that the internal prosperity and good government of the small state may be put an end to by its conquest by some greater state. Now we Englishmen are apt to fancy, and there is a germ of truth in the fancy, that we have the advantage over all other nations in the union of various forms of what the prayer-book calls health and wealth. Internal freedom, external importance, material prosperity, are three excellent things. Other nations have one or two of them separately. Frenchmen, notwithstanding that they live under a despotism,1 contrive to get rich at home and to make a noise all over the world. Dutchmen, Belgians, Swiss, are free and happy in their own fashion at home, but nobody cares about them as European powers. Even Russia, however lacking in the other points, is at least very big and is not to be meddled with without due forethought. As for Spain, Greece, and the dominions of the Turk, they are supposed to lack everything at home and abroad. We, on the other hand, are supposed to unite all advantages. We are as great as the great powers, as free and happy as the small ones. If we are all this, and if the Blessed Reformation has made us all this, then the Blessed Reformation is very blessed indeed, and is the cause of much blessedness. It is Beatrix as well as Beata. (From the Same.) PRINCIPLES OF REFORM "STAND fast in the old paths"; "Respect the wisdom of your forefathers"; are the sayings which the dull Conservative throws in the teeth of Reformers. If his scholarship goes as far as a little ecclesiastical Greek, he perhaps adds τὰ ἀρχαῖα ἔθη κρατείτω. All these are very good sayings; but it is to the Reformer and not to the Conservative that they belong. The Reformer obeys them; the Conservative tramples them under foot. The wisdom of our forefathers consisted in always making such changes as were needed at any particular time; we may freely add, in never making greater changes than were needed at that particular time. The old path was ever a path of reform; the ancient customs will ever be found to be far freer than these modern innovations which men whose notion of the good old times does not go back 1 1868. There is no man from whose beyond Charles the First or Henry the Eighth fondly look upon as ancient. If a man will cast aside the prejudices of birth and party, if he will set himself free from the blind guidance of lawyers, he will soon learn how very modern indeed is the antiquity of the Tory. All his idols, game-laws, primogeniture, the hereditary king, the hereditary legislator, the sacred and mysterious nature of anything that is called "Royal Highness," the standing army with its commands jobbed for money-all these venerable things are soon found to be but things of yesterday, by any man who looks with his eyes open into the true records of the immemorial -there are lands in which we may say the eternal-democracy of our race. The two grand idols of lawyers, the King and the Lord of the Manor, are soon found to be something which has not been from eternity, something which has crept in unawares, something which has gradually swallowed up the rights and the lands which once belonged to the people. Do I plead for any violent dispossession of either ? mind such a thought is further removed. Whatever exists by law should be changed only by law, and when things, however wrongful in their origin, have become rightful by long prescription, even lawful changes are not to be made hastily or lightly. But it is well to remind babblers that the things which they most worship, which they fondly believe to be ancient, are, in truth, innovations on an earlier state of things towards which every modern reform is in truth a step backwards. It is well to remind them that the prerogatives of the hereditary king, of the hereditary noble, of the local territorial potentate, can all of them be historically shown to be encroachments on the ancient rights of the people. It does not follow that anything is to be changed recklessly; it does not follow that anything need be changed at all. But it does follow that none of these things is so ancient and so sacred as to be beyond the reach of discussion, that none is so ancient and so sacred that it is wicked even to think of the possibility of changing it. I see no reason to meddle with our constitutional monarchy-that is, to make a change in the form of our executive government—because I hold that, while it has its good and its bad points, its good points overbalance the bad. But I hold that a man who thinks otherwise has as good a right to maintain his opinion, and to seek to compass his ends by lawful means, as if it were an opinion about school-boards or public-houses or the equalization of the county and borough franchise. I respect the kingly office as something ordained by law, and I see no need to alter the law which ordains it. But I can go no further. I cannot take on myself to condemn other nations, nor can I hasten to draw general inferences from single instances. But I do hold that the witness of history teaches us that, in changing a long-established form of executive government, whether it be the change of a kingdom into a commonwealth or of a commonwealth into a kingdom, the more gently and warily the work is done, the more likely it is to be lasting. (From the Same.) JOHN RICHARD GREEN [John Richard Green, born on 12th December 1837, spent his earlier years in his native city of Oxford. He took his degree in 1859, after an uneventful career at Jesus College, during which he showed the first signs of his historical taste in a series of contributions to the Oxford Chronicle on Oxford in the Eighteenth Century. He was ordained in 1860 and was appointed incumbent of St. Philip's, Stepney, in 1866, but, on account of ill-health, he surrendered his charge in 1869 and became librarian at Lambeth. From 1862 he was a frequent contributor to the Saturday Review, but in his enforced leisure he turned his attention to serious historical work, and he produced in 1874 his first and most memorable book, A Short History of the English People. This he recast and expanded into four volumes (1877-80) as the History of the English People. He supplemented it in 1881 by The Making of England: and a further continuation, The Conquest of England, was published posthumously, in 1883, under the editorship of his widow. In 1876 he collected some of his occasional writings under the title of Stray Studies from England and Italy. He suggested the foundation of the Oxford Historical Society and the English Historical Review, and he acted as general editor of several successful series of Primers on literature and history. He died on 7th March 1883.] GREEN'S characteristics are best discovered in his Short History of the English People. It was a new departure both in historical conception and in literary treatment. He had felt the discipline of the newer methods of accuracy in historical work and he had strong sympathies with Freeman's doctrine of the use of architecture and geography in the interpretation of the past, but his subtler historical sense perceived the forces behind the facts and his superior literary art saved him from pedantry and antiquarianism. He had the power of catching the salient features of an episode or a movement and of presenting them in a vivid and impressive way, not in the classical manner of older writers, but with a rapid sketchiness peculiarly his own. His writing remains, despite Dean Stanley's warning, a notable example of what we call the picturesque, strong alike in the merits and faults of that style. It was once an Oxford saying that if the young student who sought further culture was too poor to travel he should turn to the pages of the Short History. And it is true that he may there feel much of the atmosphere, life, and miscellaneous interest of a wanderjahr. Green had an undoubted power of the "imaginative sense of fact." The problem of his style was not how to present the facts in the least wearisome manner, but how to transform exposition into a higher literature, and to excite in the reader the writer's own artistic fervour. This imaginative treatment disturbed, and still disturbs, the scientific historians, who see in it the undoing of that very virtue of exactness on which Green prided himself. He may not be infallible in facts, nor altogether convincing in argument, but he expounds the continuity of national life and retells its greater events in a manner impossible to the experts in accuracy. He popularised history, not merely in the sense of tempting the masses to their own profit, but of showing to more capable minds the interest and possibilities of the historian's work. We may incline to think his effects overstrained, because we are unused to metaphor in historical exposition, and because they often show the frowardness of studied innovation; but there is too much unity in his work, too subtle an interpretation of fact ever to justify the criticism that his art is the mere glamour of the ready writer. It is not difficult to point out the defects of his picturesque method. The interest of his style lies to a great extent in his power of illustration, but at times he uses it in excess. The elaboration of analogy and the extravagant quotation of the memorable sayings of his characters interrupt the flow of his paragraphs; and by his favourite device of a succession of short jerky sentences he often signally fails in his endeavour to be vivid. There is a suggestion that the writer has not assimilated his material, and is only feeling his way to a complete description through a multitude of notes. The well-known passage on the character of Elizabeth (of which only a part is here given) illustrates this it is too long and too miscellaneous in style. The result is little else than a bare summation of the details, not that artistic whole which should be something more than the total of the contributing facts. This flaw in individual passages is the more striking as in the general conception of his subject, especially in the Short History, he shows the sublimating power of a writer of high order. Green's habit of work, moreover, was too hurried for a |