find the writer’s strength in a great command of facts and in clearness and force of style. His weaknesses are partisan bias, exaggeration and a certain want of depth.The story of Macaulay’s ambition to write a history which every young lady should read in preference to the latest novel has been often repeated and often ridiculed. The ridicule is ill judged. To aim at popularity is in itself innocent and even laudable; in truth it is universal. Carlyle himself with reason felt aggrieved that he remained so long unrecognised. The desire for popularity becomes vicious only when it leads the man who cherishes it to pander to a taste which he knows to be depraved, or to write something worse than his best, because he knows that his best would not be as popular. There is no trace of such conduct in Macaulay. His faults were inherent in his nature, and could have been eradicated only by making him anew.

Of late years Macaulay’s history has been often challenged on the score of inaccuracy and untruth. The charge is brought against every historian in turn; and we must remember, on the other hand, that Freeman, one of the most competent of judges, warmly praised Macaulay for his command of facts. It is necessary to distinguish three things: falsity of statement, incompleteness of statement, and the drawing of disputable conclusions. In the first respect Macaulay was rarely, in the second and third he was frequently, at fault. His omissions are often indefensible. The whole evidence of his character is against the supposition that they were due to conscious dishonesty. It is far more probable that, approaching his subject with a strong prepossession, he was positively blind to anything that told against his own view. Partly for the same reason, and partly because his philosophic endowment was not equal to his literary talent, his inferences too are often questionable. And this perhaps will prove in the end a more serious objection to his history than his partisanship; for, after all, there are worse things, even in historical writing, than partisanship. The man who is free from all temptation to take a side, if not from political affinity then from moral sympathy, must run some risk of being dull and colourless.

Macaulay did much to enlarge and liberalise the conception of history. More than any of his predecessors, he attempted to base his views on a wide consideration of the literature and life of the people, as well as on their constitution and campaigns and treaties. He cast all pseudo-dignity to the winds. His method was sound; and herein Carlyle, though he applied the principle differently, was quite at one with Macaulay. Another honourable characteristic, wherein the two historians likewise agreed, was their care in visiting the scenes about which they had to write; and both have gained in vividness and in topographical accuracy from this habit. Macaulay’s notes on the scenes of the Irish war were ‘equal in bulk to a first-class article in the Edinburgh or Quarterly Review.’

The style of Macaulay is at its best in the History, where it is more chastened, more varied and sonorous than in the Essays. The same tricks and mannerisms reappear, but they are softened and restrained. The trick of a rapid succession of curt sentences, at times so effective, but also at times monotonous and jarring, is kept within bounds. Short and simple are mingled with comparatively long and complex sentences; for Macaulay, scornful of ‘the dignity of history’ when it is merely cramping and obstructive, is scrupulously mindful of it when the phrase has a legitimate application. He rejects as meretricious ornament and illustration which, as he himself declared, he would have considered not only admissible but desirable in a review. The just censure that his style is hard and metallic applies with far more force against the Essays than against the History. Greater care and higher finish deepen and enrich the tone.

Macaulay’s verse must be dismissed with few words. He is best known by his Lays of Ancient Rome, compositions which, like his prose writings, are historical in principle. They neither are nor pretend to be great, but they rank high among the modern imitations of popular poetry. At the same time, they display no such sympathetic genius as, for example, Scott’s ballad of Harlaw, no such loftiness of mind as his Cadyow Castle. They are clear, rapid and vigorous, like their author’s prose. The generous judgment of Elizabeth Barrett, quoted in Ward’s English Poets, is essentially just: ‘He has a noble, clear, metallic note in his soul, and makes us ready by it for battle.’ That he makes us ready by it for battle is eminently true of the splendidly martial Battle of Naseby, the most stirring piece of verse Macaulay ever wrote. It is interesting to note that the historian of England thus, at the age of twenty-four, reached his highest point in ballad verse in a subject taken from the country and the century which all his life long attracted his most serious study.

In several respects Macaulay is the natural antithesis to Carlyle: to some extent they may even be regarded as complementary. We may correct the excess of the one by the opposite excess of the other. Macaulay was an optimist, Carlyle a pessimist; Macaulay was the panegyrist of his own time, Carlyle was its merciless critic; Macaulay devoutly believed all the formulas of the Whig creed, and had great faith in Reform Bills and improvements in parliamentary machinery, Carlyle accepted no formulas whatsoever, and set small store by any reforms that were merely parliamentary; Macaulay was orthodox in his literary tastes and methods, Carlyle was revolutionary and scornful of rule. The contrast applies equally to their personal history and character. Macaulay was sunny, genial and healthy, Carlyle dyspeptic, irascible, ‘gey ill to deal wi’;’ Macaulay suddenly sprang into fame, Carlyle slowly and with difficulty fought his way to it. They are contrasted in their very biographies. Macaulay’s is one of the pleasantest in the language; Carlyle’s awoke an acrimonious discussion, due in part certainly to the sins of the subject, but in part also to his injudicious treatment by the biographer.

The truth lay between them. If Macaulay was too easily optimistic, Carlyle was too gloomy. To paint a picture all shadow is as untrue to art, and generally to fact, as it is to paint one all light. It is true that the great problem of society, wise government, cannot be solved by franchises and ballot-boxes; but proper regulations as to these may help to solve it. Carlyle sometimes forgot that the practical problem usually is, not to secure that complex and difficult thing, wise government, but to effect some little improvement which will conduce to the comparative, wiser government, if it does not lead us to the unattainable positive.

The example of German thoroughness had no small influence in fostering the new movement in history. It acted most directly on the students of ancient history, and Niebuhr was the channel through which it was transmitted to England. Before the middle of the century his authority was hardly questioned, though a little later we can trace the reaction in the works of Sir George Cornewall Lewis and others; and now it is no longer possible to conjure with the Pelasgians. But whatever doubts may cloud some of the conclusions of Niebuhr, it was he who enabled the English historians to breathe life into the dry bones of ancient history. Thomas Arnold, Thirlwall and Grote were all inspired by him. Taking these writers as a group, we may remark one important difference between them and the writers of modern history. The historians of the ancient world are wider in their range, and in their works it is still possible to trace the whole life of a people. Thirlwall and Grote embrace all the history of Greece down to the period of decay, and only Arnold’s early death prevented him from being equally comprehensive. The reason is that there is a certain finality about ancient history. The materials are manageable in quantity, and there neither have been nor can be such additions to them as to those on which modern history is based.

Thomas Arnold was a man of untiring energy, and he found for his energies three channels, two of them practical and one literary. It is as a schoolmaster that he has won his widest, and what will probably prove his most enduring fame. Some unfavourable critics have insisted that Arnold’s Rugby boy could only be described by the slang term, prig. But such criticism is merely the revolt against excessive praise. There may have been some intellectual and moral coxcombry developed in early years by many of Arnold’s pupils; but that is not the mature characteristic of men like Clough and Stanley and Dean Vaughan. Moreover, Thomas Arnold was emphatically one of those men from whom virtue goes out; and a result due to affectation can hardly have come from a character so simple and so sincere.

But Arnold was ambitious likewise to have a hand in determining the doctrines and shaping the thought of England. He, a clergyman, naturally took an ecclesiastical view of what would do that; but it was at the same time a broad view. His position was singularly interesting. The two great evils of the age, in his eyes, were that materialism which he believed to be centred in the University of London, and the Catholic revival associated with the University of Oxford. He stood upon a ground of rationalism, but it was a rationalism which he firmly believed to be consistent with faith. He hated materialism because it left no room for a religious creed; he hated Tractarianism because it was irreconcilable with reason, and he was convinced that whatever was irrational must and ought to go to ruin. He would have accepted the aphorism of a living writer, ‘Nothing that is intellectually unsound can be morally sound.’ ‘It is,’ says he, ‘because I so earnestly desire the revival of the Church that I abhor the doctrine of the priesthood.’ It was this, the combination of faith with fearless loyalty to reason, that gave him his peculiar interest in the eyes of observers. The keenest of these however thought the permanent maintenance of that position impossible; and Dr. Arnold’s son, Matthew, in his Letters expresses in another way an opinion substantially identical with that which Carlyle had expressed before.

Arnold’s History of Rome, published between the years 1838 and 1843, has in great part lost its importance through the researches of Mommsen and other German scholars; but there are portions which can never lose their importance. The point of view is essentially Arnold’s own. The impulse to write came to him because he found in Rome the ancient analogue to the ‘kingly commonwealth of England.’ He found in the great republic lessons both of encouragement and of warning to his own country; but he sinned less than some others, notably Grote, in the way of drawing these lessons direct from the ancient state to the modern. In another respect, dignity of style, he had an immense advantage over his more widely-read contemporary. Arnold’s English is always forcible, and in the best passages it is eloquent. He is strongest in his account of military operations, and his description of the campaigns of the Second Punic War remains still the most vivid and readable in our language, and probably in modern literature. Certainly Mommsen, powerful as his work is, cannot rival Arnold as a military historian. It is rather in depth of scholarship, in mastery of facts, in comprehension of the early history, and consequently of the subsequent working, of the constitution, that Arnold has been surpassed.

The other two historians of the ancient world both chose Greece for their subject. The more interesting and abler man of the two, and the profounder scholar, had the singular ill fortune to see his work superseded, almost as soon as he had written it, by that of his rival. Connop Thirlwall was celebrated in his day as one of the best of English scholars; but no man was ever less of the mere grammarian. Trenchant intellect and sound judgment were his characteristics. He impressed all who encountered him with his capacity to be a leader of men; and his early enterprises seemed a guarantee that he would redeem his promise. As one of the translators of Niebuhr he moulded English historical thought; and his translation of Schleiermacher’s essay on St. Luke made an equally deep impression on English theology. It almost stopped his professional advancement. When, in 1840, Thirlwall was suggested to Lord Melbourne for the bishopric of St. David’s, Melbourne, with the characteristic oath, objected: ‘He is not orthodox in that preface to Schleiermacher.’ After some investigation the pious minister convinced himself that the writer of the preface was sufficiently orthodox for the purpose. Thirlwall, perhaps to the cost of his permanent fame, became Bishop of St. David’s, and held the office till the year before his death. As Bishop he was bold and independent in judgment. On two memorable occasions he stood alone among his order. He was the solitary bishop who refused to sign the address calling upon Colenso to resign, and he alone voted for the disestablishment of the Irish Church. Nevertheless he was in a position unfortunate for himself. His nature demanded unfettered freedom of thought; and the controversy with Rowland Williams over the question of Essays and Reviews proved that such freedom was not to be found on a bishop’s throne.

Thirlwall’s principal contribution to literature is his History of Greece (1835-1847). The completed work is unfortunately marred by traces of the original design. It had been meant for Lardner’s CyclopÆdia, but overflowed the limits set. Thirlwall thereupon revised the scheme; but he never attained the freedom he would have had if he had begun to write on his own plan and his own scale. His profound scholarship, penetrating judgment, nervous though severe style, and critical acumen, all show to advantage in the History. He is far more concentrated than Grote; and though the latter caught the meaning of certain movements and certain institutions which Thirlwall neglected or misinterpreted, he presents a more luminous and a less prejudiced view of Greek history than his successful rival.

But if the History of Greece is Thirlwall’s most solid contribution to literature, that which gives the best impression of the man, regarded by contemporaries as a rival of the greatest, is his Letters to a Young Friend.[3] Few collections of letters give a more charming view of a relation of pure friendship between two people of widely different age. They are weighty too because they touch at many points on questions of universal interest. It has been said that the letters a man writes ought to be ascribed to his correspondent in equal measure with himself; and it is certain that from the sympathy he found in this friendship Thirlwall drew an inspiration nothing else in his life ever gave him.

George Grote, the schoolfellow, friend and rival of Thirlwall, was a man in most respects widely different from the great Bishop. Thirlwall’s thought was German in origin, though it was coloured by English ecclesiastical opinion. Grote was a Benthamite, and had all the hardness without quite all the force of that school. It was the rising school, and part of Grote’s success was due to the fact that he was moving along the line of least resistance. He was a persevering, clear-sighted, determined man. As a historian of Greece he was patient and thorough. He had marked out the subject as his own more than twenty years before the publication, in 1846, of his first two volumes; and ten years more passed before the work was finished. Indeed, we may say that his whole life was devoted to it; for, according to his conception of history, Plato and the other Companions of Sokrates (1865), and the incomplete Aristotelian studies issued posthumously in 1872, were parts and appendages of the history.

Grote was spurred on to this work by political feelings more nearly related to the present time. He was irritated by the Toryism of Mitford’s History of Greece, which he exposed in an article in the Westminster Review. Yet one of his own most conspicuous defects is that he too evidently holds a brief on the opposite side. He does not slur facts, still less does he falsify, but his arguments have sometimes the character of special pleading. Democracy becomes a kind of fetish to him. Its success in the Athens of the fifth century B.C. is made an argument for extending the English franchise in the nineteenth century A.D.; and Grote is wholly blind to the fact that the wide difference of circumstances makes futile all reasoning from the one case to the other.

Grote’s style is heavy and ungainly. He plods along, correct as a rule, but uninspiring and unattractive. He is similarly clumsy in the use of materials. Skilful selection might have appreciably shortened his history; but Grote rarely prunes with sufficient severity, and often he does not prune at all. His habit of pouring out the whole mass of his material in the shape of notes lightens the labour of his successors, but injures his own work as an artistic history. Nevertheless, though Grote had no genius, and nothing that deserves to be called a style, his History of Greece holds the field. It does so because of its solidity and conscientious thoroughness, because of its patient investigation of the origin and meaning of institutions, and because its very faults were, after all, faults which sprang from sympathy. Grote was the first who did full justice to the Athenian people; and he may be pardoned if he sometimes did them more than justice.

As these three, Arnold, Thirlwall and Grote, dealt with the ancient world in its glory and greatness, so there were two, Milman and Finlay, who traced its decay, or the process of transition from the ancient to the modern world.

Henry Hart Milman in his earlier days wrote poetry. The turning-point in his literary career was the publication of the History of the Jews (1830), the first English work which adequately treats the Jews in their actual historical setting, not in the traditional way as a ‘peculiar people’ with practically no historical setting at all. Milman afterwards edited Gibbon and wrote a life of the historian; and in 1840 the result of his studies appeared in the History of Christianity under the Empire. In 1855 the History of Latin Christianity down to the Death of Pope Nicholas V. set the crown upon his labours. This work is Milman’s best title to remembrance, and though errors have been detected in it, the tone and spirit are good, the method sound and the scholarship admirable.

George Finlay has suffered from an unattractive theme, for few care about the obscure fortunes of Greece after its conquest by the Romans. But Finlay was an enthusiast who not only wrote about Greece but lived in it; and this residence (continuous after 1854) imparts to his history its most valuable qualities. Finlay published a series of works on Greece between 1844 and 1861, all of which were summed up in his History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time (1877).

Among historians of less importance, John Mason Neale did for the Holy Eastern Church a service similar to that performed by Milman for the Latin Church; but he is more likely to be remembered as a hymn-writer than as a historian. Charles Merivale was likewise a subordinate member of the group of ancient historians. His principal work was a History of the Romans under the Empire (1850-1862). Its worst defect is that the author is not quite equal to his subject. Merivale was a respectable historian, but the successful treatment of the Romans under the Empire demanded a great one.

Among the writers of modern history the next in rank after Macaulay and Carlyle is James Anthony Froude, the brother of Richard Hurrell Froude, famous for his connexion with the Oxford movement. For a time J. A. Froude himself was a Tractarian, and he took orders. But Newman’s drift to Rome forced him in the opposite direction. His first considerable book, The Nemesis of Faith (1849), records his change of mind and indicates how impossible it must always have been for him to rest permanently in the position of the Tractarians.

Leaving Oxford and the Tractarians, Froude fell under the spell of Carlyle. They were introduced to each other soon after this, but it was not till Froude’s settlement in London in 1860 that they became intimate. Carlyle’s influence upon his disciple was almost wholly good. The younger man had the good sense not to imitate his master’s style, while he learnt from him clear, sharply-outlined, fearless judgment; and the mists of Tractarianism rolled away for ever.

The great work of Froude’s life was his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1856-1870). It was written under the direct inspiration of Carlyle. ‘If I wrote anything,’ says Froude, ‘I fancied myself writing it to him, reflecting at each word what he would think of it, as a check on affectations.’ He submitted the first two chapters, in print, to Carlyle; and the verdict, ‘though not wanting in severity,’ was on the whole favourable. The critics were divided. Froude was a man who usually either carried his readers wholly with him or alienated them. Those who loved clear, vigorous, pointed English, keen intelligence and life-like portraiture, were delighted with the book. Students, familiar with the original documents and able to criticise details, regarded it with very different eyes.

Both sides were right in their principal assertions, and both were prone to forget that there was another aspect of the case. On the one hand, it has been established beyond the reach of reasonable dispute that Froude was habitually and grossly inaccurate. It is indeed doubtful whether any other historian, with any title to be considered great, can be charged with so many grave errors. Froude is inaccurate first of all in his facts. He does not take the trouble to verify, he misquotes, he is not careful to weigh evidence. But moreover, he is inaccurate in what may be called his colour. He paints his picture in the light of his own emotions and prejudices, he is rather the impassioned advocate than the calm judge. He would not only have acknowledged this, but he would have defended himself; and there is something to be said for his view. Absolute impartiality is, in the first place, unattainable; and in the second place, so far as it is attained, it is not always an unmixed good. Pure disinterestedness is apt to mean absence of interest. It is certainly true that some of the greatest histories in the world are all alive with the passions of the writers. Those of Tacitus are so, and likewise those of Carlyle; and Herodotus had undoubtedly a partiality for Athens. Froude therefore is not to be wholly condemned on this score; but he ought to have remembered that the adoption of such a theory of history made it doubly incumbent on him to examine carefully the grounds upon which his opinions rested. His cardinal defect was a disregard of this precaution.

Froude moreover was given to paradox. It has been repeatedly pointed out that one of the great tasks of the century has been the whitewashing of scoundrels. De Quincey undertook Judas. Carlyle in his later days performed the service for Frederick. Froude in his justification of Henry VIII. was only following a fashion. Nevertheless, the twisting of facts, the exaggeration of all that tells on the one side and the slurring or suppression of arguments on the other, are grave faults in history. And these are the almost inevitable results of the indulgence in paradox and the advocacy of weak causes. All the cleverness is unconvincing, and the detection of the sophistry brings discredit upon the whole work into which it is admitted.

This is the case of the advocatus diaboli against Froude. It is a re-statement of the main points in Freeman’s indictment. But a history is a piece of literature as well as a record of facts; and as literature Froude’s work stands very high. In the first place, he is great in style. Not that his English is of the kind that calls attention to itself. It is seldom magnificent, but it is always adequate, and the reader never feels himself jarred by want of taste or befogged by obscurity either of thought or expression. It is wholly free from affectation. Froude concerned himself merely to express his meaning, and wrote a good style because he did not trouble himself about style. He answered impatiently those who inquired into the secret of his prose, telling them that he only wrote what he thought and let the style take care of itself.

Froude had moreover a great talent for the delineation of character. Whether his characters are always true to fact may be questioned; but his Henry VIII., his Queen Mary and his Queen Elizabeth certainly leave the impression of living human beings, and the charm of his history is largely due to the vividness with which he paints them.

Froude never undertook another work on such a scale as the History. Perhaps he realised that the scale was too large. The plan of the Short Studies on Great Subjects (1867-1883) was in some respects better suited to him. In these essays he gives with unsurpassed vigour the thoughts of a powerful mind on themes of special interest; and as they do not pretend to be exhaustive the writer’s weaknesses are not brought into prominence. The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1872-1874) was, next to the great History, his largest work. But Irish history has been and is the source of so much passion that the present generation is no favourable time for either writing or criticising such a work. Later, in 1889, the historical romance, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, showed that his interest in the country still survived; and those who know Ireland are the readiest to acknowledge that Froude has not only written an interesting story, but has shown great insight into the country and its inhabitants.

But the principal work of Froude’s later years was his biography of Carlyle, the first instalment of which was published in 1882, and the second two years later. No biography has ever raised a greater storm of indignation; nor can it be denied that for this Froude was partly to blame. His method is ruthless, and in some cases its justice is questionable. At the same time, the condemnation passed upon him has been unmeasured; and no small part of it has been due to the disappointment of worshippers of Carlyle at the discovery that if the head of their idol was pure gold the feet were miry clay. Froude has written, perhaps one of the least judicious, but certainly one of the most readable of English biographies.

The other works of Froude are of inferior consequence. Neither his Julius CÆsar nor his Erasmus is calculated to increase his reputation; while the very interesting Oceana indicates, more clearly than any of his other writings, the source of his greatest errors—a habit of jumping to conclusions from insufficient premisses. Froude pronounces confidently upon the colonies on no better ground than a hurried visit and a few conversations with chance residents, who might not always be disinterested. Yet Oceana had more influence than many a better book. Like Seeley’s Expansion of England it was partly the consequence, but also partly the cause of the great change in public opinion whereby the colonies, regarded thirty years ago as little better than a burden, have come to be considered the principal support of the greatness of England.

The historian generally prefers to work upon a subject removed to some distance from his own time, but the intense interest of a great armed struggle not infrequently makes it an exception. Thus, the Peninsular War found a contemporary historian in Napier, and similarly Alexander William Kinglake wrote the story of the next great European contest in which England was engaged after the fall of Napoleon. He had previously won a purer literary fame in the fascinating volume of travel, Eothen, published in 1844. The journey of which it is a record had been made about nine years earlier, and Eothen as finally published was the result of long thought and of fastidious care in literary workmanship. It is little concerned with facts and occurrences, attempting rather to reproduce the effect of the life and the scenes of the East.

The reputation acquired by this book opened up for Kinglake the larger subject of the Crimean War. He had accompanied the expedition from love of adventure, and chance made him acquainted with Lord Raglan, whose papers were ultimately intrusted to him. The Invasion of the Crimea (1863-1887) is open to several serious objections. It is far too long, and the style is florid, diffuse and highly mannered. Moreover, Kinglake is a most prejudiced historian. There is no mean in his judgment; he either can see no faults, or he can see nothing else. Raglan and St. Arnaud are examples of the two extremes. But frequently the historian supplies the corrective to his own judgment. If the battle of the Alma was won as Kinglake says it was, then it was won not by generalship but by hard fighting plus a lucky blunder on the part of the general. On the other hand, Kinglake sustains the interest with great skill, especially in the battle volumes. Long as are the accounts of the Alma and of Balaclava, they are perfectly clear, and the impression left is indelible.

It has been already hinted that the chief defect in this great mass of historical work is the want of a philosophy of history. The unmanageable volume of material almost smothers the intellect. An attempt to make good the defect was made by Henry Thomas Buckle, in his History of Civilisation (1857-1861), with results not altogether satisfactory. Buckle was a man of vast reading and tenacious memory; but no knowledge, however extensive, could at that time have sufficed to do what he attempted. He soon discovered this himself, and what he has executed is a mere fragment of his daring design. Even so, it is larger than his materials justified. In accounting for Buckle’s failure, stress has often been laid upon the fact that his education was private. This is a little pedantic. Grote, whose history has been accepted at the universities as the best available, was of no university. Mill, one of the men who have most influenced thought in this century, was of none either. Gibbon, perhaps the greatest of historians, has put on record how little he owed to Oxford; and Carlyle has told us with characteristic vigour how unprofitable he thought his university of Edinburgh. The men who did not go to a university have done good work; and the men who did go to one have declared that they owed little or nothing to the education there received. In the face of such facts it is impossible to account so for the failure of Buckle. The real reason, besides the cardinal fact that the attempt was premature, is that Buckle, though he had the daring of the speculator’s temperament, had neither its caution nor its breadth. The great speculative geniuses of the world have been prudent as well as bold. No one is bolder than Aristotle, but no one is more careful to lay first a broad foundation for his speculations. Buckle did not use his great knowledge so. His account of the causes of things always rouses suspicion because it is far too simple. He never understood how complex the life of a nation is; and when he came to write he practically rejected the greater part of his knowledge and used only the small remainder. He was moreover a man of strong prejudices. He could not endure the ecclesiastical type of mind or the ecclesiastical view of things; and his account of civilisation in Scotland is completely vitiated by his determination to regard the Church, before the Reformation and after the Reformation alike, as merely a weight on the wheel, not a source of energy and forward movement.

Buckle then illustrates the tendency of the mind, noted by Bacon, to grasp prematurely at unity. This very fact, conjoined with the clearness and vigour of his style, was the reason of his popularity. When the inadequacy of his theories began to be perceived there came a reaction. But inevitably those theories will be replaced by others. To some extent they have been replaced already by the theories of two writers, Sir Henry Maine and Mr. W. E. Hartpole Lecky, of whom the latter belongs, however, rather to the period still current than to the Age of Tennyson.

The majority of Maine’s works too were published after the year 1870, but as his most awakening and original book, Ancient Law, appeared as early as 1861, we may fairly regard him as belonging to the period under consideration. Sir Henry Maine was a great teacher as well as a great writer, and he had already acquired a considerable reputation before the appearance of his Ancient Law. But it was that book which established his name as an original thinker. It has two great merits. It is written in a most lucid, pleasant style, and it is decidedly original in substance. Maine’s design is far less ambitious than Buckle’s; but for that very reason his performance is more adequate. The most conspicuous distinction between the two is that the later writer shows in far greater measure than his predecessor the modern sense of the importance of origins. It was this that gave his work importance. To a great extent the task of recent historians has been to trace institutions to their source, and explain their later development by means of the germs out of which they have grown. In this respect Maine was a pioneer, and his later work was just a fuller exposition of the principles at the root of Ancient Law. His Village Communities (1871) and his Early History of Institutions (1875) are both inspired by the same idea. In his Popular Government (1885) he may be said to break new ground; but it is easy to see the influence on that book of the author’s prolonged study of early forms of society. These later books are not perhaps intrinsically inferior to Ancient Law, but they are less suggestive, just because so much of the work had been already done by it.

Biography is another form of history, and it is not surprising that a period so rich in historical writings should also be distinguished in biography. If Boswell’s Johnson is still supreme, the Age of Tennyson has produced several lives surpassed only by it. Two of the best of these lives, Carlyle’s Sterling and Froude’s Carlyle, were written by historians, and have been noticed along with their other works. Another remarkable book, the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, is likewise best taken along with the more formal works of the philosopher. But even after these large deductions, and after a rigid exclusion of everything that is not, both in form and substance, of very high quality, there remain at least two men of great distinction in literature, J. G. Lockhart and A. P. Stanley, who must be treated as first and chiefly biographers.

John Gibson Lockhart was a man of many gifts and accomplishments, a good scholar, a keen satirist and critic, a powerful novelist, an excellent translator. He was accomplished with the pencil as well as with the pen, and some of his caricatures are at once irresistibly amusing and profoundly true. His ‘Scotch judge’ and ‘Scotch minister’ would make the reputation of a number of Punch. His biting wit won for him the sobriquet of ‘the Scorpion;’ but notwithstanding his sting he won and retained through life many warm friends. He was trained for the Scottish bar, but attached himself to the literary set of Blackwood, in which Christopher North was the most striking figure. With him and Hogg Lockhart was concerned in an exceedingly amusing skit, the famous Chaldee Manuscript; but the joke gave so much offence that this ‘promising babe’ was strangled in the cradle. A good deal of more serious literary work belongs to the period before 1830,—the novels, a mass of criticism, and the Spanish Ballads. Then too was formed the connexion which opened to Lockhart the great work of his life. He was introduced to Scott in 1818. The acquaintance prospered. Scott liked the clever young man, Scott’s daughter liked him still better, and in 1820 Lockhart married Sophia Scott. Largely through her father’s influence he was appointed editor of the Quarterly Review, an office which he held until 1853, and in which he became to a very great degree, both by reason of what he wrote and of what he printed, responsible for the tone of criticism at the time.

Lockhart undoubtedly shared that excessive personality which was the blot of criticism, and especially of the Blackwood school, in his generation. He has been charged with the Blackwood article on Keats, and with the Quarterly article on Jane Eyre, but he may now be acquitted of both these sins. It was however Lockhart who wrote the Quarterly article on Tennyson’s early poems; but this, though bad in tone and excessively severe, is to a large extent critically sound. So far as they can be traced, Lockhart’s criticisms are such as might be expected from his mind,—clear, incisive and vigorous. They are however often unsympathetic and harsh, because criticism was then too apt to be interpreted as fault-finding, and Lockhart could not wholly free himself from the influence of a vicious tradition.

But it is by his Life of Scott (1836-1838) that Lockhart will live in literature. He had in an ample measure the first of all requirements in a biographer, personal acquaintance with the man whose life he wrote. Almost from the time of his introduction, and certainly from the date of his marriage, Lockhart’s relations with Scott were of the closest; and though he was not personally familiar with the facts of Scott’s earlier life, he knew quite enough to understand the springs of the man’s character. Moreover, in the autobiographical fragment and in the endless stores of family and friendly anecdote open to him he had ample means of making good the deficiency. For among Lockhart’s advantages is to be reckoned the fact that he had not merely married into the family, but had married, as it were, into the circle of friends. The Life of Scott shows that the families of Abbotsford, of Chiefswood and of Huntley Burn (the last Scott’s great friends the Fergusons) were for many purposes only one larger family.

There are certain dangers, as well as great advantages, to the biographer even in intimate friendship. Misused in one way, it lowers the biographer’s own character; misused in another, it either lowers or unnaturally exalts that of his subject. Boswell, employing his materials with excellent effect for the purposes of his book, degrades himself. Froude, making a mistake of another sort, exaggerates all the less lovable characteristics of Carlyle; while there are multitudes who paint pictures not of flesh and blood, but of impossible saints and heroes. ‘A love passing the love of biographers’ was Macaulay’s phrase for the excess of hero-worship. Lockhart has avoided all these errors. When his book was read the contradictory charges were brought against him, on the one hand of having exaggerated Scott’s virtues and concealed his faults, and on the other of ungenerous and derogatory criticism. We may be sure that Lockhart’s temptation, if he felt any, was rather to ‘extenuate’ than to ‘set down in malice.’ But, with a noble confidence in a noble character, he does not extenuate. To describe Scott as a mere money-lover would be untrue; yet many have felt that there is a fault in his relation to wealth, and Lockhart uses just the right words when he says, ‘I dare not deny that he set more of his affections, during great part of his life, upon worldly things, wealth among others, than might have become such an intellect;’ and he gives just the right explanation when he goes on to trace this defect to its root in the imagination. In his treatment of the commercial matters in which Scott was involved, Lockhart is equally judicial.

The tact of Lockhart deserves as much praise as his fairness of judgment. As regards part of his work, he was put to the test a few years ago by the publication of Scott’s Journal. Lockhart had made liberal extracts from this journal, explaining at the same time that passages were necessarily suppressed because of their bearing upon persons then alive. A comparison of his extracts with the journal now accessible in extenso shows how skilfully he suppressed what was likely to give pain, while at the same time producing much the same general impression as the whole document leaves.

A biography, like a letter, may be said to have two authors, the man written about and the person who writes. Scott certainly gave Lockhart the greatest assistance, both by what he wrote and by what he was. At the beginning the delightful fragment of autobiography, towards the end the profoundly interesting Journal, and all through the free, manly, large-hearted letters, were materials of the choicest sort. Scott himself moreover, genial, cordial, of manifold activity, a centre of racy anecdote, was a person whom it was far more easy to set in an attractive frame than any mere literary recluse. Many could have produced a good life of such a man. Lockhart’s special praise is that he has written a great one. Except Johnson, there is no English man of letters so well depicted as Scott. Lockhart’s taste and style are excellent. The caustic wit which ran riot in the young Blackwood reviewer is restrained by the experience of years and by the necessities of the subject. Lockhart’s own part of the narrative is told in grave, temperate English, simple almost to severity, but in a high degree flexible. In the brighter parts there is a pleasant lightness in Lockhart’s touch; in the more serious parts he is weighty and powerful; and on occasion, especially towards the end, there is a restrained emotion which proves that part of his wonderful success is due to the fact that his heart was in his work.

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley ranks considerably below Lockhart, yet his Life of Arnold (1844) is inferior only to the few unapproachable masterpieces of biography. Stanley was a fluent and able writer in several fields, but in most respects his work is now somewhat discredited. His Commentary on the Epistles to the Corinthians (1855) has been severely handled for inaccuracy and defective scholarship. His Lectures on the Eastern Church (1861) and On the Jewish Church (1863-1876), and his book of Eastern travel, Sinai and Palestine (1856) are delightful in literary execution, but they are popular rather than solid. Stanley neither was nor, apparently, cared to be exact. He trusted too much to his gift of making things interesting, and had an inadequate conception of the duty he owed to his readers of writing what was true. Other travellers who have followed his footsteps in the East have sometimes found that the scenes he describes, in charming English, are such as are visible only to those whose eyes can penetrate rocks and mountains. This constitutional inaccuracy is a blot upon nearly all his works, and his one permanent contribution to literature will probably prove to be the Life of Dr. Arnold. There is here, as Stanley’s biographer justly says, ‘a glow of repressed enthusiasm which gives to the work one of its greatest charms.’ Stanley loved Arnold, and threw himself with unwonted thoroughness into the task of depicting him. For two years, we are told, he abandoned for it every other occupation that was not an absolute duty. The principal defect of the Life is that the plan—a portion of narrative, and then a body of letters—is too rigid and mechanical. But the narrative is exceedingly good, giving within moderate compass a clear impression of Arnold; and the letters are well selected and full of interest.

Minor Historians and Biographers.

Sir Archibald Alison was the son of a clergyman who won a name for a work on the Principles of Taste. Alison practised at the Scottish bar, became Sheriff of Lanarkshire, and was knighted for his services to literature. His magnum opus is a History of Europe during the French Revolution, which he afterwards continued to the accession of Napoleon III. It is laborious and honest, though not unprejudiced. Disraeli sneeringly said that ‘Mr. Wordy’ had proved by his twenty volumes that Providence was on the side of the Tories.

John Hill Burton, best known as the historian of Scotland, was an industrious man of letters, who wrote on many subjects,—The Scot Abroad, The Book Hunter, and The Age of Queen Anne, as well as the History of Scotland. The last is the work of a capable and careful writer rather than of a great historian. Burton is sensible and dispassionate, and he has collected and put into shape the principal results of modern research as applied to Scotland.

John Forster was a laborious but somewhat commonplace writer. He was the author of a Life of Goldsmith (1848) and a Life of Sir John Eliot (1864). But his most valuable works are two biographies of contemporaries, the Life of Landor (1869) and the Life of Dickens (1872-1874). Forster had little power of realising character, and the subjects of his biographies are never clearly outlined. His Life of Dickens has an importance beyond its intrinsic merits, because it is the most authoritative book on the great novelist.

Walter Farquhar Hook was a prominent clergyman, whose doctrine, that the English Roman Catholics were really seceders from the Church of England, caused a great stir when it was first promulgated. His vast design of the Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury (1860-1876) was ultimately executed in twelve big volumes. The plan was too large and the characters treated too multifarious for really good biography, but it is solid and valuable work.

Sir John William Kaye wrote two meritorious books of military history, The History of the War in Afghanistan (1851), and The History of the Sepoy War in India (1864-1876). The latter, which roused some controversy, was left unfinished at Kaye’s death, and was afterwards completed by Colonel Malleson.

Sir Francis Palgrave was in the early part of his life an active contributor to the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, and a diligent editor of state documents. His Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth (1832) threw much light on the early history of England. Palgrave was in his day one of the most earnest students of mediÆval history.

Philip Henry, Earl Stanhope, wrote the History of the War of the Succession in Spain, the History of the Reign of Queen Anne, and the History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles. He took great pains with his work, but he does not reach distinction either of thought or style.

Sir William Stirling-Maxwell is less widely known than he deserves to be, but this is partly due to the expensiveness of his works. He wrote Annals of the Artists of Spain, The Cloister Life of Charles V., Velasquez and his Work, and a posthumous book, Don John of Austria. All his work is distinguished for learning and good taste.

Agnes Strickland was a popular writer whose work is readable rather than profound or original. Her principal books are the Lives of the Queens of England, followed up by Lives of the Queens of Scotland.

Patrick Fraser Tytler, another historian of Scotland, came of a family distinguished both in literature and in law. His History of Scotland has been superseded in general favour by Burton’s, which has the advantage of embodying more recent research. Tytler however was the abler man of the two, and he had a higher literary gift than Burton. Except where the narrative has to be re-written in the light of later discoveries, his judgment is always worth weighing.