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honorary degree of LL.D., and the committee of the Athenæum Club exercised in his favor their power of electing eminent men to be members of the club without ballot, while Jesus College conferred on him an honorary fellowship.

In 1876 he took, for the only time in his life, except when he had supported a working man's candidate for the Tower Hamlets at the general election of 1868, an active part in practical politics. In

dignity for a work which was to take in the whole history of England. It was then, being convinced of this, that he can celled a great deal of what had been stereotyped, and re-wrote it, re-creating, with his passionate facility, his whole style." In order to finish it, he gave up the Saturday Review altogether, though he could ill spare what his writing there brought him in. It is seldom that one finds such swiftness and ease in composition as his, united to so much fastidious-the early part of that winter, when war ness. He went on remoulding and revising till his friends insisted that the book should be published anyhow, and published it accordingly was, in 1874. Feeling that his time here might be short, for he was often laid up and disabled even by a catarrh, he was the readier to yield.

seemed impending between Russia and Turkey, fears were entertained that England might undertake the defence of Turkey, and a body called the Eastern Question Association was formed to or ganize opposition to what was supposed to be the warlike policy of Lord BeaconsThe success of the "Short History" field's ministry. Green threw himself was rapid and overwhelming. Everybody warmly into the movement, was chosen read it. It was philosophical enough for to serve on the executive committee of scholars, and popular enough for school- the association, and was one of a literary boys. No historical book since Macau- sub-committee of five (which included also lay's has made its way so fast, or been Mr. Stopford Brooke and Mr. William read with so much avidity. And Green Morris) appointed to draw up the maniwas under disadvantages which his great festo convoking the meeting of delegates predecessor escaped from. Macaulay's from all parts of the country, which was name was famous before his "History "held in December, 1876, under the title appeared, and Macaulay's scale was so of the Eastern Question Conference. He large that he could enliven his pages with continued to attend the general committee a multitude of anecdotes and personal de- until, after the treaty of Berlin, it ceased tails. Green was known only to a small to meet, and took the keenest interest in circle of friends, having written nothing its proceedings. But his weak health and under his own signature except one or frequent winter absences made public aptwo papers in magazines or the transac-pearances impossible to him. tions of archæological societies; and the plan of his book, which dealt with the whole fourteen centuries of English national life in eight hundred and twenty pages, obliged him to deal with facts in the mass, and touch lightly and briefly on personal traits. A summary is of all kinds of writing that which it is hardest to make interesting, because one must speak in general terms, one must pack facts tightly together, one must be content to give those facts without the delicacies of light and shade, the subtler tints of color. Yet such was his skill, both literary and his torical, that his outlines gave more pleasure and instruction than other people's finished pictures.

The success of the book put him at once in easier circumstances, and he soon afterwards removed to pleasanter lodgings in Connaught Street, Hyde Park, where he remained for two years. It also won for him a recognition in the world which brightened his life. The University of Edinburgh, more prompt and generous than his own, conferred on him the

The next year, 1877, brought the chief happiness of his life, for it was then that he married Miss Alice Stopford, daughter of the late Archdeacon Stopford.

The reception of the "Short History' induced his publishers to collect and issue a selection from his anonymous articles under the title of "Stray Studies." It preserved some excellent work, and would doubtless have had a more complete success if its contents had been less miscel laneous. And about the same time he began to edit his series of primers in literature and history, a delicate task, which he discharged with great tact; and soon after he wrote, in conjunction with his wife, a book on the geography of the British Isles.

A more laborious undertaking was the re-casting of his "Short History" in the form of a somewhat larger book, which, under the title of "A History of the English People," appeared in four octavo volumes between 1878 and 1880. This revised edition of the early work profited by the care which he spent, not only in

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1882, under the title of "The Making of England." Even in those few months it was incessantly rewritten; no less than

correcting the minor errors of the latter,
but in reconsidering the views and con-
clusions which had been there expressed,
sometimes too broadly or too hastily. ten copies were, I believe, made of the
Thus the book gained in accuracy and first chapter. It was received in the
solidity. It remains the latest and com- warmest way by the highest authorities.
pletest exposition of his ideas. But many But he was himself far from satisfied with
readers thought that in being revised it it on the literary side, thinking that a
was so toned down as to lose some part reader would find it at once too specula-
of its freshness and vivacity; and it does tive and too dry, deficient in the details
not seem likely to supplant the "Short needed to make the life of primitive En.
History" in popular favor. In 1880 the gland real and instructive. If this had
concluding volume of this larger history been so, it would have been due to no
appeared, and with characteristic activity failing in his skill, but to the scantiness
he immediately set about a new project. of the materials available for the first few
He had always been intensely interested centuries of our national history. But he
in the origines of English history, the felt it so strongly that he was often dis-
settlement of the Teutonic invaders in posed to recur to his idea of writing a
Britain, the consolidation of their tribes history of the last seventy or eighty years,
into a nation with characteristic institu- and was only induced by the encourage-
tions and a settled order; and his desire ment of a few friends to pursue the nar
to treat of them was possibly stimulated rative which, in the "Making of England,"
by the way in which some critics had he had carried down to the reign of Eg
sought to disparage his "Short History" bert. The winter of 1881 was spent at
as a mere popularizing of other people's Mentone, and the following summer in
ideas; brilliant work, these critics said, London. He continued very weak, and
but still second-hand work, and affording sometimes unable to go out driving-he
no evidence of original power. Unjust
the criticism certainly was, for there was
abundant originality in the views set forth
in the "Short History; " but it made his
friends urge him to an enterprise where
he would have to deal with original au-
thorities only, and be forced to put forth
those powers of criticism and construc-
tion which they knew him to possess.
Thus he began afresh at the very begin-
ning, at Roman Britain and the English
Conquest. The work had not advanced
far when he went to spend the winter in
Egypt, and there unhappily caught an ill-
ness which so told on his weak frame that
he was only just able to return to London
in April, and would not have reached it
at all but for the care and skill with which
he was tended by his wife. Good nurs-
ing, and the extraordinary recuperative
power which his constitution possessed,
brought him so far round that in a few
weeks he was able to resume his studies,
though now forbidden to give to them
more than two or three hours a day.
However, what he could not do alone he In October, when he returned to Men-
did with and through his wife, who con- tone, the tale of our early history had been
sulted the authorities for him, examined completed, and was in type down to the
into obscure points, and wrote to his dic- death of Earl Godwine in A.D. 1052. He
tation. In this way, during the summer had hesitated as to the point at which the
and autumn months of 1881, when often book should end, but finally decided to
some slight change of weather would carry it down to A.D. 1085, the date of the
throw him back and make work impossi-dispersion of the last great Scandinavian
ble for days or weeks, the book was pre- armament which threatened England. As
pared, which he published in February, the book dealt with both the Danish and

never walked now or to work at home for weeks together. But the moment that an access of strength returned, the notebooks were brought out, and he was again busy going through what his wife's indus. try had tabulated, and dictating for an hour or two till fatigue forced him to desist. Those who saw him during that summer were amazed, not only at this brave spirit which refused to yield to physical feebleness, but at the brightness and clearness of his intellect, which was not only as forcible as it had ever been before, but as much interested in whatever passed in the world. Those who came to see him were inclined to leave forthwith when they saw how he sat propped up with cushions on the sofa, his tiny frame worn to mere skin and bone, his voice interrupted by frequent fits of coughing; but when they had stayed for a little, all was forgotten in the fascination of his talk, and they were in danger of remaining till the effort, not of thinking but of speech, had exhausted him.

Norman invasions, he proposed to call it "The Conquest of England," and it is to be shortly published, wanting, indeed, those expansions in several places which he had meant to give it, but still such a work as none but he could have produced, full of new light, and equal in the parts which have been fully handled to the best work of his earlier years.

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Soon after he returned to Mentone he became rapidly worse, and unfit to do any continuous work, or even to quit the house, except to sit in the garden during an hour or two of morning sunshine. There I saw him in the end of December, keen and active in mind as ever, aware that the most he himself could hope for was to live long enough to complete his Conquest," " but reading with avidity every new book that came to him from England - the last, which he began only a week or two before his death, was the "Life of Lord Lawrence starting schemes for various historical books sufficient to fill three lifetimes, and ranging in talk over the whole field of politics, literature, and history. It seemed as if the intellect and will which strove to remain in life till their work was done, were the only things which held the weak and wasted body together. The quenchless ardor of his spirit prolonged life amid the signs of death. In January there came a new attack, and in February another unexpected rally. On the 2nd of March he remarked that it was no use fighting longer, and on Wednesday, the 7th, he expired, at the age of forty-six.

the best of all his work had been accomplished.

I would willingly linger over those incidents of his life and characteristics of his mind whieh endeared him to his friends; but it is better to proceed to that which the public knows him by, and endeavor to present some sort of estimate of his gifts for history, and the place to which his historical work is entitled. He had powers which would have made him eminent in many walks of life, just as he had a brilliance in talk which shone out over the room whatever might be the topic that came up. History was, however, the subject towards which the whole current of his intellect set, and it was interesting to notice how everything fell with him into history; how he inevitably looked at it as an historian would.

Now what are the capacities which the historian specially needs? Firstly, he must be accurate, and so fond of the true fact as to be willing to spend much time and pains in tracing it out even when it seems to others comparatively trivial. Secondly, he must be keenly observant, that is to say, he must be able to fasten on small points, and discover in isolated data the basis for some generalization, or the illustration of some principle. Thirdly, he must have a sound and calm judg ment, which will subject both his own and other people's inferences and generalizations to a searching review, and weigh in delicate scales their validity. These two last mentioned qualifications taken together make up what one calls the critical Incomplete as his life seems, maimed faculty; the power of dealing with eviand saddened by the sense of powers dence as tending to establish or discredit which ill health would not suffer to pro- facts, and those conclusions which are duce their due results, it was not an built on the grouping of facts. Acuteunhappy one, for he had that immense ness alone is not enough, though men power of enjoyment which so often be- often speak of it as if it were the main longs to a vivacious intelligence. He thing needed. Nor is the judicial baldelighted in books, in travel, in his friends' ance alone enough, though etymologically company, in the constant changes and the critic is the judicially-minded person. movements of the world. Society never We all know people sharp in observation dulled his taste for these things, nor was and fertile in suggestion, whose concluhis spirit, except for passing moments, sions have little value, because they candarkened by the shadows which to others not distinguish between strong and weak seemed to lie so thick around his path. arguments, just as we know solid and He enjoyed, though he never boasted of well-balanced minds who never enlighten it, the fame his books have won, and the a subject because, while seeing the errors splendid sense of creative power. And of others, they cannot seize on the posithe last six years of his life were bright-tive significance of facts known, but hithened by the society and affection of one who entered into all his tastes and pursuits with the most perfect sympathy, and enabled him, by her industry and vigor, to prosecute labors which physical weakness must otherwise have checked before

erto unscrutinized. The true critic, in history, in philosophy, in literature, in psychology, even largely in the sciences of nature, is he whose judgment goes hand in hand with his observation, as the heat of the electric current is evolved

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where its light kindles. Fourthly, the classes and took Plato as the type of one,
historian must have imagination, not in- Aristotle of the other, so one might take
deed with that intensity which makes the as representatives of these two tenden-
poet, else his realizations of the unseen cies among historians Thucydides for the
may carry him too far above the earth, critical and philosophical, Herodotus for
but in sufficient measure to let him feel the imaginative and picturesque.
the men of other times and countries to former does not indeed want a sense
be living and real like ourselves, to pre- of the dramatic grandeur of a situation;
sent to him a large and crowded picture his narrative of the Athenian expedition
of a distant world as a world moving against Syracuse, to take the most obvious
struggling, hoping, fearing, enjoying, be- example, is like a piece of Eschylus in
lieving, like the world of to-day-a world prose. The latter is by no means with-
in which there is a private life infinitely out a philosophical view of things, nor
vaster, more complex, more interesting without a critical instinct, although his
than that public life which is sometimes generalizations are rudimentary and his
all that the records of the past have trans-critical apparatus is imperfect. Each is
mitted to us. Our imaginative historian so splendid because each is wide, with all
may or may not be able to reconstruct the great gifts largely, although not
that private life for us. If he can, he equally, developed.
will. If the data are too scanty, he will
wisely forbear. Yet he will still feel that
those whose movements on the public
stage he chronicles and judges, had their
private life, and were steeped in an en-
vironment of natural and human influ-
ences which must have affected them at
every turn; and he will so describe them
as to make us feel them human, and give
life to the pallid figures of far-off warriors
and law-givers. To these four, some will
think there ought to be added the faculty
of literary exposition. But one who pos-
sesses in large measure the last three, or
even the last alone, cannot fail to interest
his readers; and what more does a talent
for literary exposition mean?

Taking these four, we shall find that historians fall into two classes, according as there predominates in them the critical or the imaginative faculty. I am far from saying that any one can attain greatness without both still they may be present in very unequal degrees. Some will investigate facts and their relations with more care, and will occupy themselves chiefly with that side of history in which positive and tangible conclusions are (from the comparative abundance of data) most easily reached that, namely, which relates to constitutional and diplomatic matters. Others will be drawn towards the dramatic and personal elements in history, primarily as they appear in the lives of famous individual men, secondarily as they are seen, more dimly but not less impressively, in groups and masses of men, and in a nation at large, and will also observe and dwell upon incidents of private life or features of social and religious custom, which the student of stately politics passes by.

As Coleridge divided thinkers into two

Green was an historian of the Herodotean type. He possessed, as I shall attempt to show, the capacities which belong to the other type also; he was diligent, critical, sceptical, perhaps too sceptical, and he was eminently philosophical. Yet, the imaginative quality was the leading and distinctive quality in his mind and writing. An ordinary reader, if asked what was the main impression given by the "Short History of the English People," would answer that it was the impression of picturesqueness and vividitypicturesqueness in the externals of the life described, vividity in that life itself.

I remember to have once, in talking with Green about Greek history, told him how I had heard a distinguished scholar, in discussing the ancient historians, disparage Herodotus and declare him unworthy to be placed near Thucydides. Green answered, almost with indignation, that to say such a thing showed that this eminent scholar could have little feeling for history. "Great as Thucydides is," he said, "Herodotus is far greater, or at any rate far more precious. His view was so much wider." I forget the rest of the conversation, but what he meant was that Herodotus, to whom everything in the world was interesting, and who has told us something about every country he visited or heard of, had a more fruitful conception of history than his Athenian successor, who practically confined himself to politics in the narrower sense of the term, and that even the wisdom of the latter is not so valuable to us as the miscellaneous budget of information which Herodotus pours out about everything in the primitive world.

This was thoroughly characteristic of

himself. Everything was interesting to him because his imagination laid hold of everything. When he travelled, nothing escaped his quick eye, perpetually ranging over the aspects of places and society. When he went out to dinner, he noted every person present, and could tell you afterwards something about them. He had a theory, so to speak, about each of them, and indeed about every one with whom he had ever exchanged a dozen words. When he read the newspaper, he seemed to squeeze all the juice out of it in a few minutes. Nor was it merely the large events that fixed his mind: he drew from stray notices of minor current matters evidence of principles or tendencies which escaped other people's eyes. You never left him without having a flood of new light poured over the questions of the hour. His memory was retentive, but it was not so remarkable as the sustained keenness of apprehension with which he read, and which made him fasten upon everything in a book or in talk which was significant, which could be made the basis for an illustration of some theory. This is what I mean by calling him Herodotean. Nothing was too small nor too apparently remote from the main studies of his life to escape him or be without interest for him. His imagination vitalized it, and gave it immediately its place in those pictures he was always sketching

out.

matter they contain, but for the delicate refinement of their form. Yet they were all written swiftly, and sometimes in the midst of physical weakness and exhaustion. The friend I have previously quoted describes the genesis of one. He reached the town of Troyes early one morning with two friends, and immediately started off to explore it, darting hither and thither through the streets like a dog trying to find a scent. In two hours the examination was complete. They lunched together, took the train on to Basel, got there late and went off to bed. Green, however, wrote before he slept, and brought down to breakfast with him next morning an article on Troyes, in which its characteristic features were brought out and connected with its fortunes and those of the counts of Champagne during some centuries, an article which was really a history in miniature. Then they went out together to look at Basel, and being asked some question about that city he gave on the spur of the moment a sketch of its growth and character equally vivid and equally systematic, grouping all he had to say round two or three leading theories. Yet he had never been in either place before, and had not made a special study of either. He could apparently have done the same for any other town in France or the Rhineland.

One other result of his imagination, must be mentioned the extreme quickAs this faculty of discerning hidden ness of his sympathy. It had served him meanings and relations was one index and well in his work among the East End consequence of his imaginative power, so poor. It made him an immense favorite another was found in that artistic gift to with young people, in whose tastes and which I have just referred. To give lit- pursuits he was always ready to be intererary form to everything was a neces- ested. It enabled him to pour life and sity of his intellect. He could not tell an feeling into the figures of a bygone age, anecdote or repeat a conversation without and become the most human, and in so unconsciously dramatizing it, putting into far the most real and touching, of all who people's mouths better phrases than they have dealt with English history. Whethwould have themselves employed, and giver or not his portraits are always true, ing a finer point to the moral which the they are always lifelike. They seem to incident expressed. Verbal accuracy breathe. sometimes was impaired, but the inner truth came out the more fully.

Though he wrote very fast, and in the most familiar way, the style of his letters was as good, I might say as finished, as that of his books. Every one of them had a beginning, middle, and end. The ideas were developed in an apt and graceful order, the sentences could all be construed, the words were choice. It was of course the same with the short articles which he at one time used to write for the Saturday Review. They are little essays, worthy to live not only for the excellent

There was perhaps nothing that struck one so much in daily intercourse with Green as this passionate interest of his in human life. One may divide people → people (that is to say) who are pronounced enough to be classifiable at all — into those whose primary interests are in nature and what relates to nature, and those whose primary interests are in and for man. He was the most striking type I have known of the latter class, not merely because his human interests were strong, but also because they excluded, to a degree singular in such an active and

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