A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

by George Saintsbury

THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY

After the brilliant group of historians whose work illustrated the close of the period covered by the preceding volume, it was some time before a historical writer of the first rank again appeared in England; and there were reasons for this. Not that, as in the case of purely creative literature, in prose as in verse, there is any natural or actual lull between different successive periods in this case; on the contrary the writing of history is more likely to be stimulated by example, and requires rather the utmost talent than positive genius, except in those rare cases which, as in other departments, are not to be accounted for, either in their presence or in their absence, by observation or inference. But in the first place the greatest minds of the first generation of which we have to take account, who were born about the beginning of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, were, partly by time and partly by chance, directed for the most part either into poetry, or into politics, or into active life; and the five and twenty years of the Revolutionary War in which they passed their manhood were more likely to provide materials for history, than history itself.

Yet history, after the example given by Hume, by Robertson, and above all by Gibbon, was not at all likely to cease, nor did some men of great talents in other ways fail to betake themselves to it. Godwin was a historian, and, considering his strong prejudices, the unkindness of fortune (for history demands leisure almost as much as poetry), and some defects of knowledge, not a contemptible historian in his way. Mackintosh, intended for a philosopher, was a historian. Southey was a very considerable historian, and master of one of the most admirable historical styles on record. But he was signally unfortunate in having that work of his which should have been most popular, the History of the Peninsular War, pitted against another by a younger man of professional competence, of actual experience, and of brilliant literary powers, Sir William Napier (1786-1860). The literary value of these two histories is more even than a generation which probably reads neither much and has almost forgotten Southey is apt to imagine; and though there is no doubt that the Poet Laureate was strongly prejudiced on the Tory side, his competitor was even more partial and biassed against that side. But the difference between the two books is the difference between a task admirably performed, and performed to a certain extent con amore, by a skilled practitioner in task-work, and the special effort of one who was at once an enthusiast and an expert in his subject. It is customary to call Napier's History of the Peninsular War "the finest military history in the English language," and so, perhaps, it is. The famous description of the Battle of Albuera is only one of many showing eloquence without any mere fine writing, and with the knowledge of the soldier covering the artist's exaggeration.

Moore, Campbell, Scott himself, were all, as has been previously recorded in the notices of their proper work, historians by trade, though hardly, even to the extent to which Southey was, historians by craft. But an exception must be made for the exquisite Tales of a Grandfather, in which Sir Walter, without perhaps a very strict application of historical criticism, applied his creative powers, refreshed in their decay by combined affection for the subject and for the presumed auditor, to fashioning the traditional history of old Scotland into one of the most delightful narratives of any language or time. But Henry Hallam, a contemporary of these men (1778-1859), unlike them lives as a historian only, or as a historian and literary critic—occupations so frequently combined during the present century that perhaps an apology is due for the presentation of some writers under the general head of one class rather than under that of the other. Hallam, the son of a Dean of Bristol, educated at Eton and Christ Church, an early Edinburgh reviewer, and an honoured pundit and champion of the Whig party, possessing also great literary tastes, much industry, and considerable faculty both of judging and writing, united almost all the qualifications for a high reputation; while his abstinence from public affairs, and from participation in the violent half-personal, half-political squabbles which were common among the literary men of his day, freed him from most of the disadvantages, while retaining for him all the advantages, of party connections. Early, too, he obtained a post in the Civil Service (a Commissionership of Audit), which gave him a comfortable subsistence while leaving him plenty of leisure. For thirty years, between 1818 and 1848, he produced a series of books on political and literary history which at once attained a very high reputation, and can hardly be said to have yet lost it. These were a View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, published in the first, and supplemented by a volume of notes and corrections in the last, of the years just mentioned; a Constitutional History of England from Henry VII. to George II. (1827); and an Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries (1837-39).

The value of Hallam as a political and as a literary historian is by no means the same. In the former capacity he was perhaps too much influenced by that artificial and rather curious ideal of politics which distinguished the Whig party of the later eighteenth century, which was exaggerated, celebrated brilliantly, and perhaps buried by his pupil and younger contemporary, Macaulay, and which practically erects the result of a coincidence of accidents in English history into a permanent and rationally defensible form of government, comparable with and preferable to the earlier and unchanging forms of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy with their sub-varieties. A certain coldness and sluggishness of temperament and sympathy also marred this part of Hallam's work, though less mischievously than elsewhere. But to balance these drawbacks handsomely in his favour, he possessed an industry which, immense as have been the pains spent on his subjects since he wrote, leaves him in possession of a very fair part of the field as a still trustworthy authority; a mind, on the whole, judicial and fair; and an excellently clear and scholarly if not exactly brilliant or engaging style.

As a literary historian and critic Hallam deserves, except on the score of industry and width of reading, rather less praise; and his dicta, once quoted with veneration even by good authorities, and borrowed, with or without acknowledgment, by nearly all second-hand writers, are being more and more neglected by both. Nor is this unjust, for Hallam, though possessed, as has been said, of sound and wide scholarship, and of a taste fairly trustworthy in accepted and recognised matters, was too apt to be at a loss when confronted with an abnormal or eccentric literary personality, shared far too much the hide-bound narrowness of the rules which guided his friend Jeffrey, lacked the enthusiasm which not seldom melted Jeffrey's chains of ice, and was constantly apt to intrude into the court of literary judgments, methods, procedures, and codes of law which have no business there.

Many other estimable, and some excellent writers fill up the space of fifty years, which may be described best, both for remembrance and for accuracy, as the space between Gibbon and Carlyle. William Roscoe, who was born as far back as 1753 and did not die till 1831, was the son of a market-gardener near Liverpool, and had few advantages of education, but became an attorney, attached himself strenuously to literature, especially Italian literature, and in 1796 published his Life of Lorenzo de Medici, which, after finishing it, he followed up nine years later with the Life of Leo the Tenth. Both obtained not merely an English but a continental reputation, both became in a manner classics, and both retain value to this day, though the Italian Renaissance has been a specially favourite subject of modern inquiry. Roscoe was a violent Whig, and not a very dispassionate student in some respects; but he wrote well, and he is an early example of the diffusion of the historic spirit proper, in which Gibbon had at once set the example and, with some lapses, attained nearly to perfection.

William Mitford (1744-1827) was even an older man than Roscoe, and belonged to a slightly less modern school of history-writing. He was a man of means, a friend of Gibbon, his fellow-officer in the militia, and like him a strong Tory, though unlike him he could not keep his politics out of his history. Although Mitford's hatred of democracy, whether well- or ill-founded, makes him sometimes unfair, and though his History of Greece contains some blunders, it is on the whole rather a pity that it should have been superseded to the extent to which it actually has been by those of Grote and Thirlwall. For it is not more prejudiced and much better written than Grote's, while it has greater liveliness and zest than the Bishop's. It occupied more than thirty years in publication, the first volume appearing in 1784, the last in 1818.

While Roscoe and Mitford were thus dealing with foreign and ancient subjects, English history became the theme of a somewhat younger pair of historians, one of whom, Sharon Turner, was born in 1768 and died in 1847; while John Lingard, born three years later, outlived Turner by four. Lingard was a Roman Catholic priest, and after being educated at Douai, divided most of his time between pastoral work and teaching at the newly founded Roman Catholic school of Ushaw. He was the author of what still retains the credit of being the best history of England on the great scale, in point of the union of accuracy, skilful arrangement, fairness (despite his inevitable prepossessions), and competent literary form,—no mean credit for a member of an unpopular minority to have attained in a century of the most active historical investigation. Turner was more of a specialist and particularist, and his style is not very estimable. He wrote many books on English history, those on the later periods being of little value. But his History of the Anglo-Saxons, first issued in 1799, was based on thorough research, and may be said to have for the first time rescued the period of origins of English history from the discreditable condition of perfunctory, traditional, and second- or third-hand treatment in which most, if not all, previous historians of England had been content to leave it.

Sir Francis Palgrave, another historian to whom the student of early English history is deeply indebted, was born in London in 1788, his paternal name being Cohen. He took to the law, and early devoted himself both within and outside his profession to genealogical and antiquarian research. Before much attention had been paid in France itself to Old French, he published a collection of Anglo-Norman poems in 1818, and from these studies he passed to that of English history as such. He was knighted in 1832, and made Deputy-Keeper of the Records in 1838; his tenure of this post being only terminated by his death in 1861. Palgrave edited many State documents (writs, calendars, rolls, and so forth), and in his last years executed a History of Normandy and England of great value. His considerable literary power became more considerable still in two of his sons: the eldest, for some time past Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Mr. F. T. Palgrave, being still alive, and therefore merely to be mentioned; while the second, William Gifford, who was born in 1826 and died in 1888, Minister at Monte Video, was a man of the most brilliant talents and the most varied career. He was a soldier, a Jesuit, a traveller in the most forbidden parts of Arabia at the expense of a foreign country, and for nearly a quarter of a century a member of the consular and diplomatic service of his own. His Narrative of his Arabian journey, his Dutch Guiana, and some remarkable poems are only a few of his works, all of which have strong character.

Nearly contemporary with these was Dr. Thomas M'Crie (1772-1835), whose Lives of Knox (1812) and Melville (1819) entitle him to something like the title of Historian of Scotch Presbyterianism in its militant period. M'Crie, who was styled by Hallam (a person not given to nicknames), "the Protestant Hildebrand," was a worthy and learned man of untiring industry, and his subjects so intimately concern not merely Scottish but British history for nearly two centuries, that his handling of them could not but be important. But he was desperately prejudiced, and his furious attack on Sir Walter Scott's Old Mortality, by which he is perhaps known to more persons than by his own far from uninteresting works, argues a crass deficiency in intellectual and æsthetic comprehension.

The tenth decade of the eighteenth century was as much a decade of historians as the eighth had been a decade of poets; and with Milman and Tytler born in 1791, Alison in 1792, Grote in 1794, Arnold and Carlyle in 1795, Thirlwall in 1797, and Macaulay in 1800, it may probably challenge comparison with any period of equal length. The batch falls into three pretty distinct classes, and the individual members of it are also pretty widely separated in importance, so that it may be more convenient to discuss them in the inverse order of their merit rather than in the direct order of their births.

Patrick Fraser Tytler, son and grandson of historians (his grandfather William being the first and not the worst champion of Queen Mary against the somewhat Philistine estimates of Hume and Robertson, and his father Alexander a Professor of History, a Scotch Judge, and an excellent writer in various kinds of belles lettres), was a man of the finest character, the friend of most of the great men of letters at Edinburgh in the age of Scott and Jeffrey, and the author of an excellent History of Scotland from Alexander the Third to the Union of the Crowns. He was born in 1791, was called to the Scotch Bar in 1813, and died young for a historian (a class which has so much to do with Time that he is apt to be merciful to it) in 1849. He was perhaps hardly a man of genius, but he commanded universal respect. Sir Archibald Alison was the son of a clergyman of the same name, who, after taking orders in England and holding some benefices there, became known as the author of Essays on the Principles of Taste, which possess a good deal of formal and some real merit. Archibald the younger was highly distinguished at the University of Edinburgh, was called to the Scotch Bar, and distinguished himself there also, being ultimately appointed Sheriff of Lanarkshire. Like most of the brighter wits among his immediate contemporaries in Scotland (we have the indisputable testimony of Jeffrey to the fact) Alison was an out-and-out Tory, and a constant contributor to Blackwood, while his literary activity took very numerous shapes. At last he began, and in the twenty years from 1839 to 1859 carried through, a History of Europe during the French Revolution, completed by one of Europe from the Fall of the First to the Accession of the Third Napoleon. He died in 1867. It was rather unfortunate for Alison that he did not undertake this great work until the period of Liberal triumph which marked the middle decades of the century had well set in. It was still more unlucky, and it could less be set down to the operations of unkind chance, that in many of the qualifications of the writer in general, and the historical writer in particular, he was deficient. He had energy and industry; he was much less inaccurate than it was long the fashion to represent him; a high sense of patriotism and the political virtues generally, a very fair faculty of judging evidence, and a thorough interest in his subject were his. But his book was most unfortunately diffuse, earning its author the sobriquet of "Mr. Wordy," and it was conspicuously lacking in grasp, both in the marshalling of events and in the depicting of characters. Critics, even when they sympathised, have never liked it; but contrary to the wont of very lengthy histories, it found considerable favour with the public, who, as the French gibe has it, were not "hampered by the style," and who probably found in the popular explanation of a great series of important and interesting affairs all that they cared for. Nor is it unlikely that this popularity rather exaggerated the ill-will of the critics themselves. Alison is not quotable; he is, even after youth, read with no small difficulty; but it would be no bad thing if other periods of history had been treated in his manner and spirit.

Henry Hart Milman belongs to very much the same class of historian as Hallam, but unlike Hallam he was a poet, and, though a Broad Churchman of the days before the nickname was given, more of an adherent to the imaginative and traditional side of things. His father was a King's Physician, and he was educated at Eton and Brasenose. He obtained the Newdigate, and after bringing out his best play Fazio (of which more will be said later), took orders and received the vicarage of St. Mary's, Reading. Some poems of merit in the second class, including some hymns very nearly in the first, followed, and in 1821 he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford, where six years later he was Bampton Lecturer. It was in 1829 that Milman, who had been a frequent contributor to the Quarterly Review, began the series of his works on ecclesiastical history with the History of the Jews, the weakest of them (for Milman was not a very great Hebraist, and while endeavouring to avoid rigid orthodoxy did not satisfy the demands of the newer heterodox criticism). The History of Christianity to the Abolition of Paganism was better (1840), and the History of Latin Christianity (1854) better still. This last indeed, based on an erudition which enabled Milman to re-edit Gibbon with advantage, is a great book, and will probably live. For Milman here really knew; he had (like most poets who write prose with fair practice) an excellent style; and he was able—as many men who have had knowledge have not been able, and as many who have had style have not tried or have failed to do—to rise to the height of a really great argument, and treat it with the grasp and ease which are the soul of history. That he owed much to Gibbon himself is certain; that he did not fail to use his pupilage to that greatest of historians so as to rank among the best of his followers is not less certain, and is high enough praise for any man. He received the Deanery of St. Paul's in 1849, and held it till his death in 1868, having worthily sustained the glory of this the most literary of all great preferments in the Church of England by tradition, and having earned among English ecclesiastical historians a place like that of Napier among their military comrades.

Hallam and Milman were both, as has been said, Oxford men, and the unmistakable impress of that University was on both, though less on Hallam than on Milman. It is all the more interesting that their chief historical contemporaries of the same class were, the one a Cambridge man, and one of the most distinguished, the other not a University man at all. Both Grote and Thirlwall, as it happens, were educated at the same public school, Charterhouse. George Grote, the elder of them, born in 1794, was the son of a banker, and himself carried on that business for many years of his life. He was an extreme Liberal, or as it then began to be called, Radical, and a chief of the Philosophical Radicals of his time—persons who followed Bentham and the elder Mill. He was elected member for the City in the first Reform Parliament and held the seat for nine years; though if he had not retired he would probably have been turned out. Leaving Parliament in 1841, he left business two years later, and gave himself up to his History of Greece, which was published in the ten years between 1846 and 1856. He died in 1871, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. So was, four years later, his school-fellow, fellow-historian of Greece, and junior by three years, Connop Thirlwall. Thirlwall was one of the rare examples of extraordinary infant precocity (he could read Latin at three and Greek at four) who have been great scholars and men of distinction in after life, and to a ripe age. He was of a Northumbrian family, but was born at Stepney. From Charterhouse he went rather early (in 1814) to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had almost the most brilliant undergraduate career on record, and duly gained his fellowship. He entered Lincoln's Inn, was actually called to the Bar, but preferred the Church, and took orders in his thirtieth year. He had already shown a strong leaning to theology, and had translated Schleiermacher. He now returned to Cambridge, taking both tutorial work and cure of souls; but in 1834 his Liberal views attracted the disfavour of Christopher Wordsworth, Master of Trinity, and Thirlwall, resigning his tutorship, was consoled by Brougham with a Yorkshire living. Nor was this long his only preferment, for the Whigs were not too well off for clergymen who united scholarship, character, and piety, and he was made Bishop of St. David's in 1840. He held the see for thirty-four years, working untiringly, earning justly (though his orthodoxy was of a somewhat Broad character, and he could reconcile his conscience to voting for the disestablishment of the Irish Church) the character of one of the most exemplary bishops of the century, and seldom dining without a cat on his shoulder.

Thirlwall wrote many Charges, some of them famous, some delightful letters, part of a translation of Niebuhr, and some essays, while Grote, besides his historical work, produced some political and other work before it, with a large but not very good book on Plato, and the beginning of another on Aristotle after it. But it is by their Histories of Greece that they must live in literature. These histories (of which Grote's was planned and begun as early as 1823, though not completed till long afterwards, while Thirlwall's began to appear in 1835, and was finished just after Grote's saw the light) were both written with a certain general similarity of point of view as antidotes to Mitford, and as putting the Liberal view of the ever memorable and ever typical history of the Greek states. But in other respects they diverge widely; and it has been a constant source of regret to scholars that the more popular, and as the French would say tapageur, of the two, to a considerable extent eclipsed the solid worth and the excellent form of Thirlwall. Grote's history displays immense painstaking and no inconsiderable scholarship, though it is very nearly as much a "party pamphlet" as Macaulay's own, the advocate's client being in this case not merely the Athenian democracy but even the Athenian demagogue. Yet it to a great extent redeems this by the vivid way in which it makes the subject alive, and turns Herodotus and Thucydides, Demosthenes and Xenophon, from dead texts and school-books into theses of eager and stimulating interest. But it has absolutely no style; its scale is much too great; the endless discussions and arguments on quite minor points tend to throw the whole out of focus, and to disaccustom the student's eye and mind to impartial and judicial handling; and the reader constantly sighs for the placid Olympian grasp of Gibbon, nay, even for the confident dogmatism of Macaulay himself, instead of the perpetual singlestick of argument which clatters and flourishes away to the utter discomposure of the dignity of the Historic Muse.

It is possible, on the other hand, that Thirlwall may have sacrificed a little too much, considering his age and its demands, to mere dispassionate dignity. He is seldom picturesque, and indeed he never tries to be so. But to a scholarship naturally far superior to Grote's, he united a much fairer and more judicial mind, and the faculty of writing—instead of loose stuff not exactly ungrammatical nor always uncomely, but entirely devoid of any grace of style—an excellent kind of classical English, but slightly changed from the best eighteenth century models. And he had what Grote lacked, the gift of seeing that the historian need not—nay, that he ought not to—parade every detail of the arguments by which he has reached his conclusions; but should state those conclusions themselves, reserving himself for occasional emergencies in which process as well as result may be properly exhibited. It is fair to say, in putting this curious pair forward as examples respectively of the popular and scholarly methods of historical writing, that Grote's learning and industry were very much more than popular, while Thirlwall's sense and style might with advantage have put on, now and then, a little more pomp and circumstance. But still the contrast holds; and until fresh discoveries like that of the Athenian Polity accumulate to an extent which calls for and obtains a new real historian of Greece, it is Thirlwall and not Grote who deserves the first rank as such in English.

Intimately connected with all these historians in time and style, but having over them the temporary advantage of being famous in another way, and the, as some think, permanent disadvantage of falling prematurely out of public favour, was Thomas Arnold. He was born at Cowes, in the Isle of Wight, on 13th June 1795, and was educated at Winchester and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At the age of twenty he was elected a fellow of Oriel—a distinction which was, and remained for two decades, almost the highest in the University—and he gained both Chancellor's Essay prizes, for Latin and English. Oriel was not in his time, as it was very shortly afterwards, a centre of ecclesiastical orthodoxy; but rather the home of a curious transition blend of thought which in different persons took the high-and-dry or the Rationalist direction, and was only generally opposed to Evangelicalism. Arnold himself inclined to the Liberal side, and had also strong personal gifts for teaching. He took orders, but neither became a tutor nor took a living, and established himself at Laleham, on the Thames, to take private pupils. After ten years' practice here he was elected to the Head-mastership of Rugby, a school then, after vicissitudes, holding little if anything more than a medium place among those English Grammar Schools which ranked below the great schools of Eton, Harrow, Westminster, Winchester, and Charterhouse. How he succeeded in placing it on something like an equality with these, and how on the other hand he became, as it were, the apostle of the infant Broad Church School which held aloof alike from Evangelicals and Tractarians, are points which do not directly concern us. His more than indirect influence on literature was great; for few schools have contributed to it, in the same time, a greater number of famous writers than Rugby did under his head-mastership. His direct connection with it was limited to a fair number of miscellaneous works, many sermons, an edition of Thucydides, and a History of Rome which did not proceed (owing to his death in 1842, just after he had been appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford) beyond the Second Punic War. Arnold, once perhaps injudiciously extolled by adoring pupils, and the defender of a theory of churchmanship which strains rather to the uttermost the principle of unorthodox economy, has rather sunk between the undying disapproval of the orthodox and the fact that the unorthodox have long left his standpoint. But his style is undoubtedly of its own kind scholarly and excellent; the matter of his history suffers from the common fault of taking Niebuhr at too high a valuation.

Thomas Babington Macaulay (who may be conveniently discussed before Carlyle, though he was Carlyle's junior by five years, inasmuch as, even putting relative critical estimate aside, he died much earlier and represented on the whole an older style of thought) was born at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire on 25th October 1800. His father, Zachary Macaulay, though a very active agitator against the Slave Trade, was a strong Tory; and the son's conversion to Whig opinions was effected at some not clearly ascertained period after he had reached manhood. A very precocious child, he was at first privately educated, but entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of eighteen. Here he fell in with a set somewhat but not much less distinguished than that of the famous time, about ten years later, of which Tennyson was the centre—a set the most brilliant member of which, besides Macaulay, was the poet Praed. Praed had been accustomed to journalism before he left Eton, and had made acquaintance at Windsor with the bookseller Knight, for whose Quarterly Magazine both he and Macaulay wrote some very good things. Macaulay himself obtained the Chancellor's prize for English poems on "Pompeii" and "Evening," in two successive years 1819 and 1820; and after a very distinguished undergraduate career was elected fellow of his college. He went to the Bar, and his father's fortune, which had been a good one, being lost, his chances were for a time uncertain. In 1825, however, he won the admiration of Jeffrey and a place on the Edinburgh Review by his well-known, and slightly gaudy, but wonderfully fresh and stimulating article on Milton; and literature, which had always been his ideal employment, seemed already likely to yield him a fair subsistence—for review-writing was at that time much more highly paid than it is at present. Moreover the Whigs, on the eve of their long postponed triumph, were looking out for young men of talent; and Macaulay, being recruited by them, was put into Lord Lansdowne's pocket-borough of Calne. In the Reform debates themselves he distinguished himself greatly, and after the Bill was carried, having been elected for Leeds, he was not long in receiving his reward. It was munificent, for he, a man of little more than thirty, who had made no reputation at the Bar, though much elsewhere, was appointed Legal Member of Council in India with a salary very much of which could in those days be saved by a careful man, especially if, like Macaulay, he was unmarried. Accordingly when, after between four and five years' stay, Macaulay in 1838 returned home, he was in possession of means sufficient to enable him to devote himself without fear or hindrance to literary and political pursuits, while his fame had been raised higher during his absence by his contributions to the Edinburgh Review. Indeed his Indian experiences furnished the information—erroneous in some cases and partisan in others, but brilliantly used—enabling him to write the famous essays on Clive and on Hastings, where his historical method is at almost its best. He was elected member for Edinburgh, a very high compliment, in 1839; and next year became Secretary for War. In 1842 and 1843 respectively he established his position in verse and prose by publishing the Lays of Ancient Rome and a collection of his Essays; and in 1846 he was made Postmaster-General. But his support of the Maynooth Grant offended the Protestantism of his constituents, and he lost his seat, and for the time his political opportunities, in 1847. The disaster was no disaster for literature: he had long been employed on a History of England from the Accession of James II., and being now able to devote his whole time to it, he published the first volumes in 1848 with astonishing success.

He was re-elected for Edinburgh in 1852, published the third and fourth volumes of his History in 1855 with success greater in pecuniary ways and otherwise than even that of their forerunners, was raised to the Upper House as Lord Macaulay of Rothley in 1857, and died two years later, on 28th December 1859, of heart disease. Some personal peculiarities of Macaulay's—his extraordinary reading and memory, his brilliant but rather tyrannical conversation, his undoubting self-confidence—were pretty well known in his lifetime, and did not always create a prejudice in his favour. But a great revolution in this respect was brought about by the Life of him, produced a good many years later by his nephew, Sir George Trevelyan—a Life, standing for the interest of its matter and the skill and taste of its manner, not too far below the masterpieces of Boswell and Lockhart.

The literary personality of Macaulay, though a great one in all respects, is neither complex nor unequally present, and it is therefore desirable to discuss all its manifestations together. In the order of importance and of bulk his work may be divided into verse, prose-essays, and history, for his speeches less directly concern us, and are very little more than essays adroitly enough adjusted so as not to be tedious to the hearer. In all three capacities he was eminently popular; and in all three his popularity has brought with it a sort of reaction, partly justified, partly unjust. The worst brunt of this reaction has fallen upon his verse, the capital division of which, the Lays of Ancient Rome, was persistently decried by Mr. Matthew Arnold, the critic of most authority in the generation immediately succeeding Macaulay's. A poet of the very highest class Macaulay was not; his way of thought was too positive, too clear, too destitute either of mystery or of dream, to command or to impart the true poetical mirage, to "make the common as if it were not common." His best efforts of this kind are in small and not very generally known things, the "Jacobite's Epitaph," "The Last Buccaneer." But his ballads earlier and later, Ivry, The Armada, Naseby, and the Roman quartet, exhibit the result of a consummate literary faculty with a real native gift for rhythm and metre, applying the lessons of the great Romantic generation with extraordinary vigour and success, and not without considerable eloquence and refinement. It is a gross and vulgar critical error to deem Macaulay's poetical effects vulgar or gross. They are popular; they hit exactly that scheme of poetry which the general ear can appreciate and the general brain understand. They are coin for general circulation; but they are not base coin. Hundreds and thousands of immature and 'prentice tastes have been educated to the enjoyment of better things by them; thousands and tens of thousands of tastes, respectable at least, have found in them the kind of poetry which they can like, and beyond which they are not fitted to go. And it would be a very great pity if there were ever wanting critical appreciations which, while relishing things more exquisite and understanding things more esoteric, can still taste and savour the simple genuine fare of poetry which Macaulay offers. There are few wiser proverbs than that which cautions us against demanding "better bread than is made of wheat," and the poetical bread of the Lays of Ancient Rome is an honest household loaf that no healthy palate will reject.

In the second division, that of essay writing, Macaulay occupies a position both absolutely and relatively higher. That the best verse ranks above even the best prose is not easily disputable; that prose which is among the very best of its own particular kind ranks above verse which though good is not the best, may be asserted without any fear. And in their own kind of essay, Macaulay's are quite supreme. Jeffrey, a master of writing and a still greater master of editing, with more than twenty years' practice in criticism, asked him "where he got that style?" The question was not entirely unanswerable. Macaulay had taken not a little from Gibbon; he had taken something from a then still living contributor of Jeffrey's own, Hazlitt. But his private and personal note was after all uppermost in the compound. It had appeared early (it can be seen in things of his written when he was an undergraduate). It owed much to the general atmosphere of the century, to the habit of drawing phrase, illustration, idea, not merely from the vernacular or from classical authorities, but from the great writers of earlier European literature. And it would probably have been impossible without the considerable body of forerunners which the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, and other things of which some notice has been given in a former chapter, had supplied. But still the individual character reigns supreme.

Macaulay's Essays are in something more than the ordinary loose acceptation of the term a household word; and it cannot be necessary to single out individual instances where almost all are famous, and where all deserve their fame. The "Milton" and the "Southey," the "Pitt" and the "Chatham," the "Addison" and the "Horace Walpole," the "Clive" and the "Hastings," the "Frederick the Great" and the "Madame D'Arblay," the "Restoration Dramatists" and the "Boswell," the "Hallam" and the "Ranke," present with a marvellous consistency the same merits and the same defects. The defects are serious enough. In the first place the system, which Macaulay did not invent, but which he carried to perfection, of regarding the particular book in hand less as a subject of elaborate and minute criticism and exposition than as a mere starting-point from which to pursue the critic's own views of the subject, inevitably leads to unfairness, especially in matters of pure literature. Macaulay's most famous performance in this latter kind, the crushing review of the unlucky Robert Montgomery, though well enough deserved in the particular case, escapes this condemnation only to fall under another, that of looking at the parts rather than at the whole. It is quite certain that, given their plan, the two famous critiques of Tennyson and Keats, in the Quarterly and in Blackwood, are well enough justified. The critic looks only at the weak parts, and he judges the weak parts only by the stop-watch. But, on his own wide and more apparently generous method, Macaulay was exposed to equal dangers, and succumbed to them less excusably. He had strong prejudices, and it is impossible for any one who reads him with knowledge not to see that the vindication of those prejudices, rather than the exposition and valuation of the subject, was what he had first at heart. He was too well informed (though, especially in the Indian Essays, he was sometimes led astray by his authorities), and he was too honest a man, to be untrustworthy in positive statement. But though he practised little in the courts, he had the born advocate's gift, or drawback, of inclination to suppressio veri and suggestio falsi, and he has a heavy account to make up under these heads. Even under them perhaps he has less to answer for than on the charge of a general superficiality and shallowness, which is all the more dangerous because of the apparently transparent thoroughness of his handling, and because of the actual clearness and force with which he both sees and puts his view. For a first draft of a subject Macaulay is incomparable, if his readers will only be content to take it for a first draft, and to feel that they must fill up and verify, that they must deepen and widen. But the heights and depths of the subject he never gives, and perhaps he never saw them.

Part of this is no doubt to be set down to the quality of his style; part to a weakness of his, which was not so much readiness to accept any conclusion that was convenient as a constitutional incapacity for not making up his mind. To leave a thing in half lights, in compromise, to take it, as the legal phrase of the country of his ancestors has it, ad avizandum, was to Macaulay abhorrent and impossible. He must "conclude," and he was rather too apt to do so by "quailing, crushing, and quelling" all difficulties of opposing arguments and qualifications. He simply would not have an unsolved problem mystery. Strafford was a "rancorous renegade"; Swift a sort of gifted Judas; Bacon a mean fellow with a great intellect; Dryden again a renegade, though not rancorous; Marlborough a self-seeking traitor of genius. And all these conclusions were enforced in their own style—the style of l'homme même. It was rather teasingly antithetical, "Tom's snip-snap" as the jealous smartness of Brougham called it; it was somewhat mechanical in its arrangement of narrative, set passages of finer writing, cunningly devised summaries of facts, comparisons, contrasts (to show the writer's learning and dazzle the reader with names), exordium, iteration, peroration, and so forth. But it observed a very high standard of classical English, a little intolerant of neologism, but not stiff nor jejune. It had an almost unexampled—a certainly unsurpassed—power (slightly helped by repetition perhaps) of bringing the picture that the writer saw, the argument that he thought, the sentiment that he felt, before the reader's eyes, mind, and feeling. And, as indeed follows from this, it was pre-eminently clear. It is perhaps the clearest style in English that does not, like those of Swift and Cobbett, deliberately or scornfully eschew rhetorical ornament. What Macaulay means you never, being any degree short of an idiot, can fail to understand; and yet he gives you the sense, equipped with a very considerable amount of preparation and trimming. It would not merely have been ungrateful, it would have been positively wrong, if his audience, specially trained as most of them were to his standpoint of Whig Reformer, had failed to hail him as one of the greatest writers that had ever been known. Nor would it be much less wrong if judges very differently equipped and constituted were to refuse him a high place among great writers.

The characteristics of the Essays reproduce themselves on a magnified scale so exactly in the History that the foregoing criticism applies with absolute fidelity to the later and larger, as well as to the earlier and more minute work. But it would not be quite fair to say that no new merits appear. There are no new defects; though the difference of the scope and character of the undertaking intensifies in degree, as well as magnifies in bulk, the faults of advocacy and of partiality which have caused the book to be dismissed, with a flippancy only too well deserved by its own treatment of opponents, as "a Whig pamphlet in four octavo volumes." Yet the width of study and the grasp of results, which, though remarkable, were not exactly extraordinary, in the compass and employed on the subject of a Review article, became altogether amazing and little short of miraculous in this enlarged field. One of the earliest and one of the best passages, the view of the state of England at the death of Charles the Second, may challenge comparison, as a clearly arranged and perfectly mastered collection of innumerable minute facts sifted out of a thousand different sources, with anything in history ancient or modern. The scale of the book is undoubtedly too great; and if it had been carried, as the author originally intended, to a date "within the memory of" his contemporaries, it would have required the life of Old Parr to complete it and the patience of Job to read it through. The necessity of a hero is a necessity felt by all the nobler sort of writers. But the choice of William of Orange for the purpose was, to say the least, unlucky; and the low morality which he had himself, in an earlier work, confessed as to the statesmen of the period imparted an additional stimulus to the historian's natural tendency to be unfair to his political opponents, in the vain hope, by deepening the blacks, to get a sort of whiteness upon the grays. It has further to be confessed that independent examination of separate points is not very favourable to Macaulay's trustworthiness. He never tells a falsehood; but he not seldom contrives to convey one, and he constantly conceals the truth. Still, the general picture is so vivid and stimulating, the mastery of materials is so consummate, and the beauty of occasional passages—the story of Monmouth's Conspiracy, that of James' insane persecution of Magdalen College, that of the Trial of the Seven Bishops, that of the Siege of Londonderry—so seductive, that the most hostile criticism which is not prepared to shut eyes and ears to anything but faults cannot refuse admiration. And it ought not to be omitted that Macaulay was practically the first historian who not merely examined the literature of his subject with unfailing care and attention, but took the trouble to inspect the actual places with the zeal of a topographer or an antiquary. That this added greatly to the vividness and picturesque character of his descriptions need hardly be said; that it often resulted in a distinct gain to historical knowledge is certain. But perhaps not its least merit was the putting down in a practically imperishable form, and in the clearest possible manner, of a vast number of interesting details which time is only too quick to sweep away. The face of England has changed more since Macaulay's time, though a bare generation since, than it had changed in the four or five generations between the day of his theme and his own; and thus he rescued for us at once the present and the past.

It is almost impossible to imagine a greater contrast between two contemporaries of the same nation, both men of letters of the first rank, than that which exists between Thomas Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle. In the subjects to which both had affinity there was a rather remarkable connection. Macaulay's education rather than his sympathies made him something of a master of at least the formal part of poetry, in which Carlyle could do nothing. But essentially they were both writers of prose; they were both men in whom the historico-politico-social interests were much greater than the purely literary, the purely artistic, or the purely scientific—though just as Carlyle was a bad verse-writer or none at all, Macaulay a good one, so Carlyle was a good mathematician, Macaulay a bad one or none at all. But in the point of view from which they regarded the subjects with which they dealt, and in the style in which they treated them, they were poles asunder. Indeed it may be questioned whether "the style is the point of view" would not be a better form of the famous deliverance than that which, in full or truncated form, has obtained currency.

Carlyle was born on the 4th December 1795 at Ecclefechan (the Entepfuhl of the Sartor), in Dumfriesshire, being the son of a stone-mason. He was educated first at the parish school, then at that of Annan (the nearest town), and was about fifteen when he was sent, in the usual way of Scotch boys with some wits and no money, to the University of Edinburgh. His destination was equally of course the Church, but he very early developed that dislike to all fixed formularies which characterised him through life, and which perhaps was not his greatest characteristic. To mathematics, on the other hand, he took pretty kindly, though he seems to have early exhausted the fascinations of them. Like most men of no means who have little fancy for any of the regular professions, he attempted teaching; and as a schoolmaster at Annan, Haddington, and Kirkcaldy, or a private tutor (his chief experience in which art was with Charles Buller), he spent no small number of years, doing also some hack-work in the way of translating, writing for Brewster's Encyclopædia, and contributing to the London Magazine, that short-lived but fertile nurse of genius. The most remarkable of these productions was the Life of Schiller, which was published as a volume in 1825, his thirtieth year, at which time he was a resident in London and a frequenter—a not too amiable one—of Coleridge's circle at Highgate and of other literary places.

The most important event in his life took place in 1826, when he married Miss Jane Welsh, a young lady who traced her descent to John Knox, who had some property, who had a genius of her own, and who was all the more determined to marry a man of genius. She had hesitated between Irving and Carlyle, and, whatever came of it, there can be no doubt that she was right in preferring the somewhat uncouth and extremely undeveloped tutor who had taught her several things,—whether love in the proper sense was among them or not will always be a moot point. The Edinburgh Review was kind to Carlyle after its fashion, and he wrote for it; but Jeffrey, though very well disposed both to Carlyle and to his wife, could not endure the changes which soon came on his style, and might have addressed the celebrated query which, as mentioned, just at the same time he addressed in delighted surprise to Macaulay, "Where did you get that style," to Carlyle in the identical words but with a very different meaning. Even had it been different, it was impossible that Carlyle should serve anywhere or any one; and his mind, not an early ripening one, was even yet, at the age of thirty-two, in a very unorganised condition. He resolved to retire to his wife's farm of Craigenputtock in Nithsdale; and Mrs. Carlyle had the almost unparalleled heroism to consent to this. For it must be remembered that her husband, with the exception of the revenue of a few essays, was living on her means, that he undertook no professional duties, and that in the farmhouse she had to perform those of a servant as well as those of a wife. Whatever other opinions may be passed on this episode of Carlyle's life, which lasted from 1828 to 1834, there can be no doubt that it "made" him. He did much positive work there, including all his best purely literary essays. There he wrote Sartor Resartus, his manifesto and proclamation, a wild book which, to its eternal honour, Fraser's Magazine accepted, probably under the influence of Lockhart, with whom, strangely different as they were, Carlyle was always on good, though never on intimate terms. There too was written great part of the earlier form of the French Revolution. But the greatest thing that he did at Craigenputtock was the thorough fermentation, clearing, and settling of himself. When he went there, at nearly thirty-three, it was more uncertain what would come of him than it is in the case of many a man when he leaves the University at three and twenty. When he left it, at close on his fortieth year, the drama of his literary life was complete, though only a few lines of it were written.

That drama lasted in actual time for forty-seven years longer; and for more than the first thirty of them fresh and ever fresh acts and scenes carried it on. For the public his place was taken once and for all by the History of the French Revolution, which, after alarming vicissitudes (John Stuart Mill having borrowed the first volume in MS. and lent it to a lady, to be destroyed by her housemaid), appeared in 1837. From at least that time Mrs. Carlyle's aspiration was fulfilled. There were gain-sayers of course,—it may almost be said that genius which is not gainsaid is not genius,—there were furious decriers of style, temper, and so forth. But nine out of every ten men at least whose opinion was worth taking knew that a new star of the first magnitude had been added to English literature, however much they might think its rays in some respects baleful.

Lecturing, after the example set chiefly by Coleridge and Hazlitt, was at this time a favourite resource for those men of letters whose line of composition was not of the gainfulest; and Carlyle delivered several courses, some of which are unreported while others survive only in inadequate shapes. But Heroes and Hero-Worship was at first delivered orally, though it was not printed till 1841; and about the same time, or rather earlier, appeared the Miscellaneous Essays—a collection of his work at its freshest, least mannered, most varied, and in some respects best. Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843) reflected the political problems of the time and Carlyle's interest in them. But it was not till 1845 that a second, in the ordinary sense, great work, Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, was published. Five years passed without anything substantive from him, but in 1850 appeared Latter-Day Pamphlets, the most brilliantly satiric, and in 1851 the softest, most finished, and (save theologically) least debatable of all his books, the exquisite biography in miniature called the Life of Sterling. Then he engaged, it is difficult to say whether by ill-luck or not, on the last and largest of his great single undertakings, the History of Frederick the Great. Fourteen years were passed, as a matter of composition, in "the valley of the shadow of Frederick," as his wife put it: half the time (from 1858 to 1865) saw the actual publication. Shortly after the completion of this, Carlyle visited Edinburgh to receive the Lord Rectorship of his University, and soon after his wife died. He survived her fifteen years, but did nothing more of great importance; indeed, he was seventy-one when this loss happened. Some short things on "John Knox," on "The Early Kings of Norway," and a famous letter on "Shooting Niagara" (the Reform Bill of 1867), with a few more, appeared; but he was chiefly occupied (as far as he was occupied at all) in writing reminiscences, and arranging memorials of Mrs. Carlyle. The publication of these books after his death by the late Mr. Froude led to a violent conflict of opinion both as to the propriety of the publication and as to the character of Carlyle himself.

This conflict fortunately concerns us but little here. It is certain that Carlyle—springing from the lower ranks of society, educated excellently as far as the intellect was concerned, but without attention to such trifles as the habit (which his future wife early remarked in him) of putting bread and butter in his tea, a martyr from very early years to dyspepsia, fostering a retiring spirit and not too social temper, thoroughly convinced that the times were out of joint and not at all thoroughly convinced that he or any one could set them right, finally possessed of an intensely religious nature which by accident or waywardness had somehow thrown itself out of gear with religion—was not a happy man himself or likely to make any one else happy who lived with him. But it is certain also that both in respect to his wife and to those men, famous or not famous, of whom he has left too often unkindly record, his bark was much worse than his bite. And it is further certain that Mrs. Carlyle was no down-trodden drudge, but a woman of brains almost as alert as her husband's and a tongue almost as sharp as his, who had deliberately made her election of the vocation of being "wife to a man of genius," and who received what she had bargained for to the uttermost farthing. There will always be those who will think that Mr. Froude, doubtless with the best intentions, made a very great mistake; that, at any rate for many years after Carlyle's death, only a strictly genuine but judicious selection of the Reminiscences and Memorials should have been published, or else that the whole should have been worked into a real biography in which the frame and setting could have given the relief that the text required. But already, after more than the due voices, there is some peace on the subject; and a temporary wave of neglect, partly occasioned by this very controversy, was to be expected.

That this wave will pass may be asserted with a fulness and calmness of assurance not to be surpassed in any similar case. Carlyle's influence during a great part of the second and the whole of the third quarter of this century was so enormous, his life was so prolonged, and the general tone of public thought and public policy which has prevailed since some time before his death has been so adverse to his temper, that the reaction which is all but inevitable in all cases was certain to be severe in his. And if this were a history of thought instead of being a history of the verbal expression of thought, it would be possible and interesting to explain this reaction, and to forecast the certain rebound from it. As it is, however, we have to do with Carlyle as a man of letters only; and if his position as the greatest English man of letters of the century in prose be disputed, it will generally be found that the opposition is due to some not strictly literary cause, while it is certain that any competitor who is set up can be dislodged by a fervent and well-equipped Carlylian without very much difficulty.

He has been classed here as a historian, and though the bulk of his work is very great and its apparent variety considerable, it will be found that history and her sister biography, even when his subjects bore an appearance of difference, always in reality engaged his attention. His three greatest books, containing more than half his work in bulk,—The French Revolution, the Cromwell, and the Frederick,—are all openly and avowedly historical. The Schiller and the Sterling are biographies; the Sartor Resartus a fantastic autobiography. Nearly all the Essays, even those which are most literary in subject—all the Lectures on Heroes, the greater part of Past and Present, The Early Kings of Norway, the John Knox, are more or less plainly and strictly historical or biographical. Even Chartism, the non-antique part of Past and Present, and the Latter-Day Pamphlets, deal with politics in the sense in which politics are the principal agent in making history, regard them constantly and almost solely in their actual or probable effect on the life-story of the nation, and to no small extent of its individual members. Out of the historic relation of nation or individual Carlyle would very rarely attempt to place, and hardly ever succeeded in placing, any thing or person. He could not in the least judge literature—of which he was so great a practitioner always, and sometimes so great a judge—from the point of view of form: he would have scorned to do so, and did scorn those who did so. His deficiencies in abstract philosophy, whether political, theological, metaphysical, or other, arise directly from this—that he could never contemplate any of these things as abstract, but only in the common conduct of men towards their fellows, towards themselves, and towards God. For Carlyle never "forgot God," though he might speak unadvisedly with his lips of other men's ways of remembering Him. The "human document," as later slang has it, was in effect the only thing that interested him; and he was content to employ it in constructing human history. More than once he put his idea of this history formally under a formal title. But his entire work is a much better exposition of that idea than these particular essays; and it is not easy to open any page of it in which the idea itself is not vividly illustrated and enforced upon the reader.

But once more, this is no place for even a summary, much less for a discussion, of the much discussed Carlylian "Gospel of Work"; of its apostle's less vague, but also less disputable, condemnations of shams and cants; or of the innumerable applications and uses to which he put these doctrines. The important thing for our purpose is that these applications took form in thirty volumes of the most brilliant, the most stimulating, the most varied, the most original work in English literature. The titles of this work have been given; to give here any notion of their contents would take the chapter. Carlyle could be—as in the Cromwell, where he sets himself and confines himself to the double task of elucidating his hero's rugged or crafty obscurities of speech and writing and of piecing them into a connected history, or where he wrestles with the huge accumulation of documents about Frederick—as practical as the driest of Dry-as-dusts. But others could equal, though few surpass him, in this. Where he stands alone is in a fantastic fertility of divagation and comment which is as much his own as the clear, neat directness of Macaulay is his. Much of it is due to his gospel, or temper, or whatever it is to be called, of earnest suasion to work and scornful denunciation of cant; something to his wide reading and apt faculty of illustration; but most to his style.

In the early days of his unpopularity this style used to be abused with heat or dismissed with scorn as mere falsetto, copied to a great extent from Richter. It is certain that in Carlyle's very earliest works there is small trace of it; and that he writes in a fashion not very startlingly different from that of any well-read and well-taught author of his time. And it is certain also that it was after his special addiction to German studies that the new manner appeared. Yet it is very far indeed from being copied from any single model, or even from any single language; and a great deal that is in it is not German at all. Something may even be traced to our own more fantastic writers in the seventeenth century, such as Sir Thomas Urquhart in Scotland and Sir Roger L'Estrange in England; much to a Scottish fervour and quaintness blending itself with and utilising a wider range of reading than had been usual with Scotsmen; most to the idiosyncrasy of the individual.

Carlyle's style is not seldom spoken of as compact of tricks and manners; and no doubt these are present in it. Yet a narrow inspection will show that its effect is by no means due so much in reality as in appearance to the retaining of capital letters, the violent breaches and aposiopeses, the omission of pronouns and colourless parts of speech generally, the coining of new words, and the introduction of unusual forms. These things are often there, but they are not always; and even when they are, there is something else much more important, much more characteristic, but also much harder to put the finger on. There is in Carlyle's fiercer and more serious passages a fiery glow of enthusiasm or indignation, in his lighter ones a quaint felicity of unexpected humour, in his expositions a vividness of presentment, in his arguments a sledge-hammer force, all of which are not to be found together anywhere else, and none of which is to be found anywhere in quite the same form. And despite the savagery, both of his indignation and his laughter, there is no greater master of tenderness. Wherever he is at home, and he seldom wanders far from it, the weapon of Carlyle is like none other,—it is the very sword of Goliath.

And this sword pierces to the joints and marrow as no other of the second division of our authors of the nineteenth century proper pierces, with the exception of that of Tennyson in verse. It is possible to disagree with Carlyle intensely; perhaps it is not possible to agree with him in any detailed manner, unless the agreer be somewhat destitute of individual taste and judgment. But on his whole aspect and tendency, reserving individual expressions, he is, as few are, great. The diathesis is there—the general disposition towards noble and high things. The expression is there—the capacity of putting what is felt and meant in a manner always contemptuous of mediocrity, yet seldom disdainful of common sense. To speak on the best things in an original way, in a distinguished style, is the privilege of the elect in literature; and none of those who were born within, or closely upon, the beginning of the century has had these gifts in English as have the authors of The Lotos Eaters and Sartor Resartus.

Only one other writer of history during the century, himself the latest to die of his generation except Mr. Ruskin, deserves, for the union of historical and literary merit, to be placed, if not on a level with Macaulay and Carlyle, yet not far below them; but a not inconsiderable number of historians and biographers of value who distinguished themselves about or since the middle of the century must be chronicled more or less briefly. Two Scottish scholars of eminence, both in turn Historiographers Royal of Scotland, John Hill Burton and William Forbes Skene, were born in the same year, 1809. Burton, who died in 1881, busied himself with the history of his country at large, beginning with the period since the Revolution, and tackling the earlier and more distinctively national time afterwards. He was not a very good writer, but displayed very great industry and learning with a sound and impartial judgment. Skene, on the other hand, was the greatest authority of his time (he lived till 1892) on "Celtic Scotland," which is the title of his principal book. In the same year (or in 1808) was born Charles Merivale, afterwards Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and Dean of Ely, who, besides other work, established himself in the same class of historians with Hallam and Milman, Thirlwall and Grote, by his extensive History of the Romans under the Empire. On the whole, Merivale (who died in 1894) ranks, both for historical and literary gifts, somewhat below the other members of this remarkable group—a position which is still a very honourable one.

Shortly after these three was born Alexander Kinglake (1811-1891)—a man of very remarkable talents, but something of a "terrible example" in regard to the practice, which has already been noticed as characteristic of the century, of devoting enormously long histories to special subjects and points. Kinglake, who was a native of Somerset, an Eton and Cambridge man, a barrister subsequently, for some years a Member of Parliament, and a man of independent means, first distinguished himself in letters by the very brilliant and popular book of travels in the East called Eothen which was published in 1847. That there is something of manner and trick about this is not to be denied; but it must be allowed that the trick and manner have been followed, apparently with success, in travel-writing for about half a century, while it cannot be fairly said that Kinglake himself had any exact models, though he may have owed something to Beckford and a little to Sterne. It is not very easy to say whether Kinglake's literary reputation would have stood higher or lower if he had written nothing else; but as a matter of fact, before many years were over, he attempted a much more ambitious task in the History of the Crimean War, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1863, though the book was not finished till twenty years later. That this history shows no small literary faculties no competent judge can deny. The art of word-painting—a dubious and dangerous art—is pushed to almost its furthest limits; the writer has a wonderful gift of combining the minutest and most numerous details into an orderly and intelligible whole; and the quality which the French untranslatably call diable au corps, or, as we more pedantically say, "dæmonic energy," is present everywhere. But the book is monstrously out of proportion,—a single battle has something like an entire volume, and the events of some two years occupy eight,—and, clear as the individual pictures are, the panorama is of such endless length that the mind's eye retains no proper notion of it. In the second place, the style, though brilliant, is hard and brassy, full of points that are more suitable to the platform or the newspaper than to the historic page,—not so much polished as varnished, and after a short time intolerably fatiguing. In the third,—and this is the gravest fault of all,—the author's private or patriotic likes or dislikes pervade the whole performance and reduce too much of it to a tissue of extravagant advocacy or depreciation, made more disgusting by the repetition of catch phrases and pet labels somewhat after the manner of Dickens. Sir Stratford Canning, "the great Eltchi," is one of Kinglake's divinities, Lord Raglan another; and an acute and energetic, but not quite heaven-born diplomatist, a most honest, modest, and in difficult circumstances steadfast, if not always judicious soldier, become, the one Marlborough in the council-chamber, the other Marlborough in the field. On the other hand, for this or that reason, Mr. Kinglake had taken a violent dislike to the Emperor Napoleon the Third, and affected, as did some other English Liberals, to consider the coup d'état as not merely a dubious piece of statecraft, but a hideous and abominable crime. Consequently, he abused all those who took part in it with tedious virulence, which has probably made not a few Englishmen look on them with much more leniency than they deserved. In short, Kinglake, with many of the qualities of the craftsman in an extraordinary degree, was almost entirely deficient in those of the artist. He served as a favourite example to Mr. Matthew Arnold of the deficiency of the British literary temper in accomplishment and grace, and it cannot be denied that Mr. Arnold's strictures were here justified to an extent which was not always the case when he assumed the office of censor.

John Forster, who was born a year later than Kinglake, and died fifteen years before him, was an industrious writer of biographies and biographical history, the friend of a good many men of letters, editor for many years of the Examiner, and secretary to the Lunacy Commissioners. He paid particular attention to the period of the Rebellion; his Arrest of the Five Members being his chief work, among several devoted to it. He wrote a Life of Goldsmith, and began one of Swift. In contemporary biography his chief performances were lives of Landor and of Dickens, with both of whom he was extremely intimate. In private life Forster had the character of a bumptious busybody, which character indeed the two books just mentioned, even without the anecdotes abundant in more recent books of biography, abundantly establish. And towards the men of letters with whom he was intimate (Carlyle and Browning may be added to Landor and Dickens) he seems to have behaved like a Boswell-Podsnap, while in the latter half of the character he no doubt sat to Dickens himself. But he was an indefatigable literary inquirer, and seems, in a patronising kind of way, to have been liberal enough of the result of his inquiries. He had a real interest both in history and literature, and he wrote fairly enough.

One of the most curious figures among the historians of this century was Henry Thomas Buckle, who was born near Blackheath in 1823, and privately educated. He had ample means, and was fond of books; and in 1857 he brought out the first volume (which was followed by a second in 1861) of a History of Civilisation. He did not nearly complete—in fact he only began—his scheme, in which the European part was ultimately intended to be subordinate to the English, and he died of typhus at Damascus in May 1862. The book attained at once, and for some time kept, an extraordinary popularity, which has been succeeded by a rather unjust depreciation. Both are to be accounted for by the fact that it is in many ways a book rather of the French than of the English type, and displays in fuller measure than almost any of Buckle's contemporaries in France itself, with the possible exception of Taine, could boast, the frank and fearless, some would say the headlong and headstrong, habit of generalisation—scorning particulars, or merely impressing into service such as are useful to it and drumming the others out—on which Frenchmen pride themselves, and for the lack of which they are apt to pronounce English historians, and indeed English men of letters of all kinds, plodding and unilluminated craftsmen rather than artists. In Buckle's reflections on Spain and Scotland, he accounts for the whole history of both countries and the whole character of both peoples by local conditions in the first place, and by forms of civil and ecclesiastical government. In respect to these last, his views were crude Voltairianism; but perhaps this is the best and most characteristic example of his method. He was extremely prejudiced; his lack of solid disciplinary education made him unapt to understand the true force and relative value of his facts and arguments; and as his premises are for the most part capriciously selected facts cemented together with an untempered mortar of theory, his actual conclusions are rarely of much value. But his style is clear and vigorous; the aggressive raiding character of his argument is agreeably stimulating, and excellent to make his readers clear up their minds on the other side; while the dread of over-generalisation, however healthy in itself, has been so long a dominant force in English letters and philosophy that a little excess the other way might be decidedly useful as an alterative. The worst fault of Buckle was the Voltairianism above referred to, causing or caused by, as is always the case, a deplorable lack of taste, which is not confined to religious matters.

Edward Augustus Freeman, who was a little younger than Buckle and survived him for thirty years, had some points in common with the historian of civilisation, though his education, interests, and tone in reference to religion were wholly different. Mr. Freeman, who was not at any public school but was a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, very soon devoted himself to the study of early English history, and secured a durable position by his elaborate History of the Norman Conquest (1867-76), which, even though the largest and most important, was only one among scores of works, ending in an unfinished History of Sicily. He was, when he died in 1892, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and he had for many years been very influential in determining the course of historical study. He was also, for many years of his life, an active journalist, being especially known as a contributor to the Saturday Review, and he sometimes took a very busy part in politics. Mr. Freeman was a student of untiring energy, and will always deserve honourable memory as the first historian who recognised and utilised the value of architecture in supplying historical documents and illustrations. His style was at times picturesque but too diffuse, and disfigured by a habit of allusion as teasing as Macaulay's antithesis or Kinglake's stock phrases. That he was apt to pronounce very strong opinions on almost any question with which he dealt, was perhaps a less drawback to his excellence as a historian than the violently controversial tone in which he was wont to deal with those who happened to hold opinions different from his own. Putting defects of manner aside, there is no question that, for his own special period of English history (the eleventh and twelfth centuries), Mr. Freeman did more than any man had done before him, and as much as any man has done for any other period; while in relation to his further subjects of study, his work, though less trustworthy, is full of stimulus and of information.

His chief pupil John Richard Green, who was born in 1837 and died of consumption in 1883, was a native of Oxford, and was educated there at Magdalen College School and Jesus College. Mr. Green, like Mr. Freeman, was a frequent contributor to the Saturday Review, and did some clerical duty in the east of London; but he is best known by his historical work on English subjects, especially the famous Short History of the English People, perhaps the most popular work of its class and kind ever written. Mr. Green professed, on a principle which had been growing in favour for some time, to extend the usual conception of historical dealing to social, literary, and other matters. These, however, had never as a fact been overlooked by historians, and the popularity of the book was chiefly due to its judicious selection of interesting facts, to the spirit of the narrative, and to the style, based partly on Macaulay, but infused with a modernness which exactly hit the taste of the readers of our time. Mr. Green afterwards expanded this book somewhat; and his early death cut short a series of more extended monographs, The Making of England, The Conquest of England, etc., which would have enabled him to display the minute knowledge on which his more summary treatment of the general theme had been based.

Among historians to whom in larger space more extended notice than is here possible would have to be given, perhaps the first place is due to Philip Henry, sixth Earl Stanhope (1805-75), who (chiefly under the title of Lord Mahon, which he bore before his succession to the earldom in 1855) was an active historical writer of great diligence and impartiality, and possessed of a fair though not very distinguished style. The first notable work,—a History of the War of the Succession in Spain (1832),—of Lord Stanhope (who was an Oxford man, took some part in politics, and was a devoted Peelite) was reviewed by Macaulay, and he wrote later several other and minor historical books. But his reputation rests on his History of Europe from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles, which occupied him for some twenty years, finishing in 1854. Very much less known to the general, but of singular ability, was William Johnson or Cory, who under the earlier name had attracted considerable public attention as an Eton master and as author of a small but remarkable volume of poems called Ionica. After his retirement from Eton and the change of his name, Mr. Cory amused himself with the composition of a History of England, or rather a long essay thereon, which was very little read and falls completely out of the ordinary conception of such a book, but is distinguished by an exceptionally good and scholarly style, as well as by views and expressions of great originality. Many others must pass wholly unnoticed that we may finish this chapter with one capital name.

One of the greatest historians of the century, except for one curious and unfortunate defect, and (without any drawback) one of the greatest writers of English prose during that century, was James Anthony Froude, who was born at Dartington near Totnes in 1818, on 23rd April (Shakespeare's birthday and St. George's Day), and died in 1894 at the Molt near Salcombe in his native county. Mr. Froude (the youngest son of the Archdeacon of Totnes and the brother of Richard Hurrell Froude who played so remarkable a part in the Oxford Movement, and of William Froude the distinguished naval engineer) was a Westminster boy, and went to Oriel College, Oxford, afterwards obtaining a fellowship at Exeter. Like his elder brother he engaged in the Tractarian Movement, and was specially under the influence of Newman, taking orders in 1844. The great convulsion, however, of Newman's secession sent him, not as it sent some with Newman, but like Mark Pattison and a few more, into scepticism if not exactly negation, on all religious matters. He put his change of opinions (he had previously written under the pseudonym of "Zeta" a novel called Shadows of the Clouds) into a book entitled The Nemesis of Faith, published in 1849, resigned his fellowship, gave up or lost (to his great good fortune) a post which had been offered him in Tasmania, and betook himself to literature, being very much, except in point of style, under the influence of Carlyle. He wrote for Fraser, the Westminster, and other periodicals; but was not content with fugitive compositions, and soon planned a History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada. The first volumes of this appeared in 1856, and it was finished in 1869. Meanwhile Froude from time to time collected his essays into volumes called Short Studies, which contain some of his very best writing. His next large work was The English in Ireland, which was published in three volumes (1871-74). In 1874-75 Lord Carnarvon sent him on Government missions to the Cape, an importation of a French practice into England which was not very well justified by the particular instance. Between 1881 and 1884 he was occupied as Carlyle's literary executor in issuing his biographical remains. Later Oceana and The English in the West Indies contained at once sketches of travel and political reflections; and in 1889 he published an Irish historical romance, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. He was made Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in succession to Mr. Freeman, and his two latest works, Erasmus, published just before, and English Seamen some months after his death, contain in part the results of the appointment.

It is a vulgar observation that the natural element of some men appears to be hot water. No English author of the century justifies this better than Mr. Froude. His early change of faith attracted to him a very considerable share of the obloquy which usually (and perhaps not so unreasonably as is sometimes thought) attaches to violent revolutions of opinion on important points. His History was no sooner published than most acrimonious attacks were made upon it, and continued for many years, by a school of historical students with the late Mr. Freeman at their head. His Irish book, coinciding with the rise of "Home Rule" sentiment in Ireland, brought upon him furious enmity from the Irish Nationalist party and from those who, at first or by and by, sympathised with them in England. His colonial visits and criticisms not merely attracted to him the animosity of all those Englishmen who espoused the politics of non-intervention and non-aggrandisement, but aroused lively irritation in the Colonies themselves. About his discharge of his duties as Carlyle's executor, a perfect tempest of indignation arose; it being alleged that he had either carelessly, or through bad taste, or with deliberate treachery, revealed his dead friend's and master's weaknesses and domestic troubles to the public view.

With some of the causes of this odium we are fortunately here dispensed from dealing. Theological and political matters, in so far as they are controversial, are altogether outside of our scope. The question of the dealing with Carlyle's "Remains" is one rather of ethics than of literature proper, and it is perhaps sufficient to make, in reference to it, the warning observation that Lockhart, who is now considered by almost all competent critics as a very pattern of the union of fidelity and good taste towards both his subject and his readers, was accused, at the appearance of his book, of treachery towards Scott.

But it must be confessed that if Mr. Froude's critics were unfair (and they certainly were) he himself gave only too abundant opening to fair criticism. That his first great book (not perhaps any of his others) was planned on an unduly large scale, and indulged in far too extensive dissertation, divagation, and so forth, was rather the fault of his time than of himself. Grote and Macaulay had obtained, the first considerable, the latter immense popularity by similar prolixity; and Carlyle was about, in the Frederick, to follow the fashion. But whereas all these three, according to the information open to them, were and are among the most painfully laborious researchers and, with a fair allowance, the most faithful recorders among historians, Mr. Froude displayed an attention to accuracy which his warmest admirers must allow to be sadly, and which enemies asserted to be scandalously insufficient. He has been called by well-affected critics "congenitally inaccurate," and there is warrant for it. Nor did any one of his three great models come short of him in partiality, in advocacy, in the determination to make the reader accept his own view first of all.

He was, in the earlier part of his career at any rate, a very poor man, whereas Macaulay was in easy, and Grote in affluent circumstances, and he had not Carlyle's Scotch thrift. But the carelessness of his dealing with documents had more in it than lack of pence to purchase assistance, or even than lack of dogged resolve to do the drudgery himself. His enemies of course asserted, or hinted, that the added cause was dishonesty at the worst, indifference to truth at the best. As far as dishonesty goes they may be summarily non-suited. The present writer once detected, in a preface of Mr. Froude's to a book with which the introducer was thoroughly in sympathy, repeated errors of quotation or allusion which actually weakened Mr. Froude's own argument—cases where he made his own case worse by miscitation. To the very last, in his Erasmus itself, which he had prepared at some pains for the press, his work would always abound in the most astonishing slips of memory, oversights of fact, hastinesses of statement. There is probably no historian of anything like his calibre in the whole history of literature who is so dangerous to trust for mere matters of fact, who gives such bad books of reference, who is so little to be read with implicit confidence in detail. Had his critics confined themselves to pointing this out, and done him justice in his other and real merits, little fault could have been found with them. But it is impossible not to see that these merits were, at least in some cases, part of his crime, in the eyes of those who did not like him; in others were of a kind which their natural abilities did not qualify them to detect.

The first of these merits—the least it may be in some eyes, not so in others—was a steadfast, intense, fiery patriotism, which may remind us of that which Macaulay in a famous passage has ascribed to Chatham in modern times and to Demosthenes of old. This quality differed as much from the flowery and conventional rhetoric not uncommon in writers of some foreign nations, as from the smug self-satisfaction which was so frequent in English speakers and authors of his own earlier time. No one probably of Mr. Froude's day was less blind to English faults than he was; no one more thoroughly grasped and more ardently admired the greatness of England, or more steadfastly did his utmost in his own vocation to keep her great.

His second excellence—an excellence still contested and in a way contestable, but less subject than the first to personal and particular opinion—was his command of the historic grasp, his share of the historic sense. I have seen these terms referred to as if they were chatter or claptrap; while the qualities which they denote are very often confounded with qualities which, sometimes found in connection with them, may exist without either. The historic sense may be roughly described as the power of seizing, and so of portraying, a historic character, incident, or period as if it were alive not dead; in such a manner that the fit reader, whether he is convinced or not that the things ever did happen, sees that they might and probably must have happened. Some of the most estimable and excellent of historians have not had even a glimmering of this sense: they have at best laboriously assembled the materials out of which, sooner or later, some one with the sense will make a live history. But Thucydides and Herodotus had it; Tacitus had it, and even Sallust; it betrays itself in the most artless fashion in Villehardouin and Joinville, less artlessly in Comines; Clarendon had it; Gibbon had it; Carlyle had it as none has had it before or since. And Mr. Froude had it; not much less though more fitfully than Carlyle. It is not in the least necessary to agree with his views; it is possible to regard his facts with the most anxious suspicion. You may think that the case made out for King Henry is pretty weak, and the case made out against Queen Mary is much weaker. But Mr. Froude is among the rare Deucalions of historic literature: he cannot cast a stone but it becomes alive.

Thirdly, and still rising in the scale of incontestability, though even so contested, I believe, by some, is the merit of style. I have sometimes doubted whether Mr. Froude at his best has any superior among the prose writers of the last half of this century. His is not a catching style; and in particular it does not perhaps impress itself upon green tastes. It has neither the popular and slightly brusque appeal of Macaulay or Kinglake, nor the unique magnificence of Mr. Ruskin, nor the fretted and iridescent delicacy of some other writers. It must be frankly confessed that, the bulk of his work being very great and his industry not being untiring, it is unequal, and sometimes not above (it is never below) good journey-work. But at its best it is of a simply wonderful attraction—simply in the pure sense, for it is never very ornate, and does not proceed in point of "tricks" much beyond the best varieties of the latest Georgian form. That strange quality of "liveliness" which has been noticed in reference to its author's view of history, animates it throughout. It is never flat; never merely popular; never merely scholarly; never merely "precious" and eccentric. And at its very best it is excelled by no style in this century, and approached by few in this or any other, as a perfect harmony of unpretentious music, adjusted to the matter that it conveys, and lingering on the ear that it reaches.

Note.—As examples of the almost enforced omissions referred to in the text may be mentioned earlier Archdeacon Coxe, the biographer of Marlborough and the historian of the House of Austria; later, Finlay (1799-1875), the valiant successor of Gibbon, and the chronicler of the obscure and thankless fortunes of the country called Greece, after it had ceased to be living. Professor Sir J. R. Seeley, Kingsley's successor at Cambridge (1834-94), equally distinguished in his professional business, and as a lay theologian in a sense rather extra-orthodox than unorthodox; and Sir John Stirling-Maxwell, no mean historian either in the general sense or in the special department of Art. It is open to any one to contend that each and all of these as well deserve notice as not a few dealt with above; yet if they were admitted others still could hardly be excluded.

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