desire of stating and pointing the truth of history was as strong as the wish to make both his pictures and his arguments telling and forcible. He never treated an opposing view with intolerance or contumely; his handling of controversial matter was exemplary. And then, to add still more to the debt we owe him, there is the wonderful simplicity and beauty of the way in which he tells his tale, which more than anything else has served to make English history a popular and, as it ought to be, if not the first, at least the second study of all Englishmen."

Green had made a certain number of slips in names, in dates, and a few minor statements; that the book contained a good many printer's errors; and that Mr. Green's views on many points differed very considerably from those of his critic. A proposal was made at the time by a friend of Mr. Green's, who had been for years a student of English history, that a categorical reply to Mr. Rowley should be printed in one of the weekly newspapers, containing answers strictly confined to matters of fact, to a good many of Mr. Rowley's statements, and to an exposure of the critic's own mistakes. But Mr. In this judgment, the fruit of knowledge Green refused; he shrank from contro- and sympathy, most people will be conversy at all times; his one wish was to tent to rest; but Mr. Green's method and amend, correct, and enlarge his book; and its success have undoubtedly brought into he felt that whatever might be said on great prominence the conflict between the either side, the "Short History" must two theories of historical work now curultimately stand or fall on its merits. rent among us. Professor Seeley and Very likely he was right. The further a Mr. Cotter Morison tell us that history good book travels from the controversies has no business to be literary. Scientific which surround its start the greater it accuracy and orderliness of statement, we looks in relation to them. At the same are told on the one side, are all that an time Mr. Rowley's criticisms, and some historian should aim at. "Leave no deothers which followed in their wake, tail unnoticed," said Mr. Green, "only tended to rouse a certain unreasonable distrust of Mr. Green, especially in that outer circle of clever people who are too apt to take their tone rather from the blame than from the praise of current criticism. The inner historical circle believed in him always, and as the leaders of it were his intimate friends they had ample means of judging. "Mr. Green," writes one who fills a foremost place in the ranks of English historical criticism, and who knew him well and long, "possessed in no scanty measure all the gifts that contribute to the making of a great historian. He combined, so far as the history of England is concerned, a complete and firm grasp of the subject in its unity and integrity with a wonderful command of details and a thorough sense of perspective and proportion. All his work was real and original work; few people besides those who knew him well would see, under the charming ease and vivacity of his style, the deep research and sustained industry of the laborious student. But it was so; there was no department of our national records that he had not studied and, I think I may say, mastered. Hence I think the unity of his dramatic scenes and the cogency of his historical arguments. Like other people, he made mistakes sometimes; but scarcely ever does the correction of his mistake affect either the essence of the picture or the force of the argument. And in him the

through the most careful detail can you reach reality, but when the historian has got all his facts the problem remains how to be read. To be read, to influence mankind, the facts must be so recast as to bring them within the domain of literature, and to convey to the reader the emotions and the judgments they had excited in the writer."

It was on these principles at any rate that his own work was done. Almost immediately after the appearance of the "Short History" Mr. Green set to work upon an enlarged library edition of it in four volumes, dedicated to "my two dear friends, my masters in the study of English history, Edward Augustus Freeman and William Stubbs." In this work he was helped by the devoted wife whose presence brightened the last six years of his life. From 1877 onwards, indeed, it seemed as if a new era had begun for him; he was better in health, his marriage had brought him companionship, and the success of his book sufficient means and many new friends. The scheme of the history and literature primers had been started some years before; the present writer remembers the winter afternoon on which the project was first mooted, and Mr. Green walking eagerly up and down the room, sketching an imaginary primer of English literature with a vividness and minuteness which made the listener feel as if there was nothing more to do than

returned home in April, and at once began work on his new book. He was as eager as ever about it, making the most minute topographical study of all the districts affected by the Danish invasions, discovering a number of new facts about the most ancient boundaries and extensions of London, or lighting with glee upon the long-wanted proof of Alfred's connection with Oxford. It was pathetic to see how at any time, after a morning of pain and weariness, he would brighten up if a friend came in to see him, and how his talk gathered strength and brilliancy as it went on, till one forgot altogether the hectic color and emaciated frame in the novelty and abundance of both thought and illustration. Nobody was ever more suggestive as a talker. "Ah," he would say, "such a book wants writing. Why don't you do it? I should take some line of this kind." And then he would sketch away till the whole thing rose into shape before his own eyes and those of his listener. If his health had allowed him ever to be a teacher on a great scale, he must, one would think, have given a great impulse to historical study in England. The or ganizing power which he showed in his parish he showed to the last in literary affairs. One of his latest schemes was an Oxford historical society, which had always been a favorite dream of his, and may, we hope, some day be realized.

to go home and write the book. But the scheme was carried out and developed after his marriage, and in most respects proved a great success. Presently he and his wife settled down into a pleasant, cheerful house in Kensington Square, and in spite of occasional fits of illness all went fairly well with his health for two or three years. The lung which had been so much affected was quiescent and his general health was more satisfactory. Then came the unlucky winter of 1880, when, instead of betaking himself to his favorite Capri, he determined to go to Egypt for what he and the doctors hoped might prove a last enforced winter abroad, at any rate for some years. But the experiment turned out very badly. The heat and dust of Luxor especially tried him. He was extremely ill on the way home, and when he arrived in Kensington Square his friends were terrified by the change in him. But by the help of the most careful and tender nursing, revived, too, by the return to London from what he always considered as banishment, he struggled on towards recovery, and during that trying summer he performed perhaps a greater feat than any he had yet accomplished. Almost all the actual writing of "The Making of England" was got through in two months, during which those who saw him from day to day could hardly believe that he would ever live through the coming winter. His doctor and friends said good-bye to him in September, 1881, when he started for Mentone, with the worst forebodings, but Mentone proved an extraordinary success. The winter of 1881-2 was one of almost unbroken sunshine, and it was pleasant to see him basking in the little villa garden, high up in the west bay, the French newspapers and his books on the table beside him, the garden bright with To the last his book was constantly in January roses, and the blue Mediterra- his thoughts, and little more than a week nean in front. He could not walk a hun- before the end he still dwelt upon his dred yards without fatigue, but his mind fresh plans for it, and struggled to revise was never more active and his sympathy and correct it. When it is given to the never more ready. He devoured books. world, as we trust it may be given, it will A closely printed octavo took him gen- bear eloquent witness not only to his erally two days to get through, and while historical gift, but to the indomitable looking for "The Making of England," courage and devotion with which he which he had left behind him in En-worked under the stress of some of the gland, and which appeared in the spring of 1882, he was planning another volume in continuation on the period of the Danish inroads and colonization. He

He started for Mentone in October, 1882, with very fair prospects of improvement during the winter. The lung disease was in a more favorable state, and the doctors hoped a great deal from the southern sun, which had already done wonders. But, alas! the winter was a gloomy one, and after the first month of enjoyment a period of steadily increasing weakness set in.

worst hindrances which body can offer to spirit. He will be much missed, for he had many friends, and he deserved all their affection.

1. A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY,

II. UNDER THE SNOW,

III. MISS BURNEY'S OWN STORY,.

IV. THE THREE STRANGERS,

V. QUEEN VICTORIA AS GODDESS,

VI. STARTLING POETRY,

VII. THE CONDITIONS OF "THE GRAND STYLE,"

VIII. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF CROWDS,

IX. THE ENCHANTED LAKE,

From Beginning,

Vol. CLVII.

Macmillan's Magazine,

Contemporary Review,

Longman's Magazine,

Spectator,

POETRY.

Queen,.

Contemporary Review,.

For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded

for a year, free of postage.

Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither

of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register

letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of

LITTELL & Co.

Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

49335

From The Nineteenth Century.
A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY.

THE stormy antipathies of Thomas Carlyle have to answer for many a miscarriage of historical justice; but for none more unfounded than that superior air with which he teaches the nineteenth century to sit in judgment on the eighteenth. "The age of prose, of lying, of sham," said he, "the fraudulent-bankrupt century, the reign of Beelzebub, the peculiar era of cant." And so growls on our Teufelsdröckh through thirty octavo volumes, from the first philosophy of clothes to the last hour of Friedrich.

ton, Samuel Johnson and Robert Burns, Watt and Arkwright; and, for more than half of the century, and for more than half his work, so was Goethe himself. It sounds strange to accuse of unmitigated grossness and quackery the age which gave us these men; and which produced, beside, "Robinson Crusoe " and "The Vicar of Wakefield," the "Elegy in a Churchyard" and the lines "To Mary" and "To my Mother's Picture," Berkeley's dialogues and Burke's addresses, Reynolds and Gainsborough, Flaxman and Stothard, Handel and Mozart. But one remembers that according to the Teufelsdröckhian cosmogony, great men are dropped ab extra into their age, much as some philosophers assure us that protoplasm, or the primitive germ of life, was casually dropped upon our planet by a truant aerolite.

A century which opens with "The Rape of the Lock" and closes with the first part of "Faust," is hardly a century of mere prose, especially if we throw in Gray, Cowper, and Burns, "The Ancient Mariner" and the "Lyrical Ballads." A century which includes twenty years of the life of Newton, twenty-three of Wren's, and sixteen of Leibnitz, and the whole lives of Hume, Kant, Adam Smith, Gibbon, and Priestley, is not the age of mere shallowness; nor is the century which founded the monarchy of Prussia, and the empire of Britain, which gave birth to the republic in America and then in France, and which finally recast modern society and formed our actual habits, the peculiar

Invectives against a century are even more unprofitable than indictments against a nation. We are prepared for them in theology, but they have quite gone out of serious history. Whatever else it may be, we may take it that the nineteenth century is the product of the eighteenth, as that was in turn the product of the seventeenth; and if the prince of darkness had so lately a hundred years of rule in Europe, to what fortunate event do we owe our own deliverance, and indeed the nativity of Thomas Carlyle? But surely invectives were never more out of place, than when hurled at a century which was simply the turning epoch of the modern world, the age which gave birth to the movements wherein we live, and to all the tasks that we yet labor to solve. Look at the eighteenth century on all sides of its manifold life, free the mind from that lofty pity with which prosperous folk are apt to remember their grand-era of quackeries, bonfires, and suicides. fathers, and we shall find it in achievement the equal of any century since the Middle Ages; in promise and suggestion and preparation, the century which most deeply concerns ourselves.

Measure it justly by the light of scientific history, and not by the tropes of some biblical saga, and it holds its own beside the greatest epochs in the modern world; of all modern eras perhaps the richest, Though Mr. Carlyle seems to count it most various, most creative. It raised to the sole merit of the eighteenth century to the rank of sciences, chemistry, botany, have provided us the French Revolution and zoology; it created the conception of (the most glorious bonfire recorded in social science and laid its foundations; it profane history), it is not a little curious produced the historical schools and the that almost all his heroes in modern economic schools of England and of times, apart from Oliver Cromwell, are France; the new metaphysic of Germany, children and representatives of that un- the new music of Germany; it gave birth speakable epoch. Such were Friedrich, to the new poetic movement in England, Mirabeau and Danton, George Washing- to the new romance literature of England