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 Methods of historical stu^ 
 
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THE 
 
 METHODS OF HISTORICAL STUDY 
 
 EIGHT LECTURES 
 
 READ IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD IN 
 MICHAELMAS TEEM, 1884 
 
 TFITR THS INAUGURAL LECTURE 
 
 ON 
 
 THE OFFICE OF THE HISTORICAL PROFESSOR 
 
 EDWARD A. FREEMAN, M.A., Hon. D.C.L. & LL.D. 
 
 BEGIUS PEOPESSOE OP MODEEN HISTOE-E- 
 
 FELLOW OP OEIEL COLLEOE 
 
 HONORABY PELLOW OF TEIlTITr OOLLEOE 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 188 6 
 
 [ All rights reserved ] 
 
A'l/O^Sr 
 
 
 %LiOR ARY ,, 
 
 ©xtflta 
 
 WTNTED BY HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 . il'i ,, '■' :' 
 Y Si AM. i ' 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The course of Lectures here printed, with the Inaugural 
 Lecture prefixed, was meant as a call and an introduction 
 to historical study in general. They were followed up in 
 Easter Term 1885 by a course on the Chief Periods of 
 European History. After these two general courses, I 
 began in October 1885 the first of a series of more minute 
 lectures, beginning at the point marked out in the present 
 course as a provisional beginning for the special work of 
 a Professor of so-called " Modern " History. That point is 
 the great barbarian invasion of Gaul in 407, the beginning 
 of Teutonic settlement, strictly so called, in the Western 
 lands of the Empire. I had far rather have begun at 
 776 B.C. than at 407 a.d. ; but I believe that I have chosen 
 the best point that could be chosen, if an arbitrary divi- 
 sion was to be made anywhere. But I feel more and more 
 the utter worthlessness of the unnatural distinctions which 
 are still drawn, in matters of history and language, between 
 periods and subjects between which no natural distinction 
 can be drawn. An advanced time of life has its draw- 
 backs; but I daily feel, and I find that eminent contem- 
 poraries of miue feel with me, the great advantage of 
 having spent our youth under the old Oxford system 
 and not under the new. The changes of 1849-50 were 
 premature. The old system needed expansion to bring 
 it up to the actual level of knowledge ; but its principle 
 was good; it was sound within its own lines. Its exam- 
 ination in sixteen books at the end of four years was 
 
iv PREFACE. 
 
 a real test; it gave no such charming opportunities as 
 are now provided for forgetting one subject before another 
 is learned. It made no attempt to teach history or lan- 
 guage beyond a certain point; but it gave a man habits 
 of thought and study by which he might carry on his 
 work further at pleasure. But, instead of enlarging that 
 system so as to take in subjects later in date, the later 
 subjects were set up as something distinct from the earlier, 
 almost as antagonistic to them. It is against this state 
 of things, to say nothing of other difficulties, that a his- 
 torical Professor at Oxford has to fight. It is for others 
 to judge whether I have won any ground in my early 
 campaigns. 
 
 If really sound learning is to be our object, if the great 
 discoveries of modern times are to be made available for 
 the studies of the University, we must rise from the 
 endless petty changes in which academic life seems to 
 be frittered away, to a thorough recasting of our system. 
 Learning must no longer be sacrificed to an unintelligible 
 delight in an endless whirl of examinations. Instead of 
 the diseased excitement of class-lists — a weak point of 
 the old system which has been exaggerated under the 
 new — we need such tests, in the form of examinations 
 or otherwise, as shall make a bachelor's degree respectable, 
 and a master's degree honourable. Instead of the present 
 unnatural divisions, we need a School of History and a 
 School of Language — better still a School of History and 
 Language — in which both subjects may be studied with- 
 out regard to artificial barriers which gender only to 
 shallowness. This I hardly expect to see in my lifetime ; 
 but I do rejoice that, among many changes for the worse, 
 there is hope of one change for the better, a change which 
 
PREFAaS. V 
 
 may do something to bridge over the fatal gap, and which 
 I trust may pave the way for a more thorough reform. 
 
 I speak of those subjects only of which I conceive 
 myself to be able to judge. As to what may be best 
 for studies other than those of history and language, I 
 venture no opinion, because my opinion would be worth- 
 less. The University ought to welcome real knowledge 
 of every kind, and to do for every branch of knowledge 
 whatever is best for that branch. But that general 
 cultivation and discipline of the mind which is the 
 highest object of the University should surely not be 
 sacrificed to mere specialism in any branch. And in every 
 branch alike the aim should surely be knowledge for 
 its own sake, knowledge as a discipline of the mind. It 
 is surely not the business of the University to teach a 
 man his calling in life, but to teach him something which 
 may be good for him, whatever calling he may choose. 
 In the most ancient system of all, the professional faculties, 
 those of divinity, law, and medicine, could not be entered 
 on till after long study in the more general faculty of 
 arts. A degree in arts granted as the result of an 
 examination in law or in divinity would have seemed 
 a contradiction in terms. And however much the details 
 of our studies may have changed from the studies of those 
 days, the principle at least is a sound one. 
 
 On the relations of the professors to other teachers in 
 the University I will not at present enlarge. In the more 
 general lectures here printed, in the minute study of texts 
 with a small class which I would gladly see larger, I have 
 tried to show what I conceive the professor's duty to be. 
 Teachers of other classes must do what they conceive to 
 be their duty. But I am sure that college teaching— at 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 least as college teaching was forty years back, when a 
 college lecture was commonly a lecture on the text of 
 a book carefully construed — might be brought into the 
 closest harmony with professorial teaching. In my day 
 there was very little professorial teaching ; it was an evil 
 that there was so little. The evil now is that there is 
 so much of both kinds of teaching, but that the professor 
 and the tutor seem to stand in no kind of relation to one 
 another. In my small class with whom I have read Gregory 
 and Paul, I have had graduates and undergraduates; I 
 have had men but little younger than myseK ; I have had 
 scholars of high renown, to whom on some points I am 
 glad to look as my masters. Among these classes the 
 professed teachers of history have supplied the smallest 
 proportion. I merely state the fact; it is for them to 
 explain it. 
 
 I trust that the present volume may be followed by 
 my second course on the Chief Periods of European His- 
 tory. The lectures that have followed it, and others that 
 may follow them, I do not propose to publish in the 
 form of lectures ; but I trust that their materials may 
 be found useful in other shapes, as part of some of them 
 has been already made use of in the first number of the 
 English Historical Review. 
 
 St. Giles', Oxpoed, 
 May 7, 1886. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 INAUGUKAL LECTURE. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Office of the Histobical Phofessoe ... 3 
 LECTURE L 
 
 HlSTOEX AND ITS KINDEED STUDIES . . . -43 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 The Difficulties of HisxcRicAi Study . . . 8o 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 The Natuee of Historical Evidence 
 
 117 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 Oeiginal Authoeities 156 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 Classical and Medletal Weitees . . . .191 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 SuBSiDiAET Authoeities 226 
 
 LECTURE VH. 
 MoDEEN Weitees . . . ■ . ■ .261 
 
 LECTURE Vni. 
 Geogeaphy and Travel 296 
 
 INDEX 329 
 
INAUGURAL LECTURE 
 
 THE OFFICE 
 
 OF THE 
 
 HISTOEICAL PEOFESSOE. 
 
 i^ 
 
THE OFFICE OF 
 THE HISTORICAL PROFESSOR. 
 
 In coming forward for the first time, as I do 
 to-day, to fulfil the new duties which the highest 
 power in the land has laid upon me, I cannot forget 
 how soon my first words necessarily come after the 
 last words of the renowned scholar in whose place I 
 find myself. It is indeed matter of rejoicing for us 
 all that his last words were last words only in an 
 official sense. Our guide is taken from us, and yet 
 not wholly taken from us. Called to other and 
 higher duties, we feel sure that he will not forget 
 the studies of his earlier life ; we feel sure that he 
 will still be ready, from time to time, to stretch out 
 a helping hand to those whose main work stiU lies 
 in the fields where his own once lay. And readiest of 
 all, I would fain hope, he will be to stretch forth a 
 hand to him who feels it his highest honour to stand 
 in his place, and to stand in it, I may make bold to 
 say, with his good will and something more. And 
 yet the fact in which we all rejoice that he in whose 
 place I stand still lives and flourishes does but in 
 some sort heighten the natural difficulties of my first 
 appearance before you, I am thereby driven into 
 more direct comparison than I othervsdse might have 
 
 B 2 
 
4 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 been with one witli whom comparison is indeed 
 dangerous. You have to hear my inaugural profes- 
 sions, while what I may caU the exaugural confes- 
 sions of the Bishop of Chester have as yet hardly 
 passed from your ears. Let me only hope that, if I 
 ever have the same privilege as he had, of parting 
 from you, hardly, like him, to new duties, but when 
 the time may come for me to lay aU official duties 
 aside, I may be able to make as good a confession as 
 he made. I would fain hope that, when the time 
 comes, I may part from you with as cheerful a confi- 
 dence as his, that I may, like him, feel that I have at 
 least done my best, and that you — or those who may 
 then represent you here — have at least accepted the 
 will, perhaps even, as in his case, the deed also. 
 
 There is one point of difference, whether I am to 
 count it as a diflPerence for gain or loss, between him 
 who now speaks and him who spoke last in the same 
 character, which comes strongly home to me when I 
 am tempted to glance, as he did, at the history of the 
 post in which I am called to succeed him. As a rule, 
 the younger succeeds the elder. It is by a rather 
 singular lot that I am called on to take the place 
 which has been held in succession by two living 
 men, by two personal friends, by two of the men of 
 whom among all living men I think most highly, but 
 to neither of whom can I look up with that particular 
 form of reverence which we feel towards our elders 
 and official teachers. Of the last two holders of this 
 chair, the latter is certainly younger than I am by a 
 few years, as even the former is by a few days. And 
 
UY PREDEGESSORS. 5 
 
 this fact, a disadvantage truly in many ways, is no 
 small advantage when I come to look back at times 
 before either of them was called to it. My academic 
 memory goes back further than that of the Bishop of 
 Chester, and I cannot mourn that it does so. There 
 can be but few here who can remember, as I can, 
 listening to lectures from a Kegius Professor of 
 Modern History more than two-and-forty years ago. 
 But those whose memory carries them so far back 
 will assuredly not have forgotten the time when they 
 listened to the voice of Arnold. Of that great 
 teacher of historic truth, that greater teacher of 
 moral right, I can speak as one wholly free from 
 local, traditional, or personal bias. I was not one of 
 his pupils or of his followers. I never spoke to him ; 
 I never heard him speak save with his official voice 
 in the well-filled Theatre. And yet I am boimd to 
 honour him as a master in a sense in which I can 
 honour no other. On one side I have learned more 
 from him than I have learned even from mj Bight 
 Keverend predecessor. For of Arnold I learned what 
 history is and how it should be studied. It is with 
 a special thrill of feeling that I z^member that the 
 chair which I hold is his chain that I venture to hope 
 that my work in that claair may be in some sort, at 
 whatever distance, to go on waging a strife which he 
 began to wage. It was from him that I learned a 
 lesson, to set forth which, in season and out of 
 season, I have taken as the true work of my life. It 
 was from Arnold that I first learned the truth which 
 ought to be the centre and life of all our historic 
 
6 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 studies, the truth of the Unity of History. If I am 
 sent hither for any special object, it is, I hold, to 
 proclaim that truth, but to proclaim it, not as my 
 own thought, but as the thought of my great master. 
 It is a responsibility indeed to be the successor, even 
 after so many years, of one who united so many 
 gifts. New light has been thrown on many things 
 since his day ; but it surely ill becomes any man of 
 our time who, by climbing on Arnold's shoulders, has 
 learned to see further than Arnold himself could see, 
 to throw the slightest shade of scorn upon so vener- 
 able a name. Surely never did any man put forth 
 truths so high and deep in words so artlessly and 
 yet so happily chosen. If he were nothing more 
 than the teller of a tale in the English tongue, he 
 would take his place as one who has told a stirring 
 tale as few could teU it. It was something to make 
 us quiver at the awful vision of Hannibal, and to 
 show us Marcellus lying dead on the nameless hiU. 
 It was a higher calling to show, as no other has 
 shown, that history is a moral lesson. In every page 
 of his story A.rnold. stands forth as the righteous 
 judge, who, untaught by the more scientific historical 
 philosophy of later dajs, stiU looked on crime as no 
 less black because it was successful, and who could 
 acknowledge the rights even of the weak against the 
 strong. But more than all for my immediate purpose, 
 
 I Arnold was the man who taught that the political 
 /] history of the world should be read as a single whole, 
 
 I I who taught that the true life of the tale, the true 
 profit of the teaching, should not be made void and 
 
 
ARNOLD. 7 
 
 of none effect by meaningless and unnatural 
 divisions. It was lie who taught us that what, 
 in his own words, is " falsely called ancient history," 
 is in truth the most truly modem, the most truly 
 living, the most rich in practical lessons for every 
 succeeding age. From him I learned that teaching; 
 it will be my highest aim, in the place in which I 
 am now set, to hand that teaching on to others. If 
 I can do ought to break down the middle wall of 
 partition that is against us — if I can do ought to 
 make men feel more deeply that so-called " ancient " 
 history without " modem " is a foundation useless for 
 lack of a superstructure, that so-called " modern " 
 history without " ancient " is a superstructure ready 
 to fall for lack of a foundation — ^if I can bring home 
 to men's minds that the patriarchs of our own folk, 
 the Angul and Dan of the old legend, the mythical 
 representatives of our speech, our laws, our whole 
 historic being, are as such the equal brethren of 
 Hellen and Latinus — if I can bring but one of you 
 to work, as I have ever worked, with the kindred 
 records side by side, with the fates of one branch of 
 the house ever called in to throw the needful light 
 on the fates of the other branch — if I can bring but 
 one to trace out with me the work of Kleisthenes, of 
 Licinius, of Simon of Montfort, as parts of one living 
 whole, a whole of which every stage needs to be 
 grasped by the same faculties, to be studied by the 
 same methods— then indeed I shall have done the 
 work that I have come to do ; but I shall have done 
 it only as the loyal follower of the master who being 
 
8 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 dead yet speaketh, if only by the mouth of a distant 
 successor. 
 
 I have paid my homage where homage from a 
 holder of this chair is due chiefest and first of all. 
 But there are others, others of whom I have already 
 spoken, of whom, living though they are, I still feel 
 that I have not yet said aU that is their due. 
 Arnold was taken from us too soon, taken in the 
 fulness of his strength, when he had indeed done 
 much, but when much more, above aU in this place, 
 might have been looked for from him. He was 
 lost to us ; but worthy successors were in time 
 to fi^ll his place. Again, after a season, his chair 
 passed to a memorable man. It passed to one who 
 had indeed drunk in the spirit of Arnold, to one 
 who knew, as few have known, to grasp the truth 
 that history is but past politics and that politics are 
 but present history. It passed to a scholar, a 
 thinker, a master of the English tongue, to one 
 too who is something nobler stUl, to one whom 
 we may truly call a prophet of righteousness. The 
 name of Goldwin Smith is honoured in two hemi- 
 spheres, honoured as his name should be who never 
 feared the face of man, wherever there was truth to 
 be asserted or wrong to be denounced. He went 
 forth from us of his own will ; but it was but to 
 carry his light to another branch of our own folk, 
 and it may be more graceful in us, if we do not 
 so much regret our own loss as congratulate the 
 kindred lands to which he is gone. And in absence 
 he yet teaches us ; some truths have perhaps become 
 
GOLD WIN SMITH. 9 
 
 clearer to him on the other side of Ocean than they 
 could ever have been in our elder world. Not the 
 least among his many services to truth and to right 
 reason has been done within this very year. He 
 has taught us, in one of those flitting papers which, 
 when they come from him, speak volumes, where to 
 look for the true Expansion of England. His keen 
 eye has seen it, not in the spread of " empire," but 
 in the spread of that which is the opposite to empire 
 — not in the mere widening of dominion — an Eastern 
 despot could do that — but in that higher calling 
 which free England in the later world has shared 
 with free HeUas in the elder. He has taught us the 
 meaning of words, the realities of things ; he has 
 taught us to see, if not a " Greater Britain," yet a 
 newer England, in the growth of new lands of 
 Englishmen, new homes of the tongue and law of 
 England, lands which have become more truly 
 colonies of the English folk because they have ceased 
 to be provinces of the British Crown. 
 
 And one more tribute, not the last, I feel sure, by 
 many, to him in whose immediate place I stand, my 
 predecessor in the University and in one coUege, my 
 successor in early days in another. In those early 
 days I may, I think, fairly claim that I was the first 
 to grasp more fully than others all that was in him, 
 to see in him something more than the clever men 
 whom we meet with daily, to pick him out as one 
 with whom his first class and his fellowship were not 
 the ending but the beginning of his career. It seems 
 not so many years since I was often asked, sometimes 
 
10 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 by men who deemed themselves specially learned, 
 ■who this Stubbs might be of whom I talked so much 
 but of whom nobody else had heard. No one will 
 ask that now of the historian of the English Consti- 
 tution, the enlightening spirit of the Ecclesiastical 
 Courts Commission, and beyond all these, the man 
 who has drawn the life-like portrait of Henry the 
 Second, and who has thereby shown that he has a 
 call before other men to draw a life-like portrait of 
 Henry the Eighth. I have had in my life the 
 honour and advantage of knowing not a few wise 
 and learned men, some who have passed away from 
 us, some who are still among us. Among them two 
 stand forth before all others ; one of my own time of 
 life, the other of an older generation ; one an inti- 
 mate friend of many years, the other a master at 
 whose feet I deemed it a privilege to sit now and 
 then as a humble listener. To those two I can 
 honestly pay a special tribute which I can hardly 
 pay to any other. Among many of whom I have 
 learned, those two, the late Bishop of Saint David's 
 and the present Bishop of Chester, Connop Thirlwall 
 and William Stubbs, stand forth as the two from 
 whom one might always learn without any need 
 to doubt or stumble at what one learned of them. 
 Others may know how to teU a more popular tale; 
 others may indulge iu more brilliant feats of the 
 imagination ; of none other can I say, as I can say 
 of each of them, that his minute accuracy never 
 fails and his impartial judgement never swerves. In 
 a long and careful study of the Bishop of Chester's 
 
STUBBS. 11 
 
 writings, I will not say that I have always agreed 
 with every inference that he has drawn from his 
 evidence ; but I can say that I have never found a 
 flaw in the statement of his evidence. If I have 
 now and then lighted on something that looked hke 
 oversight, I have always found in the end that the 
 oversight was mine and not his. After five-and- 
 thirty years' knowledge of him and his works, I can 
 say without fear that he is the one man among 
 living scholars to whom one may most freely go as to 
 an oracle, that we may feel more sure with him than 
 with any other that in his answer we carry away 
 words of truth which he must be rash indeed who 
 calls in question. 
 
 Standing then in the place of such men as these, 
 of predecessors whom we have not wholly lost 
 but to whom I can stiU look as friends and fellow- 
 workers, I feel the responsibility, the burthen of my 
 new office the more keenly. It is no small matter, 
 at an age when the best part of one's days is gone, 
 to be carried away to a wholly new manner of Hfe, 
 to begin a career at a time when one who had begun 
 it earher might fairly think of withdrawing from it. 
 To that work then I am the more bound to give the 
 fulness of such powers as I have because I am likely 
 to have a shorter time than others to do it in. In 
 such a post as mine, each man will have his own 
 way of doing things, and he will do his work the 
 better, if he does it in his own way, the way which 
 his own nature and his own studies lead him to. In 
 this case, in defiance of Aristotle and Aristotle's 
 
12 INAUGURAL LEGTUBE. 
 
 teacher, I venture to think that there may be more 
 good ways than one. I feel sure that my two 
 illustrious predecessors must have done their work, 
 each admirably, but in utterly different ways. And 
 I feel sure that each of them did his work the better 
 for doing it in his own way, and not trying to follow 
 the way of some other man. To them, as well as to 
 our teachers of past days, I may apply the words 
 which Cicero applies to the great orators whom he 
 followed^-" omnes inter se dissimiles fuerunt, sed ita 
 tamen ut neminem sui velis esse dissimilem ^." And 
 I trust it is not presumptuous in me to say that I 
 feel sure that my way of doing the work will also be 
 different from that of any who have gone before me, 
 and moreover that I shall do that work aU the 
 better if I do it in my own way and do not try to 
 copy the way of any of those who have gone before 
 me. I need not tell you that I come back to the 
 University after many years, and those years full of 
 great changes. I need not say that much in the 
 present teaching and administration of this place is 
 altogether new and strange to me. Of its examina- 
 tions I once knew something, but even then I found 
 the course of change to be so fast that, each time that 
 I was appointed Examiner, I had to learn my trade 
 afresh ; my experience from the former time had 
 already become a matter of ancient history. Of 
 teaching in the strict sense, in the University or out 
 of it, I have had no experience whatever, unless any 
 one chooses to count two terms' possession, eight- 
 ^ De Oratore, iii. 7. 
 
RETURN TO OXFORD. 13 
 
 and-thirty years back, of a lowly office in my own 
 college, an office which the progress of reform has 
 since swept away. In the art of preparing — I will 
 not use the ugly word cramming — an undergraduate 
 for his class or for his pass the last bachelor who has 
 won his own class or his own pass is necessarily 
 more skilful than I am. But I do not feel that my 
 lack of experience of this kind is necessarily a dis- 
 advantage ; every man has his own line of duty, and 
 it seems to me, strange as I beheve the doctrine will 
 sound in some ears, that to prepare men for examina- 
 tions is no part of the duty of a Professor in such a 
 subject as mine. Duties he has, and no small ones ; 
 but they are, as I hold, duties of quite another kind 
 from even the widest and most liberal form of teach- 
 ing into which the thought of success or failure in 
 an examination is ever allowed to enter. 
 
 There is surely a certain lurking fallacy in the 
 word " Professor." The name surely means wholly 
 different things according to the subjects to which 
 it is applied. It surely implies a different relation 
 to the Professor's subject, according to the nature of 
 that subject, or rather perhaps according to the posi- 
 tion of that subject among the studies of the Uni- 
 versity. When a subject, for whatever cause, is 
 studied by a few only, when the Professor is perhaps 
 the only teacher of the subject in the University, I 
 should conceive that, while it is his duty to stand 
 forth as a representative of the highest learning in 
 his subject, it must also be his duty to bend himseF, 
 if need be, to the humblest form of its teaching. A 
 
14 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 Professor of Arabic, while master of a mighty litera- 
 ture from which I daily mourn that I am shut out, 
 must also, I imagine, be ready to teach the Arabic 
 alphabet, even, if need be, to a brother-professor. 
 No such duty lies on a professor of that which is 
 alike the oldest and the newest speech of European 
 freedom ; none such lies on a professor of the im- 
 dying tongue of Empire, the tongue of the consuls, 
 the Cffisars, and the pontiffs. A professor of Greek 
 must, I assume, be master alike of every stage and 
 every phase of that still living speech, from the song 
 of Homer to the song of Eh^gas, from the prose of 
 Hekataios to the prose of TrikoupSs. A professor of 
 Latin, I assume, must be alike at home in every 
 page of the long life of the Imperial tongue, from 
 the song of the Arval Brethren to the hymns of Ber- 
 nard of Clairvaux, from the sharp sayings exchanged 
 between Nsevius and the Metelli to those yet more 
 memorable Saturnians in which the nameless poet of 
 the thirteenth century set forth the earliest platform 
 of Parliamentary Keform. Nay, it might hardly be 
 unreasonable if we even asked him to begin a fresh 
 journey from the oath of Strassburg, if we called on 
 him to trace the fates of the children as well as of 
 the parent, to trace them even to the most wayward 
 shapes which the speech of Latium has put on by 
 the springs of the Ehine or by the mouths of the 
 Danube. Each alike, he who represents Greek and 
 he who represents Latin, is surely set in his place to 
 be the representative of the widest and the deepest, 
 the oldest and the newest, learning that can bear on 
 
THE PROFESSOR'S DUTIES. 15 
 
 the history of the undying tongue that forms his 
 subject. But they are spared the lowHer duties 
 which I conceive that a professor of Arabic or 
 Chinese must combine with a learning no less deep 
 and wide of the tongue that forms his subject. And 
 so, I take it, it must be with the professor of every 
 subject which has many followers in this place and of 
 which there are many teachers besides himself. If I 
 may so far magnify an office in which I am myself a 
 sharer, I would say that a professor of any of the 
 great branches of study in this place should hold a 
 place something like that which the prince held in 
 the view of Tiberius Caesar \ The prince was not 
 called on to discharge the duties of an sedile, a prse- 
 tor, or a consul ; so the Professor is not called on to 
 discharge the duties of a college tutor or a private 
 tutor. " Majus aliquid et excelsius a professore 
 postulatur." His business is, not to make men 
 quahfied for classes and fellowships, but to be the 
 representative of that to which classes and fellow- 
 ships, if they are not to be wholly useless and mis- 
 chievous, are simply means. His place is to be the 
 representative of learning. He should stand ready 
 to be the helper, if need be, to be the guide, of any, 
 old or young, be they freshmen or be they doctors, 
 who, in days like these, between the frenzy of amuse- 
 ments and the frenzy of examinations, can still find 
 a few stray hours to seek learning for its own sake. 
 But before all other classes he wOl welcome the 
 younger graduates, those who have already learned 
 ^ Tac. Ann. iii. 53. 
 
16 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 something, but who still have much to learn, and 
 among them he will specially welcome those who 
 have undertaken the work of teaching in his own 
 subject. He and they are alike teachers, though 
 teachers of different kinds, and his experience in the 
 art of teaching himself may make him of some use 
 to them in the art of teaching others. But his own 
 calling is different from theirs. He must be ready, 
 in set discourses, to show forth whatever, in his own 
 researches or in the researches of others, he may 
 deem most fitting to suggest thoughts as well as to 
 supply facts to his hearers. But he will not confine 
 himself to this more easy, more showy, perhaps 
 both to himself and to his hearers more taking work. 
 He must not forget the most solid business of his 
 calling. He must ever bear in mind himself, and he 
 must ever strive to impress on the minds of others, 
 that the most ingenious and the most eloquent of 
 modern historical discourses can after all be nothing 
 more than a comment on a text. All that he can 
 say of his own thinking, even all that the newest 
 German book can tell him, will after all be but illus- 
 trations of those original authorities without a sound 
 and thorough knowledge of whose texts all our finest 
 talk is but shadow without substance. To the law 
 I and to the testimony, to the charter and to the 
 , chronicle, to the abiding records of each succeeding 
 age, writ on the parchment or graven on the stone — 
 it is to these that he milst go himself and must 
 guide others. He must himself toil, and as far as in 
 him lies, he must constrain or beguile others to toil 
 
ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 17 
 
 with him, at that patient study of contemporary 
 texts, of contemporary monuments, which to some 
 minds seems a good deal less taking than the pOing 
 together of theories to be upset the next day by 
 some other theory. He must work to lay the foun- 
 dation ; when the foundation is once laid on the rock 
 of original research, a superstructure may be raised 
 on it which may live through a good many blasts 
 and storms of controversy. But he who without a 
 foundation builds on the sands of theory, he who 
 rushes at a difficult and controversial period with no 
 knowledge of the periods that went before it or of 
 the periods that came after it, he who conceives of 
 events, not as they are reported by those who saw 
 them, but as may be convenient for some favourite 
 doctrine, political or theological, philosophical or 
 artistic — against such as these our professor wiU 
 hardly need to raise his voice of warniug. He may 
 spare himself the task ; he may leave events to take 
 their course ; the house built on the sand will pre- 
 sently crumble of itself, without needing any special 
 blasts and storms to sweep it away. 
 
 It is, as you will see, a somewhat lofty standard 
 that I have formed to myself of the professor's office. 
 But it is only by aiming at the highest standard of 
 all, at a standard which may be far above our reach, 
 that we shall ever attain to the highest standard 
 that is within our reach. In other words, the pro- 
 fessor should be one who has at least striven to be a 
 master in that branch of knowledge which he is 
 called on to represent,, and he should be ready to 
 
 c 
 
18 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 devote himself heart and soul to the advancement of 
 knowledge, of knowledge in the highest sense, in 
 that branch. If he is not thus qualified, intellectu- 
 ally and morally, he is not fit to be professor at all. 
 If he is thus qualified, he is surely fit to judge for 
 himself how he can best promote the interests of 
 that branch of knowledge. It is therefore surely 
 a mistake to lay down a code of hard and unbending 
 rules, not only for professors of this or that subject, 
 but for aU professors of all subj ects, I cannot but think 
 that my idea of a professor must be widely different 
 from the idea which seems to have been entertained 
 by the last reformers of the University. I can speak 
 the more freely on this head, because the last reform 
 was not a reform of our own making, but a reform 
 which was thrust upon us from outside, I had 
 passed my life in the belief that an University ought 
 to be, before all things, a seat of learning, or, if the 
 word be liked better, a seat of research. And I had 
 thought that for some years past the great object of 
 reformers had been to make learning or research less 
 difiScult, perhaps even to make it, in a meaner sense, 
 less unprofitable to its followers. Whoever dictated 
 the ordinances of the last set of Commissioners must 
 have thought otherwise. It is indeed hard to be- 
 lieve that the object of the Commission really was 
 to do all that could be done for the hindrance of 
 learning and for the humiliation of its official re- 
 presentatives. But, if such had been their objects, 
 no one could have denied that tjiey had adapted 
 means to ends very skilfully. The ordinance seems 
 
THE LAST COMMISSION. 19 
 
 to look on a professor, not as a representative of 
 learning, but as a mere teacker, as an usher, I might 
 say, an usher too of a low moral standard, who will 
 be likely to shirk his work unless he is bound down 
 to it by minute and rigid rules. Nothing surely can 
 be more likely than this to hinder the professor from 
 giving full play to whatever powers he may have, 
 nothing more likely to make him look on his work as 
 a task and to keep him back from throwing himself 
 into it heart and soul. It is, or lately was, the 
 fashion to mock at the old founders of colleges for 
 making strict and unbending statutes to control the 
 discipline and manner of life of their members. Yet 
 here, as the last instalment of reform, as the newest 
 developement of enlightenment, we have a set of pro- 
 fessorial ordinances, ordinances almost as minute as 
 the statutes of any founder of past ages, designed for 
 the guidance, not of lads and their immediate teachers, 
 but of men who, if they are not masters of the 
 several branches of learning, are altogether out of 
 their places. For a man who is what a professor 
 ought to be, what I am sure that not a few of the 
 professors in this place are, it is not exactly en- 
 couraging to tell him that he must give so many 
 lectures at such and such times, that he must 
 announce them beforehand at such and such times, 
 that he must hold himself responsible to one Board 
 and that he must take counsel with another. Will 
 the members of the Boards forgive me if I tell them 
 that as yet I feel towards them much as Apoll6niQS 
 of Tyana felt when he had never seen a tyrant, when 
 
 c 2 
 
20 TN AUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 he did not know how many heads a tyrant had, or 
 what kinds of necks and teeth those heads might be 
 furnished withal But I am told that the boards 
 are much less terrible in real life than they seem in 
 the bristling language of the ordinance. The good 
 sense, no doubt, of their members hinders them from 
 really being such thorns in the professor's side as it 
 would seem that the authors of the ordinance meant 
 them to be. But neither professor nor board can 
 ■wipe out the ordinance, with all its petty and gro- 
 tesque restrictions. Till some deliverer from outside 
 steps in to undo the work of the invader from out- 
 side, we must bear our yoke as we can. 
 
 An Oxford professor then in these days must work 
 in fetters, but he may still work. And a professor of 
 what is called " Modern History " may feel himself 
 bound by fetters which seem to be more firmly 
 rivetted than those of any of his brethren, I need 
 not tell you — I have already told you in this 
 lecture — that I acknowledge no such distinction as 
 that which is implied in the words " ancient " and 
 " modern " history, " ancient " and " modern " lan- 
 guages, and the like. In the course of a life divided 
 about equally between what are called " ancient " and 
 jwhat are called " modern " studies, I have never been 
 able to find out the difference between the two, I 
 have never been able to find out by my own wit 
 when "ancient" history ends and when "modern" 
 history begins. And when I have asked others, 
 when I have searched into the writings of others, I 
 * Philostratos, Life of Apoll6nios, iv, 37. 
 
WHAT IS "MODERN BISTORT"? 21 
 
 have found so little agreement on the point that I 
 have been myself none the wiser. A living friend 
 once told me that modern history begins with the 
 French Eevolution, and I fancy that a good many 
 people, at least in France, would gladly agree with 
 his doctrine. On the other hand, Baron Bunsen 
 held that modern history began with the Call of 
 Abraham. These, I think, are the two extremes ; 
 but I have heard a good many intermediate points 
 suggested. Those perhaps are wisest who decline to 
 define at all ; only the thought will follow that it 
 might be wiser still not to draw a distinction which 
 cannot be defined. At any rate the University has 
 never ruled the point. In all the controversies of 
 five-and-thirty years ago I never could get a defini- 
 tion of modern history. More than all, even the last 
 set of Commissioners have not taken on them to 
 define it. Even those who are so minute as to rule 
 that the Professor of Modern History is to give 
 exactly forty-two lectures in a year — they do not 
 say how they propose to compel him to give forty- 
 two good lectures — even they do not undertake to 
 tell him what he is to lecture about. They tell him 
 to lecture in " some part of modern history ; " but 
 they do not tell him what "modern history" is. It 
 is surely open to him to accept either of the defini- 
 tions which I have quoted. I should, I conceive, be 
 strictly keeping within the four comers of the ordi- 
 nance if I were to begin with the battle of four kings 
 against five, or again if I were to dechne to touch 
 any matter older than A. d. i 789. In short out of the 
 
22 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 very abundance of the Professor's fetters comes his 
 means of escape. As to my subjects, at least I am 
 free. But let no one fear that, because I am free, I am 
 likely to make any raids on the domains of other pro- 
 fessors of which they might reasonably complain. It 
 is one of the dearest wishes of my heart to see this 
 vain distinction where no real distinction is utterly 
 wiped away from the legislation of the University of 
 Oxford, or even to see such promising approaches 
 towards wiping it away which have been actually 
 made in the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge 
 there is now a tripos where, at the bidding of 
 common sense, in the interest of sound learning, it is 
 possible to take up Thucydides and Lambert of Herz- 
 feld side by side. All honour then to our illustrious 
 sister, and may we soon have the wisdom to follow in 
 the track which she has opened. I will not at present 
 enter with any fulness on a subject on which I trust 
 to have other opportunities of speaking at greater 
 detail. But I cannot help pointing out, now at the 
 very beginning, that this unnatural division into 
 " ancient " and " modern " hinders the great central 
 fact of European history, the growth and the abiding 
 of the power of Eome, from being ever set forth in all 
 the fulness of its unity. The strange confusions 
 which prevail in many minds with regard to the 
 Empire in East and West, the utter blank which the 
 whole subject is in many minds, come largely of this 
 piecemeal way of looking at things which are simple 
 enough if looked at as a whole, but which are 
 utterly meaningless when this and that fragment of 
 
THE EMPIRE. 23 
 
 the story is looked at apart from its fellows. No 
 man can ever vinderstand how truly the last Con- 
 stantine was the successor of the first, how truly 
 again the last Francis was the successor of the first 
 Charles, unless he has fuUy taken in in what sense 
 and through what stages Charles and Constantine 
 alike had stepped into the place of Gains Julius Csesar 
 Octavianus, consul, tribune, and pontifi" of the com- 
 monwealth of Eome. Or, look at the history of one 
 of the noblest of the provinces of that commonwealth, 
 of that illustrious island whose story is in one of its 
 brilliant times so closely interwoven with our own. 
 Look at Sicily, the meeting-place of the nations, the 
 battle-field of creeds and races, where the strife 
 between Aryan and Semitic man has been since 
 fought out in all its fulness. That wonderful cycle 
 of events loses all its historic life, if we look at one 
 fragment of it only ; the strife with the Phoenician and 
 the strife with the Saracen each loses half its mean- 
 ing if either is parted from the other; Timole6n can- 
 not hold his full historic place apart from Eoger, nor 
 can Roger hold his place apart from Timole6n. But 
 the mischief of this unnatural division where no real 
 division is is not confined to any one of the subjects 
 of University study ; it affects our whole system to 
 its very centre. We in the nineteenth century are 
 called on to do a work of the same kind as that which 
 was wrought by the scholars of the sixteenth century. 
 They brought to light a new learning, a learning 
 which seemed like the discovery of an elder world. 
 We have to put all worlds and all learning, old and 
 
24 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 new, past and present, into their due relations 
 towards one another. The sixteenth century found 
 out the life and value of certain stages of the history 
 and the languages of Greece and Italy ; it is for 
 the nineteenth to put those stages into their due 
 relation to other stages in the history and the lan- 
 guages both of those lands and of other lands. The 
 question is one which does not touch the study 
 of political history only; it touches no less the 
 study of language and the study of art. We 
 need here no "modern school," no "modern side;" 
 we need no school of so-called " modern " languages 
 apart from " ancient," we need no chair of so-called 
 " classical" archaeology apart from the archeeology of 
 other times. The warning that is now needed is a 
 general one, and one which closely touches the very 
 existence of Oxford or of any other University as a seat 
 either of really sound learning or of really liberal teach- 
 ing. Those studies which are the truest foundation of 
 all studies, studies without which we may as well shut 
 up our haUs and schools and lecture-rooms altogether, 
 studies which are misapplied only when it is forgotten 
 that they are only the foundation and not the whole 
 building, are daily threatened, daily mocked at, it may 
 be by men who, as has been happily said, sometimes 
 dissemble, it may be by the ignorant and presumptu- 
 ous who deem themselves philosophers, and who even 
 come to be so deemed by others. We ought to be 
 ready with our answer to the gainsayers, and, if we 
 think good, we may make ourselves ready with it. But 
 we shall never be ready with it as long as we remain 
 
"ANCIENT" AND "MODERN" LANGUAGES. 25 
 
 deaf to the teaching of the great discoveries of the 
 age, as long as we take no heed to the new life 
 thrown on all knowledge by the comparative method, 
 as long in short as we obstinately part asunder 
 "ancient" and "modern" history, "ancient" and 
 " modern " languages. We are told over and over 
 again that the time is wasted which we spend on the 
 teaching of what are called " dead " languages, that 
 the time is wasted which we spend on the political 
 communities of small physical extent in ages which 
 are far distant. Cavils like these are indeed only 
 the cavils of ignorance and shallowness, but, as the 
 world goes at present, they are cavils which need a 
 practical answer. And oui* answer wiU never be 
 so practical as it might be as long as we give an 
 advantage to the enemy by keeping up these 
 artificial barriers. We all, I trust, agree in holding 
 that there are no tongues more truly living, no 
 tongues which even now more deeply influence 
 the speech and thoughts of men, than those older 
 forms of the still abiding tongues of Greece and 
 Italy which the unlearned and unbelieving think 
 good to speak of as " dead.' If they are dead, 
 bury them ; or at least leave them as a matter of 
 curious study for those whose tastes may lead their 
 studies in that direction. It is surely because they 
 are not dead, because they are the most living and 
 practical of all tongues, that we hold that they 
 must still abide, as the foundation, as the corner- 
 stone, as the crowning of the edifice, as the centre 
 of all that is worthy of the name of culture or 
 
26 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 liberal education. But we make our ground less 
 strong than we should make it, we leave our 
 fortress more open to the assaults of ignorance, 
 if we part the elder from the younger, if we part 
 the parent from the children, if we fail to pro- 
 claim that our knowledge of any language is 
 imperfect, unless we know both whence words 
 come and whither they go. "Ancient languages," 
 "modern languages," Latin to be learned with 
 no regard to its later fruit of French — French 
 to be learned without regard to its parent stock 
 of Latin — such a cruel severance as this is indeed 
 to betray one of our strongest outworks into the 
 hands of the besiegers. If the sixteenth century 
 made such a severance, it was neither wonderful 
 nor blameworthy; but it is blameworthy indeed 
 if we keep it on in the fuller light of the nine- 
 teenth. And as with language, so with political 
 history. We shall never be able to make such 
 answer as we ought to make to cavils about " small 
 states," about "battles fought two thousand years 
 ago," unless we boldly write on our banner the 
 golden words of Arnold, to which I have referred 
 already, when he speaks of "what is falsely called 
 ancient history, the really modern history of Greece 
 and Eome." One might think that the Roman 
 Empire was big enough even for a declaimer 
 
 against " petty states ; " but we must take the 
 cavillers on their own ground ; we must proclaim 
 aloud that the history of those small states of a far 
 distant age is, as the history of small states of a 
 
rALU:E OF "ANCIENT" HISTORY. 27 
 
 far distant age, an essential part of the study of 
 man's progress, without which we shall never fully 
 understand the workings of greater states in later 
 times. We must proclaim that the real life of 
 the history of those times lies not in its separation 
 from the affairs of our own time, but in its close 
 connexion with them. But this we cannot do in 
 its fulness as long as we part asunder periods 
 of history each of which loses half its value if it 
 is looked at apart from the other. We cannot 
 make our full defence as long as we condemn so- 
 called " ancient " and so-called " modern " history 
 to be taken up in distinct schools as wholly un- 
 connected subjects, to be taught and lectured on 
 by teachers and professors who stand in no kind 
 of relation to one another. If we wish to keep | 
 our " ancient " history, our " ancient " languages, 
 as an essential part of any sound and liberal teach- 
 ing, we can do it only by letting the gainsayers 
 know that the falsely called " ancient " studies 
 are, as Arnold taught us forty years ago, the 
 most truly " modern " of all. 
 
 To me then the very title of a Professor of 
 "Modern" History is in itself a fetter. It is be 
 sure made one degree less hard to bear because no 
 attempt is made to define " modern " history, because 
 it doubtless has been felt that it was impossible to 
 define it. There is indeed one definition of "modern" 
 history which I would gladly accept ; there is one 
 point at which I would even be content to draw a 
 hard and fast fine between " ancient " and " modern." 
 
28 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 That point is one which is not quite so near to our 
 own day as the French Eevolntion nor yet quite so 
 far from it as the Call of Abraham. We may well 
 agree to draw a line between " ancient " and 
 " modern," if we hold our " modem " period to begin 
 with the first beginnings of the recorded history of 
 Aryan Europe, whether we place those beginnings at 
 the first Olympiad or carry them back to any earlier 
 time. There alone can we find a real starting-point ; 
 a line drawn at any later time is a mere artificial 
 and unnatural break. It is then that for us, for the 
 nations of Europe of our own day, the story of our- 
 selves and of our kinsfolk begins. It is the beginning 
 of our political being ; it is the beginning of tongues 
 kindred to our own, tongues which still happily 
 form the groundwork of all our studies. Then be- 
 gins that one great and unbroken drama which takes 
 in the long political history of European man, the 
 history of the Greek and the Italian, the history of 
 the Celt, the Teuton, and the Slave. By "modern " 
 history then I should understand our own history in 
 the widest sense, as distinguished from certain, 
 branches of history which are older than our own, 
 and from certain other branches which, though con- 
 temporary with our own, are not our own. We, 
 students of modern history, of the European history 
 of perhaps the last seven-and-twenty centuries, 
 should be among the first to welcome the vast 
 additions which our own days have made to the 
 knowledge of history which is truly ancient, of 
 languages which are truly dead. While we claim 
 
BEGINNING OF 'MODERN" HISTORY. 29 
 
 the records of Athenian archons and Koman consuls 
 as essentially parts of the same tale as the records of 
 Venetian doges and English kings, we welcome the 
 recovered records of the Accadian, the Assyrian, 
 and the Hittite, as materials for a high and worthy 
 study, but for a study which is not our own. The 
 two studies are closely connected ; each may give 
 good help to the other ; but Accadian history is 
 helpful to English history, not as Latin or Hellenic 
 history is helpful, but as anthropology, as palaeon- 
 tology, as geology — studies all of them which de- 
 serve plain Teutonic names — are constantly found 
 helpful. All these are helpful, indeed there is 
 hardly any branch of knowledge which is not helpful 
 to the true historian ; but they are helpful as distinct, 
 thotigh kindred, studies, not as parts of the same 
 study. There is then, beyond the first beginnings of 
 our "modern" history, a wide field of truly "ancient" 
 history, of history which does not directly influence 
 the political life of modern Europe, but which is 
 fully worthy of its place as a separate branch of 
 knowledge, with its distinct students, its distinct 
 teachers. And we, students and teachers of the 
 history of living Europe, must give a welcome yet 
 more brotherly to all that advances the knowledge 
 of those branches of history which are still living, 
 though not European. We do not fully understand 
 the history of the lands and nations which are our 
 own, unless we know at least their relations to the 
 lands, the nations, the tongues, the creeds, which 
 have supplied the men of Aryan Europe with their 
 
30 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 immediate neighbours and rivals. The tale of 
 Greece, the tale of Italy, brings us at almost every 
 page across the records of the Hebrew, the Phoeni- 
 cian, and the Arab. When in the palaces of Palermo 
 we see the letters traced from right to left, traced at 
 the bidding of Norman kings but by the hands of 
 Saracenic craftsmen, when we see the sadder sight 
 of legends in the same world-wide alphabet blotting 
 out the mosaics of Justinian in the most glorious of 
 Christian temples, we must indeed acknowledge that 
 the teaching of Arabia has truly a history of its own, 
 a history parallel to our own history, a history in- 
 tertwined with our own history, but still distinct 
 from it. Semitic history, Arabian history above all, 
 must have its distinct students and distinct teachers, 
 yet it stni is so closely connected with our own 
 studies that the votaries of either subject must at 
 least know the main outHnes of the other. The 
 history of the Phoenician and the Arab and of those 
 who have adopted the creed of the Arab, must be 
 known as the history of mighty and abiding rivals, 
 not as part of the history of our own home and of 
 our own folk. For this last we can acknowledge but 
 one boundary either in space or in time. It spreads 
 wherever men have spread themselves who have 
 been brought under the political, the moral, or the 
 religious influence of Eome. For its beginning we 
 may not seek at any time more recent than our first 
 glimpses of Home's own Hellenic teacher. 
 
 But in an imperfect world man must yield to 
 circumstances. Vain and mischievous as is the dis- 
 
THE FIFTH CENTURY A.D. 31 
 
 tinction, yet as long as it is formally acknowledged in 
 the University, as long as there are distinct schools, 
 distinct professors, of " ancient " and of " modern " 
 history, and as long as the accepted sphere of the 
 " ancient " professor takes in times much later than 
 the first Olympiad, a professor of " modern " history 
 must, if only under protest, try to put some meaning 
 upon his qualifying adjective, and to chalk out for 
 himself some special sphere which will not bring him 
 into any open clashing with his "ancient" colleagues. 
 And I think that a boundary may be drawn between 
 us which, better at least than some others, may serve 
 as a fair temporary shift till the whole arrangements 
 of the University as to the teaching of history and 
 language are thoroughly recast in accordance with 
 the advance of modern knowledge. The fifth cen- 
 tury of our sera, the period of the settlement of the 
 Teutonic nations within the Empire, is one of the 
 most marked periods in the history of the world. 
 It is of equal importance with the earlier period 
 which in some sort balances it, the second century 
 before our sera. The earlier time ruled that Eome 
 should be the head of Europe ; it ruled what form 
 should be taken by her dominion ; the later time 
 ruled what form her abiding influence should take in 
 days when her political power was cut short and in 
 many of her western provinces broken in pieces. 
 The division is of course open to the objection that, 
 in any philosophical view of the course of events, the 
 age which saw the first sack of Carthage and the age 
 which saw the first sack of Eome answer to one 
 
32 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 another and cann6t be parted asunder. That strong 
 objections may be taken to this as to any other point 
 of division is indeed the essence of my whole case ; 
 but, if a distinction must be drawn at some point, the 
 point at which I propose to draw it seems open to 
 fewer objections than most others. It is a real 
 starting-point ; it is the time that saw the planting 
 of the germs of the great nations of Western Europe, 
 the age which saw the settlement of the Goth in 
 Spain, of the Burgundian and the Frank in Gaul, of 
 the Angle and the Saxon in Britain. I may admit 
 a secondary sense in which that age may be called 
 the beginning of "modern" history, if only it is 
 allowed that "ancient" history goes on alongside of 
 it for a thousand years. That thousand years the 
 professors of the two divisions will have in common, 
 but they wiU look at them from different points of 
 view. The "ancient" professor will look at them 
 with the eyes of one whose home is fixed within the 
 walls, first of the elder and then of the younger 
 Rome. His " modern " colleague will look at it with 
 the eyes of the younger nations, who have found 
 themselves dwellings on Koman soil, who in becom- 
 ing conquerors have become disciples, who deem it 
 their highest boast to deck their princes with the 
 ensigns and the titles of the power whose political 
 greatness they have overthrown. In other words, 
 a Professor of Modern History, while he protests 
 against the name, will stiU have a definite and 
 intelligible function if he be understood to be a 
 professor of the history of the Teutonic and Slavonic 
 
R.iNGE OF THE "MODERN" PROFESSOR. 33 
 
 nations. He will do well to fix his ordinary limit at 
 the point when Teutonic wandering changes into 
 Teutonic settlement. Yet he may be forgiven if he 
 is sometimes tempted to look back with yearning to 
 that great day in the history of our race, in the 
 history of the whole world, when it was ruled by the 
 Teutoburg wood that there should be a free Germany 
 to plant a free England, and a free England to plant 
 a free America. Nay, he may even sometimes cast 
 a backward glance to that premature wandering of 
 our kinsfolk which was checked by the arm of the 
 yeoman of Arpinum, when the eagle of Eome, the 
 eagle of Marius, first spread her wings over the field 
 of Aquae Sextiee. All that is purely Greek, all that 
 is purely Eoman, he will school himself to forego ; 
 the historian of Teutonic nations and Teutonic laws 
 cannot afford wholly to shut up his Tacitus, his 
 Strabo, and his Csesar ; but he must turn away, with 
 however heavy a heart, from the widest and deepest 
 teaching that ever came from the pen of one who set 
 down the records of deeds in which he himself had 
 played his part. To his " ancient " colleague he 
 must give up the man of varied experience and 
 varied thought, the man who looked at his own age 
 with the eyes of an historian of all ages, the man 
 who bore the urn of Philopoim^n and who stood 
 beside the flames of Carthage, Polybios surveyor and 
 teacher of the world. 
 
 And now for a word as to the immediate choice 
 and treatment of subjects and texts among all that 
 fill the ages since the tremendous sound of the Gothic 
 
34 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 trumpet was heard within the Salarian gate. Till 
 our whole system is recast, the best thing that can 
 be done for sound learning in the department in 
 which I am called to give my help will be to fix as 
 far as may be the energies of those who devote 
 themselves to the so-called "modern" school on those 
 periods which can be treated most nearly after the 
 sound fashion of the old school oiLiterse Humaniores. 
 That school did not make a man a philosopher, a 
 philologer, or an historian, but it gave him the best 
 possible start towards making himself any one of the 
 three. In my long past character of Examiner in 
 the School of Modern History, I always noticed the 
 great advantage enjoyed by those who had gone 
 through the discipline of the elder school, not merely 
 in the amount of knowledge that they brought with 
 them, but in the habits of mind which they had 
 gained, habits which enabled them to do justice to 
 later periods as well as to earlier. Among the four- 
 teen centuries which we have just taken as our 
 special heritage, some times adapt themselves far 
 better than others to the acquisition of sound and 
 scholar-like habits of thought and judgement. I can 
 conceive nothing more utterly opposed to sound 
 learning, nothing which more thoroughly deserves 
 the name of building without a foundation, than the 
 fashion of rushing off at once to the most recent 
 times, to controversial times, to times for which 
 the original authorities are so endless that, for 
 ordinary University study, it comes to the same 
 thing as having no original authorities at all. For 
 
ADVANTAGES OF THE EARLIER PERIODS. 35 
 
 it is quite certain that in nearly every case the pro- 
 fessed study of very modern times will mean some- 
 thing other than the real and thorough study of 
 original authorities. The last recorded event in the 
 newspapers is indeed part of the history of the world. 
 It may be, and it should be, studied in a truly his- 
 toric spirit. We who have seen the union of Ger- 
 many and Italy, who have seen the new birth of the 
 nations of south-eastern Europe, have lived in an age 
 almost as rich in great events and great changes as the 
 age of Polybios or the age of Procopius. Only there 
 is this objection to making our own age a direct sub- 
 ject of University study that there is as yet no 
 Polybios or Procopius in whom to study it. Indeed 
 the whole range of the last two or three centuries of 
 European history is surely far better suited for 
 private study, for the wider professorial teaching, 
 than it is to be made a direct subject of enforced 
 work to be tested by examination. Knowledge of 
 those times may well be no less solid in itself than 
 knowledge of any earlier time ; but solid know- 
 ledge of them is not likely to be reached early in life, 
 nor can it be so easily tested by examination as 
 knowledge of earlier times. The excessive devotion 
 to very modem periods which seems to have set in 
 within the last ten years or so seems to me to be an 
 evil in every way. It widens the partition which it 
 should be our first work to break down ; it is more 
 likely than the study of earlier times to gender to 
 shallowness and mere talk ; it savours of the notion 
 which was afloat a generation back that it was well 
 
 D 2 
 
36 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 to bring in " modern. " history as an " easier " study 
 than the severe labours of the elder school. As far as 
 I may have any influence, official or personal, that 
 influence will be given to attempting to show that 
 " modern " history is at least no more easy than 
 " ancient." I shall do all that in me lies to dis- 
 courage the delusive study of what are called " sub- 
 jects " and " periods," and to do all that one man can 
 do to bring back the sound and old-fashioned study 
 of " books." The one foundation of learning is the 
 mastery of original texts. That must come first ; 
 there is much for the student himself, much for the 
 tutor and the professor, to add in the way of com- 
 ment and illustration and comparison of text with 
 text. But knowledge of a man's books is the be- 
 ginning, the foxmdation, the absolutely needful thing, 
 without which all the rest is vanity. The great 
 difficulty is to persuade people that there really are 
 original authorities for what are called " mediaeval " 
 times, exactly in the same way that it is allowed that 
 there are original authorities for what are called 
 "classical" times. I remember well how hard a 
 saying this seemed in the days when "modern" 
 history was brought in as something which might be 
 learned in modern Engfish and French books that 
 were pleasant to read, and needed no painful mastery 
 of writings in the Greek and Latin tongues — the yet 
 more terrible Old-French and Old-English were as yet 
 hardly thought of. By this time some at least 
 have found out that both Western and Eastern 
 Europe can show no lack of original writers for 
 
STUDY OF BOOKS. 37 
 
 the history of days since the fifth century, writers 
 who in their way deserve as much to be studied as 
 the original authorities of earlier days. By this 
 time it may not sound wholly a paradox to say that 
 the two cannot be studied so profitably as when they 
 are studied side by side, that the mind is far more 
 widened, that the historic judgement is far more 
 strengthened, by the study of the two side by side 
 than by the study of either singly. 
 
 It is now high time that I should tell you in what 
 way I propose to carry on the work which I have 
 this day begun, what shape I mean to give to my 
 first official contribution to historical learning. My 
 notion is, if I find support enough in the University 
 to carry out the scheme, to keep going, through at 
 least part of the year, two distinct coiu"ses of lectures 
 of different kinds. One course may well consist of 
 lectures of a more general kind, written or spoken, 
 lectures which I venture to hope may be interesting 
 and profitable even to those who have not specially 
 given themselves to minute historical study. Along- 
 side of these I hope I may find encouragement enough 
 to enable me to carry on courses of lectures of a more 
 minute kind on the texts of original writers. These 
 wUl be for special students of history, and to them I 
 would bid any, of whatever standing, who may be 
 willing to try whether it is not possible to work in. 
 the same solid and thorough way at a writer in the 
 Greek or Latin of a later age as it confessedly is to 
 work at writers in the earlier forms of the same 
 tongues. In the present term I propose, for the 
 
38 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 more general course, to give a series of lectures 
 on the methods of historical study j in another term 
 I hope to follow this up with a general course on the 
 great periods of history. After these introductory 
 courses I trust to go on with others of a more special 
 kind, on the history of our own land, of the Empire 
 in East and West, of Sicily, of any other part of our 
 great subject which may be found expedient. As 
 the first stage in the more minute series, I propose 
 to begin during the present term with the Frankish 
 History of Gregory of Tours. He is, I find, the 
 earliest writer recommended for candidates in the 
 School of Modern History. I fear that he is not one 
 of those who are most commonly taken up. I was 
 tempted to begin with some earlier writers, with 
 some who not only recorded the events of the fifth 
 century, but who actually lived in it. Above aU; 
 I was tempted to begin with Sidonius ApoUinaris, 
 courtier, bishop, panegyrist, and saint. But the 
 writings of Sidonius, precious as they are as illustra- 
 tions of history, are not themselves in strictness 
 historical writings. And if we are to make any 
 distinction, even under protest, we must reckon the 
 purely Eoman Sidonius among the latest of ancient 
 writers, while Gregory, not Frankish certainly, but 
 yet not wholly Eoman, may be fairly looked on as 
 opening the mediaeval series. With him then I will 
 begin. I choose him for his own sake, and I choose 
 him for a further motive. When we have well 
 seen what the Frankish Conquest of Gaul was, 
 we shall be better able to understand by contrast 
 
fyREGORY OF TOURS. 39 
 
 the true nature of the English Conquest of 
 Britain. 
 
 I have chalked out a scheme for the steady work 
 
 of at least a year. How and how far that scheme 
 
 can be carried out dejoends partly on the Professor 
 
 himself, partly on the University at large. My 
 
 object will be gained, my reward will be won, if 
 
 I can succeed in bringing any considerable number 
 
 of members of the University, of whatever standing, 
 
 to join with me in the study of those ages which 
 
 begin with the settlement of our own and of kindred 
 
 races in the lands which some of them still hold, as 
 
 a subject no less worthy than the study of the ages 
 
 that went before them, as a study which cannot be 
 
 worthily followed if it is kept wholly apart from the 
 
 study of the ages which went before them. To 
 
 fellowship with me in that attempt I bid any who 
 
 feel a call to learning as an object to be sought for 
 
 its own sake, and who feel a special call to research 
 
 in that particular branch of learning. But remember 
 
 that it is to the pursuit of learning for its own sake 
 
 that I would call them. I call them to the pursuit 
 
 of knowledge, the pursuit of truth, to that learning 
 
 which is said to be better than house and land, but 
 
 which perhaps is not the path best adapted for the 
 
 winning of house and land. And if it is better 
 
 than house and land, it is also, I presume, better 
 
 than classes and fellowships, though I presume also 
 
 that it will be found to be at least not a hindrance to 
 
 the winning of classes and fellowships. I only give 
 
 the warning that my work here will have no im- 
 
40 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 mediate reference to the winning of classes and 
 fellowships. I am put here to do what can be done 
 .by one man who cannot have many years to do it in, 
 
 Jfor the promotion of historic truth for its own sake. 
 
 ' Or, if there is any object beyond, higher than the 
 search after truth for its own sake, it will be the 
 hope that our studies of the past may be found to 
 have after all their use in the living present, that 
 we may at least not play our part the worse in the 
 public Hfe of our own day if we carry about us a 
 clear knowledge of those earlier forms of public lifes 
 out of which our own has grown. We shall surely 
 not be the less at home in our own generation, if we 
 bear in mind that we are the heirs and scholars of 
 the generations that went before us, if we now and 
 then stop in our own course to thank the memory of 
 those without whom our own course could not have 
 been run, if we are ready, at every fitting moment, to 
 " praise famous men and our fathers that begat us." 
 
THE METHODS OE HISTOEICAL STUDY. 
 
LEOTUEE I. 
 
 HISTOEY AND ITS KINDEED STUDIES. 
 
 I SAID somewhat in my Inavigural Lecture, it is not 
 unlikely that I may find something to say in future 
 lectures, on the difficulty of defining the exact range 
 of our subject as implied in the title of the chair 
 in which I am placed. It is truly hard to define 
 "modern" history; in the sense indeed in which the 
 phrase is commonly used, it is impossible to define it, 
 because there is really nothing with any distinctive 
 being of its own to define. But we may throw 
 our difficulty further back ; if it is hard to define 
 "modern" history, it is equally hard, though not 
 for the same reason, to define history at all. It is 
 hard to draw the line between history in the stricter 
 sense, history such as is the business of my own 
 chair and of my brethren of the other chairs of 
 history, and a crowd of other subjects for whose help 
 historical research is always asking, and which in 
 their turn are constantly asking for the help of his- 
 torical research. It is indeed hard to conceive any 
 kind of knowledge that is not purely abstract, 
 any kind of knowledge which deals in any way 
 with the affairs of men, with which the historian 
 Inay not do wisely to enter into an alliance. It need 
 not be an alliance offensive and defensive, but it 
 may with great advantage be an alliance for mutual 
 
■A HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 ociety, help, and comfort. The historical inquirer 
 vill feel so firm a conviction that his neighbours 
 vill often be useful to him, he will entertain so 
 trong a suspicion that he may often be useful to 
 lis neighbours, that he wiU not always be anxious 
 draw any very hard and fast line between his 
 erritories and theirs. There must be very few 
 tudies which may not ever and anon, in some 
 ncidental way, throw light on historical questions. 
 There are some indeed which I fancy hardly can. 
 ^ great mathematician among ourselves is said to 
 lave made a discovery the great beauty of which was 
 hat it could never be of the slightest use to any- 
 >ody. Therein undoubtedly spoke the truest scientific 
 pirit, that genuine love of knowledge for its own 
 ake from which I trust that we too are not wholly 
 hut out. Still I feel sure that, whatever that dis- 
 overy was, it will never give me the sHghtest help 
 owards any of my lectures from this chair. The fact 
 hat it never could be of any use to anybody at once 
 •uts it out of aU fellowship with a branch of study 
 s'hich we fondly hope may be of great use to many 
 leople. If I am right in holding that history is past 
 lolitics and that politics are present hist ory~that wJi ichr 
 an never be of any use to anybody would seem to be 
 luite shut out from our range. But^tEere~^fe few 
 iranches of knowledge, few forms of literature, few 
 orms of art, of which their own masters would thus, 
 nth. a kind of triumph, proclaim the utter useless- 
 ess. And any branch which deals in any way with 
 he affairs of mankind must be accepted by the 
 
INCIDENTAL HELPS TO HISTORY. 45 
 
 historical student as at least potentially useful for 
 his own purposes. The historian may have inci- 
 dentally to deal with any subject whatever, and the 
 more branches of knowledge he is master of the 
 better prepared he is for his own work. But we 
 must make a distinction between branches of know- 
 ledge which may help him incidentally, but which 
 will help him only incidentally, and other branches 
 which stand in more direct connexion with his own 
 subject. For instance, the science of chemistry may 
 incidentally explain some point in an historical 
 narrative which would otherwise be obscure ; the 
 historical student who is also a chemist will clearly 
 have an advantage over one who is not. Still this 
 kind of help from a pursuit of a wholly different 
 kind is so purely incidental that we could hardly 
 make it even a counsel of perfection to the historian 
 to make himself an accomplished chemist on the 
 chance of such occasion. It will commonly be enough 
 to consult such a chemist whenever the case arises. 
 It is otherwise with geology, and with a whole 
 group of sciences which have a close connexion with 
 geology. The historian will clearly do his own 
 regular work better for being master of them. The 
 method of study which is followed in those sciences has 
 much in common with his own, and its matter will 
 give him far more than merely incidental help. The 
 physical construction of any country is no small part 
 of its history; it is the key to not a little in the 
 political destiny of the land and its folk. I know few 
 things more instructive than a look at Mr. Dawkins' 
 
[6 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 nap of what we may call Eskimo Europe. We feel 
 it once that the European history which we have 
 master could never have happened in such an 
 Europe as that. There was no Greece, no Italy, no 
 Denmark, no Netherlands, no Britain, The gulfs 
 md straits and' islands and peninsulas which have 
 nade Europe other than Africa and Asia were 
 lot yet. The Mediterranean was not yet; two 
 luge lakes unconnected with one another and with 
 ;he Ocean could have given no scope for the life 
 )f Sidon and Carthage, of MiMtos, Massalia, and 
 Athens. The physical revolution which made the 
 ife of Greece possible, which called into being so 
 nany cradles of freedom on their islands, their pro- 
 nontories, their inland valleys, must be set down as 
 nore than a physical change ; it was the greatest and 
 ;he most healthful of moral and political changes. 
 So, as 1 have often said and as others have doubtless 
 jften said before me, the geological process which 
 jailed into being those hills by the Tiber, lower in 
 lieight, nearer to each other, than the other hills of 
 Latium, fixed the history of the world for ever. For 
 that process made the life of Eome possible ; it 
 nade the rule of Rome and all that came of that 
 [•ule possible ; the world could never have found its 
 mistress on the single hill of Tusculum, apart alike 
 Prom the sea and from the yellow river. The history 
 3f man is bound up in no slight measure with the 
 history of man's dwelling-place, and we hail those 
 who expound to us the history of man's dweUing- 
 place, not merely as incidental helpers, but as abiding 
 
HISTORY AND GEOLOGY. 47 
 
 fellow-workers. And those who go on to tell us of 
 the older occupiers of the dwelling-place, of races of 
 beasts or of men which have vanished from the earth, 
 or whose domain upon the earth has been cut short, 
 come yet nearer to our subject than those who con^ 
 cern themselves with the dwelling-place only. The 
 retreat of the Hon from Mendip and from Nemea is 
 at least as much a part of the tale of Britain and of 
 Hellas as the retreat of those earlier races of men 
 which held the soil of Britain and of Hellas before 
 they came who were to give their soil a place among 
 historic lands. The close connexion which used to 
 be held to exist between those subjects and ours is 
 shown in the name which, from the days of Pliny 
 onwards, bound them together in one. In my 
 younger days we still read our books of " Natural 
 History," and I would not even blame the arrange- 
 ments of the Scottish University which united 
 " Natural and Civil History " under a single chair. 
 The practical connexion which still exists between 
 them is shown by the ease with which the students 
 of those subjects pass to the study of ours. I have 
 known at least two mien of learning — and where I 
 have known two there are doubtless others whom I 
 do not know — whose studies began with the earth 
 itself, and who thence steadily worked up their way, 
 by an easy and natural ladder, through the several 
 stages of extinct animal life, of existing animal life, 
 of primitive and early man, to our own study of man 
 as a political being. They made their way steadily 
 up from lifeless matter to man as he has wrought 
 
48 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 the democracy of Athens and the Empire of Eome, 
 the lawful kingship of an elder England and the 
 federal union of a younger. It is indeed hard to 
 draw the line between the study of the rock of 
 Ath^n^ itself and the study of all of which the rock 
 of Ath6n6 is the symbol. All the branches of know- 
 ledge of which I have been speaking, if not actually 
 branches of our study, are its very closest allies. To 
 my mind they are at least as near, to us, -students_a^ 
 we~are before all things of the political life of Aryan 
 man, as are those branches of man's recorded history 
 which throw no light on that political life. The 
 pursuits of which I have been speaking, geology and 
 its kindred studies, have always seemed to me to be 
 quite wrongly placed, when they are grouped far 
 away from us, alongside of branches of knowledge 
 which depend mainly on experiment or on theory. 
 Like political history, their matter is the knowledge 
 of facts drawn from records. The only difference is 
 in the nature of the facts, in the nature of the records. 
 And the intermediate branches, opening to us facts 
 of so many kinds, recorded in so many ways, are 
 quite enough to fill up the seeming gap between the 
 two. 
 
 These then are kindred studies, distinct, though 
 kindred. Either can stand apart, though either gains 
 much by its connexion with the other. Of some of 
 them indeed we must confess that we have more 
 need than they have of us. A man may make out 
 the geological history of a country quite thoroughly 
 for purely geological purposes, without ever asking 
 
SATELLITES OF HISTORY. 49 
 
 "what deeds of man were in after days wrought on its 
 soil, or indeed whether man ever set foot on its soil at 
 all. When we come to hiiman life — ^I should be 
 almost inclined to add, when we come to existing 
 animal life — the temptation must surely be great to 
 go on from the ruder beginnings of the life and 
 works of man to those higher developements of them 
 which grow into art, literature, political history 
 itself. That the temptation is great I know from 
 the experience of those who have entered our own 
 hearth and home by that path. Still those studies 
 are distinct from ours, and they have objects apart 
 from ours. They are fully worthy of study for their 
 own sake, even if they never come into contact with 
 history at all. Alongside of them is a whole crowd 
 of other pursuits which it is impossible in this way 
 to separate from history. There are not a few 
 branches of knowledge which we may call satellites 
 of history ; they are studies whose results are most 
 precious to the historian, but which, in themselves, 
 apart from their use to the historian, seem not 
 to rise above that kind of curious interest which 
 may be called forth by any inquiry to which a 
 man gives his mind. The study of coins and 
 weapons and antiquities of every kind, the study 
 of palaeography as a special branch of knowledge 
 as distinguished from the study of inscriptions 
 directly as records of facts, the study of genealogy, 
 nay even the self-styled science of heraldry, each has 
 its place in the comitatus of our Lady Klei6, and the 
 place of each is useful and honourable as long as that 
 
 E 
 
50 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 place is kept. All are branches of history ; looked 
 on as branches of history, they all surely rise in 
 dignity ; looked at each alone by itself without 
 reference to its fellows and to the centre of all, they 
 sink into little more than matters of curiosity. None 
 of these secondary branches of history has thrown 
 more and more precious light on the main subject 
 than the study of coins ; but the mere gathering of 
 the coins themselves, apart from the facts which the 
 coins prove or illustrate, hardly rises above the 
 gathering of postage-stamps, and in ages to come the 
 postage-stamps will prove something as well as the 
 coins. When it comes to art in the higher sense, to 
 painting, sculpture, architecture, we have reached sub- 
 jects which from one side are undoubtedly branches 
 of history, while from another side they claim 
 the rank of distinct branches of knowledge. They 
 not only illustrate history, but are essential parts of 
 history ; still they have a value of their own apart 
 from their strictly historical value. A statue, a 
 painting, a building, has an artistic value in itself, 
 even if we have no knowledge of its date or author; 
 a coin, a vase, a weapon or implement of any kind, is 
 nothing apart from its historical value, except so far 
 as painting or sculpture or some other form of art 
 may claim it as belonging to its own province. 
 The architectural works of any nation are among the 
 most important of its monuments ; they are among 
 those which throw the most valuable light on its 
 history; one side of them is indeed imperfectly 
 understood without the history of the folk that 
 
NUMISMATICS AND GEOGRAPHY. 51 
 
 reared them. Yet architecture has another side 
 
 distinct from its historical side, while numismatics, 
 
 purely as numismatics, without reference to either 
 
 history or art, become simply the hobby of a collector. 
 
 ' So again to the historical inquirer geography, as 
 
 distinguished from geology, may well seem to be 
 
 part and parcel of his own subject. Without 
 
 political geography history has no being; or more 
 
 truly, political geography, looked at simply in that 
 
 special aspect, is simply one essential part of history. 
 
 But political geography implies physical geography, 
 
 and physical geography is parted by a very narrow line 
 
 from geology, and we are thus again brought within 
 
 the range of those subjects which are closely akin 
 
 to history but which are stUl distinct. Geography and 
 
 chronologj^Jiaye been called the two eyes of history, 
 
 and assuredly without them history would be blind 
 
 work indeed. But the two do not stand in exactly 
 
 the same relation to the study which they in this sort 
 
 j enlighten. Chronology has to some extent its own 
 
 I method, and its perfect mastery implies a lore of its 
 
 ' own of which the student of strictly political history 
 
 has no direct need. Yet it is simply and purely 
 
 a branch of history; except to make history clearer 
 
 by putting events in their due order and distance 
 
 from each other, it seems to have no object or 
 
 meaning. Geography is more like the various forms 
 
 of art ; with one side that is strictly and purely 
 
 historical, it has another which stands apart. It is 
 
 plain that there is such a thing as a strictly 
 
 geographical taste, that it is possible to take interest 
 
 E 2 
 
52 HISTOBY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 in geography for its own sake, whether it has any 
 historical reference or not. To the strictly geo- 
 graphical inquirer a land where nothing is known to 
 have happened may be as attractive as Greece or 
 Gaul. But it is hard to conceive chronology as 
 studied without some reference, even if an unconscious 
 one, to the advancement of historical knowledge. 
 
 Of some of these subjects and of their relations to 
 history and to one another I may have something to 
 say in future lectures. The rest of the present 
 lecture I wish to give to some remarks on two of the 
 kindred subjects of history which are of even greater 
 importance than any which we have named, whether 
 in themselves or as holding a place among the 
 studies of our University. They are two studies 
 whose bearing on one another is comparatively rare 
 and indirect, while both of them stand in the closest 
 relation to those historical studies which in a manner 
 stand between them. It is only incidentally that the 
 study of language and the history of law do much to 
 illustrate one another. It may often be well for the 
 lawyer to learn of the phUologer the original force of 
 some word which he uses in a special sense, as a 
 technical term of his own art. And the way in 
 which words come to be used as technical terms of 
 the lawyer's art wOl often supply the phUologer with 
 some of his most apt illustrations of the way in which 
 words drop off old meanings and take to themselves 
 new ones. But it is only incidentally that the two 
 studies illustrate one another ; the main body, so to 
 speak, of each remains quite distinct from the other. 
 
LAW AND LANGUAGE. 53 
 
 But it is impossible either to conceive law and lan- 
 "— ^age-goiTTg on'witliout reference to histoiy, or to 
 li conceive history going on withaut reference to law 
 and language. The connexion is constant; it is 
 intimate ; it is involved in the nature of the several 
 subjects. But it is only of late years that the con- 
 nexion of history with either subject has become so 
 ' clear and so intimate. It is wholly owing to the 
 great discoveries of our own time that either history 
 itself or its two great allies on either side has been 
 made worthy of the place which they all now hold. 
 Law has ceased to be an empirical trade ; language has 
 ceased to be, sometimes an empirical trade, sometimes 
 an elegant amusement; and both have taken their 
 place among the sciences. They have risen as his- 
 tory has risen ; it is hard to say whether, in actual 
 amount, history owes most to them or they most to 
 history. But in idea it is law and language which 
 owe their scientific character to their connexion with 
 history ; history does not owe its scientific character 
 to its connexion with law and language. 
 
 On the historical, in other words, the comparative, 
 ■ study of language in the wider sense it is not for me 
 to enlarge. But it is surely the greatest of the many 
 great discoveries of this century, or more truly of the 
 century which went before it. It is only a few 
 branches of that wide and wonderful subject which 
 directly touches the business of the chair of Modem 
 History. But those few branches touch the business 
 of that chair very directly indeed. The first question 
 which I am always inclined to ask, in reading the 
 
54 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 history of any people, and one to which I often find 
 it very hard to get an answer, is. What language did 
 they speak 1 It is the question which goes further 
 than any other one question towards giving us an 
 idea of what we call the nationality of a people. It 
 is a question which comes before the questions that 
 must soon follow, about their mode of warfare, their 
 laws, their creed, their general condition, political, 
 religious, and moral. But it is a question to which 
 it is often hard to find an answer, because we have 
 commonly to put up with indirect and incidental 
 evidence. It is but seldom that those who record a 
 discourse or a dialogue think it needful to tell us in 
 what language that discourse or dialogue was carried 
 on. When only one tongue is spoken in a country, 
 that tongue is of course taken for granted as the 
 tongue of all that is said. When two or three lan- 
 guages are spoken in a country, we have a better 
 chance of some direct mention of them. But even in 
 this case it often happens that each language has its 
 own particular range within which it is almost as 
 much a matter of course as the one language is when 
 one only is used. Thus we know that, in the latter 
 half of the twelfth century, Latin, French, and Eng- 
 lish were all familiarly spoken in England. It is 
 said of particular men, as of Bishop Gilbert Foliot, 
 that they were eloquent in all three. Yet it is the 
 rarest thing for us to be told which of the three 
 Gilbert Foliot or any other man spoke at any par- 
 ticular moment. We are left to guess from the cir- 
 cumstances of the speaker and from the class of people 
 
LANGUAGE. 55 
 
 to whom he is speaking. So again, in the fifth 
 century, Latin — at least Roman — and the Frankish 
 form of German must both have been habitually 
 spoken side by side over a large part of Gaul. We 
 are constantly tempted to ask, In vs^hat tongue did 
 Eoman bishops and Frankish kings speak to one 
 another 1 And this last question leads us to a fact 
 most important for our present purpose. Whatever 
 may have been the state of things while the two 
 languages were spoken side by side, we know what 
 was the result some ages later, when one of those 
 tongues had, under the influence of the other, grown 
 into what we may for practical purposes call a third 
 tongue different from either. Now I was reading not 
 long ago in a discourse by a master in his own branch 
 of knowledge, in nothing short of Lord Eayleigh's 
 opening discourse to the British Association at Mont- 
 real, a proposal, one not wholly new, to substitute, in 
 some cases, the study of French and German for the 
 study of Latin and Greek. This proposal could be 
 made only in utter forgetfulness of what the scientific 
 study of language is. No doubt it is true enough 
 that there are cases in which a lad who is dull at 
 his Latin and Greek grammar may easily be taught 
 to chatter French, as he might just as easily be 
 taught to chatter Greek, if Greek were in the same 
 sort set before him as matter for chattering. But 
 this is not aU ; we are told something very different 
 from this undoubted fact. We are told that French 
 and German might be made as useful for the dis- 
 cipline of the mind as Latin and Greek. Now it is 
 
56 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 plain to every one who knows anything of the rela- 
 tions of languages that German in this matter stands 
 on a wholly different ground from French ; each lan- 
 guage is instructive and profitable in its own way, 
 but in quite different ways. I will here speak of 
 French only. I would say here in the matter of 
 language, as I have already said in the matter of 
 political history, Break down the middle way of par- 
 tition that is against us, and proclaim the unity of 
 our studies in both branches alike. I would ask the 
 old-fashioned tutor or schoolmaster, I would ask the 
 innovating natural philosopher, how the one would 
 teach Latin without French and the other teach 
 French without Latin, so as to form any real dis- 
 cipline. The one no doubt may turn out an elegant 
 scholar of a by -gone type, able to make elegiacs and 
 quote tags of Horace a great deal faster than the 
 historical philologer can. The other no dotibt may 
 turn out a practical man of business or society who 
 can talk the latest form of polite French with a 
 gHbness which may astound the historical philologer. 
 Of these two faculties the latter is undoubtedly a 
 valuable practical gift, and the other may be an 
 elegant accompHshment. But for discipline of the 
 mind we miist go somewhat deeper than either. If 
 we are to study either Latin or French in any scien- 
 tific, in any historical, way, in any way that is likely 
 to give a discipline to the mind, we must study 
 them, not as rival tongues, but as earlier and later 
 stages of the same tongue. Our study of Latin is 
 sadly cut short, if we do not look on to see how our 
 
LATIN AND FRENCH. 57 
 
 Latin passes away into French and the other Eomance 
 languages. And it is no study of French at all — it 
 is mere empirical building without a foundation — if 
 we do not look back to see how our French had its 
 beginning in the Latin — at least the Roman — tongue 
 which, for purposes of ordinary speech, lost itself in it. 
 He who has mastered the process by which Latin 
 changed into French or any other Eomance language — 
 though French is in some points the most instructive 
 of all — has not only gained a mass of most curious 
 and interesting knowledge, he has gone through a dis- 
 cipUne of the mind which is surely to be called scien- 
 tific. He has gone through a profitable practice in 
 the art of making true analogies and rejecting false 
 ones. He has learned to reduce certain phsenomena 
 which might at first seem capricious to rules not 
 quite so certain, to be sure, as those of the geometer, 
 but surely as certain as those inferences of daily life 
 by which we direct our steps in public and private 
 affairs. The probability that, in a word strictly and 
 purely French — French within the needful bounds 
 both of time and place — Latin c before a will change 
 into French ch is not quite so certain as the eternal 
 truth that every triangle will have its angles equal 
 to two right angles, but it is surely as certain as the 
 reasonable expectation, grounded on long experience, 
 that the public creditor will receive his next half- 
 year's dividends on his investments in the public 
 funds. 
 
 Now wherein lies the difference between a scientific 
 and an empirical treatment of language, between wild 
 
58 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 guesses at the origin and relations of words and a cer- 
 tainty as to their origin and relations second only to 
 the certainty of the mathematician 1 It lies surely 
 in the presence or absence of the historical treatment 
 of language. By this I do not mean merely the light 
 which is thrown on the history of language by actual 
 records ; I mean a historical method of treatment, 
 whether with or without records. Much may be done 
 without records which is truly historical in its method 
 and spirit. Among the masters of pr»-historic history, 
 the geologist fixes without records that such a forma- 
 tion is older than another. The palaeontologist fixes 
 without records that such a species of extinct animal 
 is older than another. And, to come within the range 
 of history itself, the architectural antiquary could, 
 without records, without knowledge of the succession 
 of styles, arrange the parts of a building in their 
 right order by the evidence of the construction only. 
 So it is with the history of institutions. A man 
 used to historical research, but who knew nothing of 
 Roman history except that one functionary was 
 called an interred, another a rex sacrorum, that the 
 house of a third was called the regia and that a feast 
 was kept called the regifugium, would be able to 
 infer, with a certainty second only to that of the 
 geometer, that there had been a time when the 
 Roman state had real kings. In cases of this latter 
 kind, though a soimd historical inference may 
 be made without records, yet records step in, 
 not only to confirm the inference, but to make it 
 more definite and minute. The geologist and the 
 
WITNESS OF LANGUAGE. 59 
 
 palaeontologist need no records ; their time cannot 
 be measured by kings or consuls ; but their inferences 
 are historical none the less. So it is with language. 
 Let us suppose a philologer, practised in his art, but 
 to whom Latin and French were as unknown as the 
 tongues of Central Asia are to most of us. If the 
 phaenomena of those languages were laid before him 
 in all their fulness as phaenomena of language, but 
 without dates, without names of countries or nations, 
 he would still be able to put those phaenomena in 
 their proper order ; he would be able to arrange in their 
 due succession the stages by which the later forms of 
 the language grew out of the earlier. He would be 
 able of himself to report the true relation of language 
 B to language A-; what records only can tell him is 
 what are the names of the languages concerned, what 
 were the nations that spoke them, when, where, and 
 how did the events take place which caused those 
 languages to come into the relation in which he finds 
 them. Leaving then the geologist and the palaeontolo- 
 gist, who can get without records all the I'ght that is 
 to be thrown upon their subject, it is plain that the 
 other three inquirers, the student of architecture, 
 the student of institutions, the student of language, 
 though they may make sound historic inferences 
 by their unaided skill, can never by their unaided 
 skill, without the help of history in the narrower sense, 
 without the help of records, reach to the same com- 
 plete and minute knowledge of their own subjects 
 which they can reach with their help. 
 
 I say this, because in two of the cases of which T 
 
60 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 have spoken it is hardly needful to be said. The 
 studies of the architectural and the constitutional 
 antiquary are in truth simply branches of history. An 
 inquirer in either of those subjects is unusually lucky 
 if he finds all that he wishes to know, all that he 
 reasonably infers, set down anywhere in so many 
 words ; but it is perfectly possible that every detail 
 may be so set down. But by far the greater part of 
 the discoveries and inferences of the philologer are of 
 such a kind that they cannot be put on record till 
 they are put on record by himself. The philologer 
 notices that, in the change from Latin to French, 
 c before a is turned into ch ; but it is certain that no 
 one in the age of transition itself would be likely to 
 record when and why men changed their utterance 
 from campus to champs and champ. The philologer is 
 thus in a stricter sense a discoverer than the student 
 of antiquities or of constitutions ever can be. In 
 short we have reached an essential point of difference 
 between the science of language and such studies as 
 the historical study of buildings. By this I mean the 
 study of the buildings themselves, a study distinct 
 from their value for the history of art, or which at least 
 makes use of the history of art simply as part of the 
 evidence to fix the date of the building. Such studies 
 as those of which the late Professor WiUis was the 
 luirivalled master are in truth simply parts of history, 
 just like the study of coins or of weapons or any other 
 of those subsidiary branches of history of which we 
 spoke some time back. But the science of language 
 is something more than a mere branch of historical 
 
POSITION OF LANGUAGE. 61 
 
 study; it is one of the studies akin to history, one of 
 those which are most closely akin to it, a study from 
 which history is ever borrowing and which is ever 
 borrowing from history, but which still is a branch of 
 study distinct in itself It follows a historical method 
 in its grand outlines ; but it is itself historical and 
 something more ; it makes its way into regions 
 whither the historic method cannot follow it. The 
 science of language is held by its votaries to be one 
 of the physical sciences ; whether it be so or not I 
 will not presume to judge ; but, if it is physical, it is 
 physical and something more, as I have just said that 
 it is historical and something more. The science of 
 language may well be looked on as one of the links 
 between the historical and the physical sciences. It 
 records and classifies, not only the workings of nature, 
 but the acts of man and his free will. For that mass 
 of unconscious, but still unconstrained, action, on the 
 part of countless individuals which goes to make up 
 what we call change, growth, developement, fashion, 
 in language or in any other matter, is in truth the 
 aggregation of endless acts of the human wUl. The 
 history of language is a record of physical facts, but 
 of physical facts controlled by human agency ; it thus 
 becomes a record of human actions, a part of the 
 record of history. Even if the science of language 
 never drew, as for its fullest purposes it must con- 
 stantly draw, upon the written records of history, it 
 would stUl remain, for one side of it at least, a his- 
 torical science; its discoveries would still be set down 
 as part of the facts of history. 
 
62 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 Now of these two studies, Mstory strictly so 
 called and language, each largely exercises the same 
 faculties ; each largely employs the same methods ; 
 the two have a vast field of inquiry common to both j 
 the master of the one must have gone no small way 
 towards becoming a master of the other. No man 
 can really understand history without a considerable 
 knowledge of philology; no man can really under- 
 stand philology without a considerable knowledge of 
 history. Each will follow the other's study so far as 
 it helps to illustrate his own, possibly a little further 
 stiU. But if he goes no further than is needed to 
 illustrate his own subject, that journey will carry him 
 a good way. But we shall soon see the difference 
 between studying with primary and with secondary 
 objects,* between studying a subject absolutely for 
 its own sake and studying it only so far as it helps 
 to illustrate another subject. The historian and the 
 philologer have a wide field in common on which 
 both win feel equally at home. But each has also a 
 separate territory of his own on which the other feels 
 no temptation to enter. A truly oecumenical his- 
 torian, one who took the whole world as his subject and 
 who felt equally at home in every age and country, 
 might feel himself equally drawn to every stage and 
 form of every language. But most of us have our 
 special periods which we work in detail, while as to the 
 others we think that we have done our part if we 
 know enough of them to put them in their true 
 relations to our own periods and to one another. As 
 a rule then, while the true philologer will care for 
 
THE HISTORIAN'S RELATION TO LANGUAGE. 63 
 
 the whole world of language — not necessarily as a 
 master of every language but as a master of some 
 and as knowing the general relations of all — so the 
 historical student who uses philology only as an 
 illustration of history will care only for those 
 languages which illustrate his own branches of 
 history; he may be indifferent even to the general 
 relations of those languages which throw no light 
 on his own studies. To most of us it may seem 
 enough if we have a mastery of some and a certain 
 knowledge of aU, among the various forms of Grreek, 
 Latin, and Teutonic, and if we add a general know- 
 ledge of the relations of the other European tongues 
 and of those non-European tongues which come into 
 historical connexion with them. At the same time 
 of course the more languages a man knows the 
 better ; he who to his Greek, Latin, and Teutonic 
 can add Celtic, Slavonic, Lithuanian, the rival speech 
 of the Arab, even the more uncouth tongues of the 
 Turk and the Magyar, wiU certainly not regret 
 having added so many unusual weapons to his 
 historic armoury. On others whose work lies in 
 other fields of history than ours other tongues wiU 
 have the same claim that the tongues of Europe and 
 the neighbour lands have upon us. Still all whose 
 object is primarily history, and not language for its 
 own sake, will be likely to draw the line in every 
 department at those languages which have some 
 kind of history, some kind of literature. But I can 
 understand that to the philologer pure and simple 
 the tongue of some savage tribe of whom no acts 
 
64 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 have been set down in writing, and whose speech has 
 never been brought within the fetters of any alpha- 
 bet, may possess an interest and convey an instruc- 
 tion fully equal to that of Greek or Gothic. And 
 even with regard to the tongues which the historian 
 and the philologer may study in common, the two 
 will not look at them exactly from the same point 
 of view. To the philologer nothing is so precious as 
 the grammatical forms; the vocabulary is secondary; 
 the extant writings in the language are valuable 
 chiefly by way of evidence to illustrate the philo- 
 logical facts of the language itself. To the historical 
 student on the other hand the grammatical forms 
 are of comparatively little moment ; they concern 
 him only when they illustrate some of the further 
 facts in the language itself or in its relations to other 
 languages. His main care is the vocabulary, and 
 specially when the words that form it are arranged 
 in the shape, not necessarily of literature in the 
 higher sense, but of compositions recorded or handed 
 down. In short, to the philologer every language is 
 precious as itself a possession for its own sake. To 
 the historian only this or that language is precious, 
 and that only as the possession — the chief and most 
 distinctive possession, he may be incHned to add — 
 of the particular nations with whose history he is 
 concerned. To the one in short every fact of lan- 
 guage is valuable in itself; to the other only such 
 facts of language are valuable, a very large class 
 to be sure, as help to illustrate the more general 
 history of nations. 
 
RELATIONS OF HISTORY AND PHILOLOGY. 65 
 
 Thus, besides the large field common to the his- 
 torian and philologer, a field in which both are alike 
 at home though both do not use it exactly for the 
 same purposes, there is another large field which 
 the philologer keeps to himself and into which the 
 historian does not penetrate. The historian in re- 
 turn has his own special plot also, which is not 
 likely to have any charm for the philologer as such. 
 As long as either is dealing with the migrations and 
 relations of nations, each is on the ground common to 
 both. But, as the historian is in no way concerned 
 with large branches of philological research, so the 
 philologer has no call to go into those details, politi- 
 cal, military, and of other kinds, which form so large 
 a part of our work. They concern him only when 
 they throw some incidental light on his own subject. 
 To him the chief interest of a parliament will lie in 
 that remarkable train of verbal accidents which has 
 made a parliament so nearly akin to a parable. He 
 can throw light on the history of every technical 
 term of every art which history has to borrow ; but 
 the history of the words will be to him of deeper 
 interest than the history of the things. 
 
 Now we may further remark that it is only the 
 more extended philology of recent times which can 
 give this help to historical study. The antiquated 
 style of classical learning, which was supposed to 
 make a man a scholar and a gentleman, was of no 
 great value for historical purposes. A strange devo- 
 tion to the writers of a few arbitrarily chosen cen- 
 turies gendered not a little to contempt, not only 
 
66 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 for the writings, but for everything else, belonging to 
 other centuries. It would be amusing, if it were not 
 provoking, to read the Greek and Italian travels of 
 writers of the narrow classical school. It is curious 
 to see how the smallest memory is cherished, how the 
 most trifling relic is prized, if only it comes within 
 the favoured period, while the scenes and memories 
 of the most stirring events in the world's history are 
 passed by without a thought, existing monuments 
 are despised or their wanton destruction is rejoiced 
 in, if they happen to be a little too late, or perhaps 
 sometimes a little too early, to come within the arti- 
 ficially prescribed limit. The narrow classical scholar, 
 who has ruled that certain languages are dead, seems 
 sometimes to think it a presumption on their parts 
 when they venture to show that they are alive. He 
 stands amazed at the irrepressible life of the Greek and 
 Latin tongues through long ages after he had doomed 
 them to the grave. It is no less amusing to see the 
 narrow classical antiquary standing amazed and 
 shocked at the wonders of Spalato and Ravenna, to 
 see him perplexed at the great works which cast 
 aside aU the narrow rules of his craft, and which 
 opened the way for every true form of artistic grov^^th 
 in later times. It will indeed be a white day when 
 the word " classical " no longer infests the nomencla- 
 ture either of language or of art, and when both are 
 allowed to be studied unhindered by worn-out and 
 unmeaning barriers. The wider and more generous 
 studies of the Comparative school hang together in 
 all their branches. Be it language, be it art, be it 
 
THE NARROW '^CLASSICAL" SCHOOL. 67 
 
 political history, all alike draw new life from a 
 method which does not shut itself up within arbi- 
 trary fetters, but which welcomes the witness of all 
 times and of all places. While the narrow style of 
 scholarship, hke the narrow style of antiquarian 
 research, can be looked on only as directly hostile to 
 historical learning, in the wider philology of our own 
 day, in the other kindred branches of study to which 
 that wider philology has set the example, history- 
 welcomes allies without whose help she would find 
 it hard indeed to do her own work as she is now 
 called upon to do it. 
 
 In short, in the relations between history and 
 philology we surely see the very best example of 
 that kind of brotherhood which may exist between 
 two branches of knowledge, distinct in their own 
 nature, but which have much in common both in 
 range and in method. It is hard to conceive how 
 two studies which really are distinct can be more 
 closely allied, and allied on more equal terms, than 
 enlightened history and enlightened philology cer- 
 tainly are. Yet it is plain that, of the two, philo- 
 logy needs the help of history more largely than 
 history needs the help of philology. Deprive his- 
 tory of the help of philology, and the gap would 
 be frightful. If we were driven to study history 
 without any knowledge of the languages and coun- 
 tries with which we have to deal, if we had nothing 
 beyond a vague literary knowledge of some of 
 those languages without any grasp of their scien- 
 tific relations, we should indeed feel that one of 
 
68 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES 
 
 the eyes of our subject was put out. We should 
 \oQ one of the most instructive, perhaps the most 
 instructive of all, of the particular branches of our 
 own study, and we should be in danger of the 
 grossest errors with regard to the great outlines of 
 the history of the world. We see what confusions 
 come of mistakes as to the history of language, as 
 to the nature of the languages spoken in this or 
 that time or place. I believe that there are still 
 some who fancy that Charles the Great spoke French, 
 just as there are still some who fancy that the 
 earth is flat. I need not stop to show how the 
 history of Europe must be turned upside down by 
 such a belief; I will only point out that a merely 
 literary knowledge of the languages concerned is 
 no safeguard against such errors. What historical 
 truth needs in such matters is something which may 
 fairly come within the head of philology; that is, it 
 needs a careful notice of every indication of language, 
 a firm grasp of the meaning of every such indi- 
 cation. Addison conceived his Pharamond as speak- 
 ing French ; at least if we may infer as much from 
 his presiding over courtiers bearing very modem 
 French names. And I can fancy that, if Addison 
 had casually looked into Einhard, he would have 
 taken the description of the great Emperor's speech, 
 "Hngua patria, id est Francica," as full proof — ^if it 
 could ever have come into his head to doubt about 
 the matter — that the magnus et^acificus Bomanorum 
 Imperator spoke in very much the same fashion as 
 the Eex Christianissimus of his own day. 
 
NEED OF LANGUAGE TO HISTORY. 69 
 
 Into errors like this history might fall at any 
 moment, if it had not the study of language to help 
 it at every step in its passage through the field 
 which the two studies have in common. And yet, 
 as I just now said, language stands even more in 
 need of history than history stands in need of lan- 
 guage. Without language, history would indeed lose 
 much ; but it could still go on and discharge some 
 of its functions. We might trace out political events 
 and make political inferences, even while we prac- 
 tically knew nothing of the speech of those with 
 whose institutions we were dealing. Our work would 
 be very imperfect, often no doubt very inaccurate ; 
 but the essence of historical research might still go 
 on. I once saw a History of Eome the writer of 
 which knew so httle of the Latin tongue that he 
 thought that plehs was the plural of a singular jpleb, 
 that each particular plebeian was. a pteh, while the 
 whole body of plebeians formed the jylebs. And yet 
 this writer, so utterly in the dark in point of lan- 
 guage, had grasped the political relations between 
 patricians and plebeians with far greater power and 
 clearness than many whose verbal scholarship is of 
 a much higher kind. But it is hard to see how the 
 study of language could go on without the help of 
 recorded facts. At the very least it would jput on 
 altogether another character from that which it now 
 has. It might withdraw to the position which it 
 claims among the physical sciences ; but it would, 
 as far as I can venture to judge, stand under some 
 disadvantages as compared with the other physical 
 
70 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 sciences. The difference would come in wHch exists 
 between sciences which deal with the phsenomena 
 of nature and a science which deals with the acts 
 of man. Philology, as a purely physical science, as 
 a science without historical records, would surely be 
 unable to marshal its facts in the same good order 
 as the other physical sciences for whose perfect 
 developement historical records are not needed. 
 
 Let us turn now to the other side, and see liow 
 history stands with regard to its other sister study 
 of law. One point strikes us in which ]aw differs 
 from history and language, and from most of the 
 kindred branches of knowledge. It is not merely a 
 matter of learning followed for learning's sake or for 
 the indirect results of learning ; it is directly and 
 immediately a matter of practical business, in which 
 any man may be at any moment entangled, .even 
 against his will. Students of other branches of 
 knowledge flatter themselves that their studies may 
 ever and anon serve some practical object ; they may 
 even go so far as to flatter themselves that their 
 studies may lead to their own private profit or 
 advancement. But law, without its practical appli- 
 cation, could have no existence at all ; it is studied 
 primarily for practical objects, among which the 
 profit and advantage of those who study it is cer- 
 tainly not forgotten. Many branches of knowledge 
 may incidentally become professions ; but the law is 
 primarily a profession ; any other aspect is incidental. 
 The side of law which makes it a branch of know- 
 
HISTOR T AND LAW. 7 1 
 
 ledge capable of scientific treatment is not its 
 primary and practical side. It is rather an esoteric 
 aspect of tlie study, whose pursuit is a kind of 
 counsel of perfection, a counsel which some of the 
 most successful masters of the law have certainly 
 not made it their business to follow. On the other 
 hand, it might be possible to define the study of law 
 from the other side, as one of the branches of history, 
 to define it as the study of institutions followed with 
 a practical object. But the practical object of law 
 makes it something more than a branch of history; 
 it causes a certain technical learning of its own to 
 gather round it ; it tends on the other hand to 
 connect the study of law as it is with questions as 
 to what law ought to be. But one side of law, the 
 knowledge of the actual enactments, of the time, 
 place, circumstances, motives, and results of those 
 enactments, is strictly a branch of history, to be 
 studied in a purely historic spirit and by a purely 
 historic method, just as much as any other branch of 
 history. Where the professional lawyer has, from our 
 point of view, so often gone wrong, is when he has 
 declined to look at his subject historically, when he 
 has declined to look at historic evidence, and has 
 preferred his own technical jargon to facts. But on 
 this side too we have to record an advance as marked 
 as the advance which we have had to record on the 
 side of language. In both cases the progress of the 
 last generation or two has been the progress of ages. 
 In the study of law we can^ow span the gap which 
 parts Blackstone from Maine and Pollock. If narrow 
 
72 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 classical scholarship was a foe to history, narrow- 
 professional law was a foe more deadly still. For 
 narrow classical scholarship was at worst narrow. 
 It was imperfect ; it saw only a small part of its own 
 field ; but what it did see it saw for the most part 
 accurately. It refused to look at a whole range of 
 facts, but there was a smaller range which it mastered. 
 Its etymologies were wild ; but that was the result 
 of living in a prse-scientific age ; speaking generally, 
 it taught part of the truth ; it did not pile up a 
 gigantic mass of error instead of the truth. But 
 this last was just what a vast body of professional 
 lawyers for some generations did. Utter ignorance is 
 a hopeful state compared with that perverse ingenuity 
 with which the lawyer of a class which I hope is at 
 least dying out was wont to read through the main 
 facts of English history, and to read every one of 
 them backwards. It is far better to know nothing 
 than to know everything wrong. The sheet of blank 
 paper may easily be written on ; to turn out a palim- 
 psest is harder work. I ventured to say some years 
 back that lawyers of this class believed that the 
 hereditary king had existed from all eternity, and 
 the hereditary lord of the manor from a time just so 
 far short of eternity as to give the king a moment or 
 two to make him a grant. If so much serious error 
 had not sprung from it, there would be something 
 not a httle amusing in the flounderings of Blackstone 
 when, starting from the d priori doctrine that the 
 English crown must aWays have been hereditary, 
 he comes across the evidence which shows that it 
 
TEE OLD LEGAL SCHOOL. 73. 
 
 once was elective. He is honest, and does not shirk 
 the facts ; only in his eyes the sayings of the lawyers 
 that went before him were mtich greater than the 
 facts. The facts must be twisted and twirled into 
 any kind of unnatural meaning rather than that he 
 should dare to say a word against the infallible 
 tradition of the very modem elders whom he was 
 professionally bound to hold for oracles. As for the 
 lord of the manor, I shall most hkely have in some 
 later lectures to say something about him and about 
 some doctrines, yet stranger than those of the lawyers, 
 which have lately been set forth about him. The 
 lawyers have certainly read the lord of the manor's 
 history backwards, but they have preserved at least 
 one fact of his history. They have at least kept 
 alive the truth that a manor implies free tenants; 
 he who knows his law-books will not run after the 
 last new craze, the craze which teaches that a 
 manor necessarily implies bondmen and seemingly 
 shuts out free tenants altogether. 
 
 Stm on the whole I suppose that the temper 
 of the mere professional lawj^er is of aU tempers 
 that which is most alien to the true temper of 
 the historian. It absolutely refuses to look at evi- 
 dence ; it deliberately, almost consciously, puts some- 
 thing else instead of the facts of the case. After 
 a time not far short of thirty years I may reveal 
 some of the secrets of old examination days. I once 
 had a legal colleague, a gentleman I believe of repute 
 in his profession, but who was hardly known in the 
 University, and who is not now alive. He required 
 
74 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 the candidates for degrees to say that William the 
 Conqueror " introduced the feudal system " at the 
 great Gem6t of Salisbury in 1086. I prayed him 
 not to lay so heavy a yoke of falsehood on the neck 
 of any man ; I tried to put the case before him, and 
 to show him that, so far as his words had any mean- 
 ing, they meant the exact opposite of the facts. I 
 would fain have shown him the passage in the 
 Chronicle, and have explained that what William 
 the Great really did in that assembly was — so far 
 as we can talk of a " feudal system " at all — to keep 
 the most important feature of the " feudal system " 
 out of his kingdom. But my little lecture went for 
 nothing ; my colleague held himself bound to have 
 nothing to do with the facts of history ; he was 
 Examiner in Law — an inaccurate description by the 
 way; to Law facts were indifferent ; facts might be 
 found in Chronicles, but Law was to be found in 
 Blackstone ; it was to be found in Blackstone as 
 an infallible source ; what Blackstone said he, as a 
 Law Examiner, could not dispute. Surely I was 
 justified in thinking that such teaching of Law as 
 this was fully entitled to the woe denounced against 
 certain earlier lawyers, who, like my colleague, took 
 away the key of knowledge, who, like him, refused to 
 enter in themselves, and who hindered them that 
 would have entered in. There surely never was such 
 another case of making the simple truth of none effect 
 by arbitrary traditions. Such a position has been 
 laid down as law by such a judge or in such a law- 
 book. Never mind how contrary it is to fact, never 
 
BLAGKSTONE. 75 
 
 mind that it rests neither on immemorial custom 
 nor on recorded enactment, nevermind that its whole 
 authority comes from the fact that some man who 
 knew nothing of the matter in hand, who had per-' 
 haps never looked at an original record in his life, 
 chose to say this and that — when it was once written 
 down in a law-book, it becomes law, it becomes 
 something which, if not fact, is greater than fact, 
 something against which not only the judgement of 
 experts, but the plainest words of contemporary 
 writers cannot stand for a moment. Like a flock of 
 sheep, one writer of law-books follows another. One 
 sometimes wonders how my colleague who deemed 
 Blackstone infallible thought that Blackstone himself 
 came to know things. But it is a more curious 
 subject of inquiry by what supposed rule of pro- 
 fessional duty Blackstone contrived to force himself 
 to copy down and to hand on the amazing things 
 that he did copy down and hand on. It is perfectly 
 plain that he could have done something much better. 
 Now and then he did think for himself; and, when 
 he thought for himself, his thoughts were to the 
 purpose. He has put on record a saying about game 
 laws which any reformer may be glad to quote. He 
 even saw through one of the strangest superstitions 
 which ever grew round a very simple matter, but one 
 of the superstitions which have most thoroughly bound 
 down men's minds. To say the least, he allowed 
 himself to wonder at the strange doctrine that a writ 
 of summons to Parliament does in some mysterious 
 way " ennoble " the blood, and that a bishop who 
 
76 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 holds an almost immemorial see by what our 
 fathers called jus hsereditarium is less a peer of 
 the realm than his modern temporal brother created 
 ' out of nothing but yesterday. At such passages as 
 these he who deemed Blackstone infallible must 
 have been sore puzzled ; if Blackstone was infallible, 
 an act of Parliament, and even a standing order of 
 the House of Lords, must be yet more infallible ; 
 and the truth of history might have a chance when 
 the two infallibles fall out. 
 
 Now this direct opposition between the facts of 
 history and the imaginations of what within my own 
 memory passed for law was the more wonderful 
 because there had been an earlier time when as- 
 suredly law and history were no more enemies to 
 one another than they are now. Law in the hands 
 of Selden was indeed another matter from law in the 
 hands of Blackstone. Whatever we say of the 
 eighteenth century, the seventeenth was an age 
 which no man can despise. But even in the age of 
 Blackstone there were men who had kept on a far truer 
 tradition of English history than Blackstone ever 
 dreamed of Perhaps indeed knowledge coming at 
 all near to that of Selden was in that day more 
 likely to be found among laymen than among lawyers. 
 There was certainly one layman at a time a little 
 later than Blackstone whose work on another branch 
 of law does indeed carry on the natural connexion 
 between law and history. The law of Rome was 
 traced up to its sources by Gibbon in a way in which 
 not many professional lawyers of his generation could 
 
THE NEWER LAWYERS. 77 
 
 have traced up tlie law of England. But in the 
 seventeenth century at least the natural union of 
 law and history was undisturbed. It was at aU 
 events not harder for a lawyer to grasp the true 
 history of the institutions of his country than it was 
 for another man. 
 
 That good estate of an earlier time has now 
 more than come back to us. Law, as a generation 
 younger than mine is used to it in the teaching 
 of this University, is another matter indeed from 
 law, as my colleague of eight-and-twenty years ago 
 understood it. The step from longs and shorts 
 and scraps of Latin verse to the comparative 
 philology of our day is hardly wider than the step 
 from the Commentaries on the Laws of England to 
 that great series of volumes, partly springing, like 
 the Commentaries themselves, out of lectures in 
 this place, the first of which bears the emphatic 
 title of "Ancient Law." Law has now become a 
 mainstay of history, or rather a part of history, 
 because the knowledge of history is coming to be 
 received as part of the knowledge of law. The 
 lawyer of the new school, at all events when he is 
 out of court, is no longer bound to worship the 
 ignorance of his predecessors ; it is lawful for him 
 to read and to think, to compare and to infer. 
 The experience of all times and of all nations is 
 open to him; he may trace the origin of some 
 feature of our English common law through its 
 kindred institutions among every branch of the 
 Aryan family and even beyond the Aryan pale. 
 
78 HISTORY AND ITS KINDRED STUDIES. 
 
 India and Ireland alike are pressed into the service 
 of law as they have been already pressed into the 
 service of language. The law of Eome herself 
 puts on a new meaning and a new value when we 
 see that the institutions of "the great group of 
 village communities by the Tiber " were essentially 
 the same as the institutions of less famous village 
 communities in other lands. The help given to 
 historical story by this enlarged treatment of law 
 has been beyond words. And we laymen are 
 bound to add that the professional lawyer, when- 
 ever he breaks his chains, has in some points the 
 advantage of us. The habits of his calling give 
 him a certain quickness and sharpness, a certain 
 power of speedy discernment, which, when once 
 put on the right track, are invaluable. A lawyer's 
 argument, such as we find in our law-books, is 
 for the most part a most ingenious and commonly 
 unanswerable chain of reasoning from its own pre- 
 misses. Each step in the argument is sound, it 
 is only the premisses from which the whole starts 
 that are good for nothing. We now have the same 
 ingenuity set to work on sound premisses, and the 
 result is the sister study which history must greet 
 with thankfulness as the third member of a 
 triple alliance. We have not yet defined history; 
 but, on the principle of " noscitur a sociis," we have 
 learned something about history. The very yoke- 
 fellow of philology and law, the more distant ally of 
 a whole crowd of branches of knowledge which deal 
 with days before political history began, such is the 
 
THE FELLOWS OF HISTORY. 79 
 
 study one branch at least of which I am called on 
 to represent among you. If I claim a high place for 
 our pursuit, I claim for it no exclusive place. But 
 I may claim for it a pre-eminence of one kind. No 
 study, except its ally philology, is so liable to be 
 misunderstood, to be misapplied, to be taken ' up 
 hastily and without fitting preparation. If any one 
 still cleaves to the superstition that history or 
 "modern history" or any branch of history is an 
 "easy" study, easier than the other studies of 
 this place, it will at least be my calling to deliver 
 him from his error. Our work, if it is to be done 
 at all, must be done by men of zeal who do not 
 shrink from hard work. I seek as my companions, 
 my comitatus, my SToi iTuTpoi, the three hundred who 
 lap, and none other. The next time we come to- 
 gether, it may be well to give an hour to the 
 diflSculties of our study, to the causes which make 
 it and its fellow philology more commonly mis- 
 understood, more commonly superficially treated, than 
 any other branches of knowledge. 
 
LECTUEE II. 
 
 THE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTOEICAL 
 STUDY. 
 
 I HAVE referred once or twice in the lectures whicli 
 I have already given to a doctrine which was largely 
 in vogue some five-and-thirty years back, when the 
 new arrangement of the Examinations of this Uni- 
 versity first came in, namely that History was a 
 specially easy study. The saying was indeed not 
 put quite so broadly as that ; it was not History as 
 a whole, but whatever was meant by the words 
 Modern History, which was pronounced to be so 
 remarkably easy. But as no definition of Modern 
 History was given, as a high authority has ruled 
 that Modern History may be carried back to a 
 very early time indeed, as it is quite certain that 
 whatever one part of History is another part is, 
 I think that I am justified in leaving out the quah- 
 fying adjective. "Ancient" history was allowed to 
 be hard, perhaps because in those days it was still 
 read in the original writers, and some of the original 
 writers were confessedly hard. It was hard too, 
 because it was taken up in common with certain other 
 subjects which were confessedly not easy. " Modern " 
 history was supposed to be easy, because it was to 
 be read after a diiFerent fashion from " ancient." It 
 
INTRODUCTION OF "MODERN" HISTORY. 81 
 
 ■was to be read without the trouble of turning to 
 the authorities; it was to be read as a pleasant 
 amusement in this or that modern French or 
 English book. WiUiam of Malmesbury was the 
 only original writer that was recommended — malicious 
 folk said that he was the only original writer that 
 the authors of the scheme had heard of — and I fear 
 that William of Malmesbury was sometimes read in 
 a crib. I dare say " modern " history would be 
 easy, if read in such a fashion; but then "ancient" 
 history, if read in the like fashion, would be just 
 as easy. It was simply the happy union of language 
 and history in one school which kept for " ancient " 
 history its honourable character of hardness. We 
 were told that "modern" history would be of great 
 use in the University, because, as an easy study, it 
 would enable rich men to get first classes without 
 going through such a mass of puzzling Latin and 
 Greek as was needed for first classes in the elder 
 school. For all men knew that Thucydides and 
 Tacitus wrote, the one in Greek, the other in Latin; 
 nobody stopped to think whether the same was not 
 equally true of Procopius and Hugo Falcandus. A 
 study that might be got up in cribs and modern 
 books without any great exertion was just what was 
 wanted, an easy school for the rich. It reminded 
 one of the way in which royal and princely persons 
 seem to have sometimes won the honours of saint- 
 ship on easier terms than meaner folk. It reminded 
 one of the days when crusades were preached as an 
 easy means for laymen to win salvation without the 
 
 G 
 
82 THE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 trouble of leading Christian lives. It was as an 
 " easy " study that " modern " history was first given 
 a place in the pursuits of our University, and it was 
 matter of sheer accident, not of anything in the 
 study itself, that "ancient" history was not coupled 
 with it as an " easy " study too. 
 
 Now I believe that, after five-and-thirty years, I 
 can look on those controversies, and the part which 
 I myself played in them, very much as if it had been 
 a part played by another man. " Modern " history 
 was proposed as a new study in the University, and 
 I was one of those who opposed its introduction. I 
 can see now that I was wrong as regarded the 
 general proposal. But I was right as regarded the 
 particular shape which the proposal took, and the 
 particular arguments by which it was supported. 
 I was right in opposing a school in which " modern " 
 history was parted from " ancient," and which was 
 proposed on the ground that " modern " history was 
 easier than " ancient." I was wrong in thinking 
 that "modern" history was not a subject suited for 
 academic study. But I was led to think so simply 
 because I had not then fully taken in the dignity of 
 the study of "modern" history. I had not then 
 learned how thoroughly it stands on a level with the 
 study of earlier times, and how thoroughly the two 
 must be studied after the same method. I had 
 learned that " modern " history was not an easy 
 study ; I had not fully taken in how very hard it is. 
 Certainly I have for the space of forty years found 
 whatever periods of history I have taken to, earlier 
 
PAST CONTROVERSIES. 83 
 
 and later, hard work enough, in all conscience. And 
 I do not believe that, if I had been born to the pos- 
 session of a great estate, I should have found them 
 easier. 
 
 But this notion of " modern " history, and by im- 
 plication all history, being an easy study is one 
 which has great power in the world, and one which 
 well deserves that we should give it some thought. 
 In truth it helps to make real historical study still 
 harder than it need be. It causes the way of him 
 who would teach history to others, and even the way 
 of him who would teach it to himself, to be cumbered 
 with difficulties which are altogether needless, and 
 which I do not believe to exist in the study of any 
 other branch of knowledge. I ought perhaps to 
 except some branches of the kindred study of lan- 
 guage. I do not think that the study of language 
 as a whole is looked on as an easy study; but some 
 branches of it certainly are. And so in truth with 
 regard to history, the notion of its easiness is often 
 oddly combined with something that might be called 
 an exaggerated notion of its hardness. The outer 
 world seems to waver to and fro between a belief that 
 original authorities either do not exist or are not 
 needed, and a belief that the original authorities are 
 something so strange and rare and out-of-the-way 
 that only a very few people can ever know anything 
 about them. And this is sometimes mixed up with 
 a notion that all our authorities are in manuscript, 
 or that they can be found only in the British Museum. 
 From this point of view " modern '' history is clearly 
 
 G 2 
 
84 THE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 looked on as being harder than " ancient," Most 
 people must know that Thucydides has been printed ; 
 some may even know that he has been translated. 
 But I was seriously asked not long ago whether any 
 of the books which I had used in writing the His- 
 tory of the Norman Conquest were printed. How 
 did I consult them 1 Where were they ■? "Was there 
 any key or any grammar to any of them 1 Above 
 all, was Bseda printed 1 It is odd that a man should 
 have heard of Bseda and should fancy that he still 
 exists only in manuscript ; but so it was. There is 
 thus a notion afloat that the task of the professed 
 historian is in some respects a good deal harder than 
 it is. But this is balanced by the notion, acted on if 
 not expressed, that the labours of the professed his- 
 torian may be dispensed with, that anybody is quali- 
 fied to understand history without an effort, seemingly 
 that anybody is quahfied to write it or teach it with- 
 out any attempt to learn it. And what people think 
 of history, they think also of certain branches of the 
 study of language. Anybody, it is clearly the general 
 belief, can deal with etymology, above all when ety- 
 mology is applied to local nomenclature. Not very 
 long ago some articles on that subject, whose author- 
 ship it is in this place not hard to guess at and whose 
 authority no man can dispute, were published in the 
 Times newspaper. But the words of wisdom were 
 no sooner spoken than the flood-gates of folly were 
 at once opened. Every one who had a craze on the 
 subject thought the time was come to air it. Ab- 
 surdity after absurdity was solemnly printed^ down 
 
POPULAR MISCONCEPTIONS. 85 
 
 to the talk of a man who seemingly thought that the 
 xpiodern forms of the names of French cities were as 
 eteroial as the lord of the manor himself, and who 
 quoted the name of JEvreux as if it had been on a 
 level with the name of Eboracum. It is quite incon- 
 ceivable that the pubhcation of three discourses by a 
 master of astronomy, of chemistry, above all of geo- 
 metry, would have been followed by the publication 
 of a like torrent of nonsense on any of those subjects. 
 Most likely no one would write to prove that Jupiter 
 was the smallest of the planets, or that some triangles 
 had all their angles not equal to two right angles. 
 It is pretty certain that, if he did so write, his letters 
 would not appear in the Times, or that they would 
 appear only by way of a cruel joke. Those who 
 hold that the earth is flat and that the sun is only 
 three miles from it do, I believe, form a sect ; but it 
 is a sect which, if it is not everywhere spoken against, 
 it is because on such subjects it is hardly worth while 
 to speak against the crazes of men who are past 
 reasoning. It is quite certain that a man who took to 
 astronomy because he had nothing else to do, and 
 the result of whose astronomical studies was the belief 
 that the sun went round the earth, would nowhere be 
 looked upon as a great astronomer. Yet a man who 
 gives the same reason for taking to history, and the 
 result of whose historical studies is the belief that a 
 Prince of the Empire means something in France, may 
 come to be looked on as a great historian. Now to 
 any one who knows European history, to fancy that 
 a Prince of the Empire means something in France 
 
86 TEE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 implies an ignorance of the great central fact of history 
 which is exactly on a level with that ignorance of the 
 great central fact of astronomy which is implied in 
 the belief that the sun goes round the earth. Or we 
 might add that he who holds this last belief has by 
 far the better case of the two. Every one, till he was 
 taught better, would naturally think that the sun 
 did go round the earth ; not only the mass of man- 
 kind, but astronomers of great merit, once thought 
 so ; but there does not seem to be any such natural 
 temptation to turn the whole course of history upside 
 down by quartering the Princes of the Holy Roman 
 Empire in France. Yet, while everybody sees the 
 absurdity of the one proposition, comparatively few 
 people, we may be sure, saw the absiu-dity of the 
 other. It would be hardly worth the while of an 
 astronomer to answer the silly talk in his depart- 
 ment, but, if he did, he would assuredly have all 
 hearers and readers with him. But if the historian 
 exposes equally silly talk in his department, it is 
 thought to be some eccentric fancy of his own ; he 
 is charged with pedantry, with hypercriticism ; he is 
 happy if he is not charged with anything worse. At 
 any rate the question between knowledge and igno- 
 rance is looked on as a "controversy," in which -the 
 votaries of each have an equal " right to their own 
 opinion," It is plain that the studies of history and 
 language have not, as far as any sound knowledge oi 
 them is concerned, made the same progress as certain 
 other studies. And this is not because history and 
 language are unpopular studies with which few 
 
HISTORY IN POPULAR BOOKS. 87 
 
 peop]e are disposed to meddle. It is rather be- 
 cause they are highly popular, because too many 
 people are disposed to meddle with them. It is be- 
 cause they are studies on which it is held that every 
 one may talk and write without any preparation, and 
 that such talking and writing has just as good a right 
 to be listened to as the talking and writing which is 
 the result of a life's work. 
 
 I think that this is not too hard a judgement, when 
 we look at the way in which matters of history, and 
 indeed matters of language also, commonly fare in 
 the casual writings and casual talkings of the day. 
 I am naturally not versed in those periodical writings 
 which are devoted to the natural sciences, nor have 
 I any great experience of meetings devoted to those 
 purposes. But though I am aware that sheef non- 
 sense is sometimes talked on those subjects as well 
 as on ours, I cannot believe that it is talked in 
 anything like the same proportion. There is in truth 
 hardly the same opportunity. A large amount of the 
 nonsense talked on subjects of history and language 
 is local talk, talk on local subjects, often put forth at 
 local meetings or in local publications. Now local 
 study of this kind is absolutely necessary for our 
 purposes. General history, and the history of 
 language as one part of it, is largely made up of 
 local history, and it constantly needs local research for 
 its full mastery. But of course local study can never 
 bear any real fruit as long as it is purely local ; to 
 be of any value, the local objects, the buildings, the 
 institutions, must be dealt with, not as standing 
 
88 THE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 ■alone, but as contributions to their several branches 
 of historical knowledge. Now I imagine that it is 
 •only in some special branches of natural science, in 
 those which I have claimed as having, to say the 
 least, a close connexion with the historical sciences, 
 that the local difficulty can come in. Geology, 
 natural history, botany, are in their own nature 
 local studies, exactly in the same way as the study 
 of antiquities is local ; local researches, local examples, 
 largely supply the means for more general inferences. 
 JBut I imagine that the truths of chemistry and 
 astronomy, to say nothing of pure mathematics, 
 must be the same all over the world. The field 
 which lies most temptingly open for nonsense would 
 therefore seem to be narrower in the case of the 
 -natural sciences than it is in the case of our own 
 pursuits. But nonsense, in our pursuits at least, 
 is very far from being wholly local ; it attacks every 
 branch of our studies, and there are few quarters 
 from which it is possible to keep it out. There are 
 those who write nonsense because they write in 
 simple ignorance of the subject on which they write ; 
 they have not taken the most obvious steps to learn 
 anything about those subjects. About them the 
 simple question is. Why do they write at all 1 
 People who had. never learned anything at all of 
 this or that branch of natural science would hardly 
 venture to write about it ; at any rate their writings 
 would not be admitted into periodicals of some 
 pretension devoted to the objects of those sciences. 
 And there are those who are not wholly ignorant, 
 
LOCAL AND OTHER TALK. 89 
 
 men who have read something, who have read 
 enough to make them know better, who have not 
 only read good modern writers, but who have even 
 some glimmering of the original authorities, who 
 write, and are allowed to publish in respectable 
 quarters, even greater nonsense than those who have 
 ■read nothing at all. I lately read, in a publication 
 devoted to antiquarian research, a discourse on the 
 Salic Law, which the writer, in the year 1884, 
 evidently still believed to be a law setthng the 
 succession to the crown of France on males only. 
 Of the text of the Salic Law itself, of Waitz and of 
 editors and commentators earlier and later than 
 Waitz, he had clearly never seen or heard anything. 
 Instead of Waitz, he quoted Voltaire. He had seen 
 the words " Salic Law " in some popular, perhaps 
 in some comic, reference, and, with this amount of 
 knowledge, he sat down and wrote a discourse on the 
 Salic Law, and found an antiquarian editor to pub- 
 lish it. I tremble as I draw my illustrations from 
 subjects of which I know hardly more than this 
 daring man knew of the Salic Law; but I conceive 
 that his state of mind is very much like that of one 
 who should sit down and write on the sun, moon, and 
 planets, without having ever heard of Newton or 
 Copernicus or of anything that Newton or Copernicus 
 found out. Yet in making this comparison we may 
 perhaps do some injustice to Claudius Ptolemy, and 
 we may perhaps be letting off our commentator on 
 the Lex Salica too easily. Or again, I have before 
 me a number of papers published by a very respect- 
 
90 TEE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTOBIGAL STUDY. 
 
 able local society, whose writer goes about to prove, 
 not only that there is a large Celtic element in the 
 present English people — a proposition with which, in 
 its truth and in its falsehood, I may have to deal 
 in some later set of lectures — but that the Angles 
 themselves were a Celtic people, speaking a Celtic 
 tongue. And this doctrine is thought to be estab- 
 lished by finding Celtic derivations for the plainest 
 of English words. And this is the work of a man 
 who has read something, a man who not only knows 
 that Bseda is printed, but who knows something of 
 the contents of his works. Only he wiU not believe 
 in Bseda ; he denounces him and his followers, old 
 and new, as blind guides. The parallel surely would 
 be a man who shoiild know the discoveries of Coper- 
 nicus and Newton and of philosophers later than 
 Newton, but should look on their discoveries as mere 
 delusions. And such, I believe, there are. I have 
 seen a publication called " The Bible Earth," devoted 
 to the refutation of that class of heresies which Galileo 
 had to retract. Only I fancy that the writers of 
 " The Bible Earth " keep pretty much to themselves, 
 and that their theories would find no admission in 
 any publication laying any claim to a scientific char- 
 acter. But the kind of nonsense of which I speak on 
 matters of history and language does find a place in 
 publications of considerable pretensions, publications 
 which contain other papers which are by no means 
 on the same level of absurdity. Here is a sign of 
 the different position which is held in the world in 
 general by our studies and by those of some of our 
 
HISTOR Y IN PARLIAMENT AND NE WSPAPERS. 9 1 
 
 neighbours. To write about history or language is 
 supposed to be within the reach of every man. To 
 write about natural science is allowed to be within 
 the reach only of those who have mastered the 
 subjects on which they write. 
 
 Let me give one illustration more. I spoke of 
 local research as an essential part of general history. 
 And something has been done towards putting local 
 research on a more scientific footing. But on those 
 who cater for the information of the general public 
 all efforts of the kind seem to be thrown away. 
 When any particular town or district comes into 
 notice, when some great meeting is to be held in 
 it, when it is to be honoured with what is called 
 a "royal visit" — that is commonly a visit from some 
 of our fellow-subjects — it is commonly thought be- 
 coming that a sketch of the history of the place 
 should appear in the newspapers. The sketch is 
 invariably pree-scientific ; the characteristic points 
 in the history of the place are always left out ; the 
 old wives' fables are always told again. I can even 
 believe that, the next time that the affairs of the 
 English Universities come to be discussed in Par- 
 liament, we shall again listen to noble lords and 
 honourable gentlemen who believe that the city of 
 Oxford and borough of Cambridge grew up around 
 those Universities which in truth gradually arose 
 in them some centuries after the towns themselves 
 had begun to play a part in English history. The 
 grandest case to be sure lies beyond the four seas 
 of Britain. Does any one remember the " naval de- 
 
92 THE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTOBIGAL STUDY. 
 
 monstration" of four years back on the eastern shores 
 of the Hadriatic 1 Our daily papers then were full 
 of Spalato and Eagusa and the neighbour cities 
 thereof. Strange tales to be sure they told of them. 
 But the greatest exploit of all was that of an in- 
 genious correspondent of the Times, who chanced to 
 visit the isle of Curzola, who found that its ancient 
 name was Black Korkyra, who accordingly got up 
 the history of the greater and more famous Korkyra, 
 and carried it off bodily, the seditions of the fifth 
 century b. c. among the rest, and set it all up again 
 in the Dalmatian island. I do not expect to see in 
 the same columns a description of the planet Mars, 
 in which some daring astronomer has transferred to 
 our own heavenly neighbour the belts and satellites 
 of dis'tant Jupiter. 
 
 Now all these things are examples in different 
 ways of the notion that history is an easy study, 
 that it is a subject within any man's reach, without 
 that kind of preparation which he would think it 
 necessary to give to other branches of knowledge. 
 They are examples of the notion that it is a subject 
 about which anybody has a right to talk, and about 
 which every man, learned and unlearned, has an 
 equal " right to his opinion." Perhaps no one would 
 accept this description, put into such plain words as 
 I have put it, as a true picture of his own notions of 
 historical study; but it is one of the thousand cases in 
 which men practically believe, that is, they act upon, 
 some principle or assumption which they would not, on 
 
ORIGIN OF POPULAR ERRORS. 93 
 
 examination, confess that they beheved. The mass 
 of people do practically believe that history, and 
 language too in its historical aspect, is a matter 
 within the reach of every man without very much 
 trouble. And matters are not mended when the 
 real historical student is credited with work perhaps 
 much harder, certainly much further removed from 
 ordinary human concerns, than his work really is. 
 For this notion is simply another side of the other ; 
 men think, though they would not allow that they 
 think, that they can dispense with the help of a 
 guide in historical matters in a way that they cer- 
 tauily would not think that they could dispense 
 with a guide in any branch of natural science. Now 
 all this is very mischievous and very annoying ; but 
 there must be some cause for it. A popular error 
 is never pure and unmixed error ; it is always the 
 distortion of some truth. Some aspect of the case, 
 perfectly true as far as it goes, is looked at so ex- 
 clusively, so wholly out of its proper relation to 
 other aspects of the case, that it practically ceases 
 to be tru.e. There must be some real ground for 
 these mistaken beliefs, and a little thought will show 
 us what the facts are which give our studies a super- 
 ficial look of being so much easier than any others. 
 
 Now one foremost cause, perhaps the foremost, 
 cause, of the mistake is that there is a certain sense 
 in which the proposition is true, a certain sense in 
 which history is an easier study than most others, 
 and one whose students stand less in need of the 
 guidance of teachers. History is the least technical 
 
94 THE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 of all studies ; it is absolutely without teclinical 
 terms. Let a wholly uninstructed person take up 
 a book of cbemistry, and he finds it utterly un- 
 intelligible. He cannot tell what the book is about. 
 He sees sentence after sentence which does not con- 
 tain a single word which gives him any meaning, 
 save only those absolutely necessary words without 
 which a sentence cannot be put together. For the 
 words are in truth not words ; they are not the 
 natural words of any language ; they never formed 
 part of the ordinary speech of mankind in any time 
 or place. They are words invented by scientific men 
 to express purely scientific ideas. Let no one think 
 that I am blaming the use of such words for purely 
 scientific purposes. The professors of any branch of 
 knowledge have a perfect right to use among them- 
 selves whatever kind of language they may find 
 best suits their purpose, whatever words will best 
 convey their ideas to one another. They are to be 
 blamed only when they come out of their inner re- 
 cesses, and use their own special language to those — 
 they sometimes call them the vulgar public — to whom 
 that language conveys no idea at all. Only one is 
 tempted to think it a little hard when one is driven 
 away from a study for which one once had a certain 
 liking purely by the never-ending invasion of techni- 
 calities. The books of natural history of my youth 
 were interesting books, books that told us something 
 about the creatures and their ways. Whenever I 
 have opened a book of natural history in later years,, 
 it has commonly seemed to be simply a string of 
 
IN WHAT SEN8E HISTORY IS EASY. 95 
 
 hard words conveying no meaning save to those who 
 are initiated in the seventh or the seventy-seventh de- 
 gree. Now historical study has the advantage or 
 disadvantage of being altogether free from words of 
 this kind. History has no technical terms of its 
 own, though it often has to use the technical terms 
 of other branches of knowledge. An uninstructed 
 man opens a book of history, and he finds little or no 
 difficulty in understanding it as far as the mere 
 words go. There may be references to things and 
 persons that he never heard of ; there may be par- 
 ticular words which he does not understand, but if 
 the book is decently written in English or any other 
 language, it is hardly possible that there shall be 
 any sentence which shall give the reader no meaning 
 whatever. He may mistake the meaning ; he may 
 go away with a dim and imperfect meaning ; this or 
 that word may be strange ; but there can hardly be 
 a sentence so made up of strange words as to carry 
 with it no sense at all even to the unlearned. And 
 the words which are strange wiU not be technicalities 
 of history; that is, they wiU not be words invented 
 by the historian himself, coined in Greek or in some 
 other foreign language, to express ideas or facts 
 which students of history have all to themselves. 
 They may likely enough be technicalities of some 
 other subject with which the historian has to deal 
 in its historical aspect, technicalities of theology, 
 technicalities of warfare, above all, technicalities of 
 law, perhaps even, from some incidental cause, tech- 
 nicalities of natural science itself. History, which 
 
96 TEE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTORICAL STtlDY. 
 
 lias no technicalities of its own, is constantly called 
 on to ma,ke use of the technicalities of all these sub- 
 jects. And there are other words which may pos- 
 sibly seem to be technicalities of history, but which 
 are not really such. The historian has constantly to 
 use, in a fixed and definite meaning, words which 
 are no longer in common use, or which, if they 
 are in common use, have in common use lost that 
 fixed and definite meaning. He may have to use 
 the 'words fatrician, plebeian, ovation, triumph, dema- 
 gogue, tyrant, ostracism, decimate, metropolis, province, 
 and a crowd of others, in senses widely difierent from 
 those which they commonly bear in the newspapers. 
 But the words are none of his coining ; the meanings 
 are none of his inventing ; he simply, when recording 
 the events of certain times and places, uses words 
 belonging to those times and places in the meanings 
 which they bore on the lips of those of whose native 
 tongue and daily speech they formed part. He may 
 even have to use words altogether belonging to some 
 foreign tongue or to stages of our own tongue which 
 no longer convey their meaning to all hearers. He 
 may have to distinguish hookland and folkland ; he 
 may have to speak of the imperium, of the consul, the 
 ^otestas of the tribune, the auctoritas of the senate. 
 The Latin words of course convey no meaning save to 
 those who have learned Latin, and among those who 
 have learned Latin they convey their correct meaning 
 only to those who have also mastered the forms of 
 the Eoman constitution. The English words, com-, 
 pounded as they are of the simplest words in our. 
 
LACK OF TECHNICAL TERMS. 97 
 
 tongue, will still convey no accurate meaning except 
 to those who know something of the tenure of land 
 in England in early times. But none of these are 
 really technical terms ; there was a time and a place 
 when they were words of daily speech. A Eoman 
 of the days of the commonwealth could distinguish 
 ivfiferium and jpotestas as naturally as a modern 
 Englishman can distinguish Lords and Commons ; 
 an Englishman of the ninth century could distin- 
 guish booMand and folJcland as naturally as an Eng- 
 lishman of the nineteenth can distinguish freehold 
 and leasehold. Words of this kind are the nearest 
 approach to technicalities that history has to deal 
 with, and they are not technicalities in the same 
 sense as the technicalities of natural science. They 
 are not arbitrary words invented yesterday; they 
 are words called back to their proper meaning ; they 
 are at most old words called back to new life. And 
 their use in historical writing is rare compared with 
 the use of technical terms in other branches of know- 
 ledge. One may write page upon page without 
 using any of them, without using any but every-day 
 words in their every-day sense. And we are never 
 called on to write sentences so full of such words 
 that they do not convey some meaning, even to the 
 unlearned. The reader of a page of history should 
 never find himself in any position of greater diffi- 
 culty than that in which he can say, " I shall fully 
 understand this saying as soon as I find out the 
 meaning of this particular word that puzzles me." 
 In this way history seems to be easier than other 
 
 H 
 
98 THE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 subjects ; it seems to be so because in a certain 
 sense it is so. It stands to reason that historical state- 
 ments made in untechnical language must be easier 
 to understand than the statements of other studies 
 which have to be made in technical language. The 
 mistake lies in thinking that, because the mere state- 
 ments are easier to understand, therefore the subject 
 itself is easier to master. A subject whose state- 
 ments are so easy to understand seems as if it could 
 not need the same judgement, the same application, 
 the same general training of the mind, as subjects 
 whose statements are harder. And this difference at 
 once leads to another. No other branch of know- 
 ledge has so close a connexion with mere literature 
 as history has. Some branches of knowledge stand 
 wholly apart from literature ; by some literature is 
 looked on as an enemy. The geometer needs no 
 graces of style ; he altogether eschews them. I well 
 remember how in my boyhood, when proving a pro- 
 position in Euclid, I said, not simply " much more," 
 but " how much more, is AB greater than CD." I 
 was told, and I have never forgotten the telling, that 
 geometry knows no emotions. So with other branches 
 of knowledge ; there may be a literature about them, 
 but their actual propositions are not literary. If 
 they are accurate and intelligible, it is enough ; if 
 they are anything further, it is more than enough. 
 A book on a subject of natural science may easily 
 and rightly contain much of stirring narrative and 
 picturesque description ; but the pages which con- 
 tain it are likely to be those which set forth the way 
 
HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 99 
 
 in which the scientific knowledge was gained rather 
 than the scientific knowledge itself. But in historical 
 writing, narrative and description, though very far 
 from being the whole of the matter, are no small 
 part of it. And description, if it gets beyond 
 definition, narrative, if it gets beyond annals, are 
 both in their own nature literary. For the narra- 
 tive historian then it is not enough that his state- 
 ments shall be accurate and intelligible ; the annals 
 of the Pontiffs or the Anonymus Cuspiniani may be 
 that. He cannot help having some kind of style, 
 good or bad ; and, being placed under this necessity, 
 he had better have a good style than a bad one. To 
 take no other view, if he tells his story attractively, 
 people will be more likely to listen to what he says 
 and to profit by it. But this unavoidable connexion 
 between history and literary style brings with it 
 further difiiculties and temptations. There are 
 temptations which beset the writer himself and 
 temptations which beset his readers. There is the 
 constant danger that he himself may sacrifice 
 accuracy to effect, that he may exaggerate some- 
 thing, that he may leave out something, that he may 
 throw in some epithet or give his sentence some 
 turn, which may depart from simple truth of state- 
 ment, which will no longer set forth facts as they 
 really happened, but which may make the tale more 
 attractive in the eyes of those who read for pleasure 
 or amusement and not from true love of knowledge. 
 For as soon as any composition assumes a literary 
 form, such readers will, or at least may, follow; and 
 
 H 2 
 
100 TBE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 the temptation arises to give them, not the food 
 which may be best for them, but the food which will 
 most please their palates. In this way false reputa- 
 tions are formed, false views of history are spread 
 abroad ; let the tale be prettily told, let it be told in 
 ^ny way which pleases the taste of any class of 
 readers, and that class of readers will accept it, 
 true or false. 
 
 Let us pause and see more narrowly how some 
 i^eputations are formed. A man shall sit down and 
 profess to write the history of a period chosen at 
 random, without the needful knowledge of times 
 before and after the time chosen ; he shall show in 
 every page, perhaps actual indifference to truth, 
 perhaps only a kind of physical incapacity to make 
 an accurate statement ; he shall go wrong on every 
 opportunity of going wrong ; if a man bore one name 
 or title, he shall give him another ; if a thing 
 happened in one place, he shall say that it happened 
 in another ; he shaU show in every page an ignorance 
 absolutely grotesque of the laws, the customs, the 
 language, of the times of which he is writing, of the 
 geography of his own country and of every other ; 
 words, phrases, allusions, which are the daily bread 
 of the true student shall for him have no meaning ; 
 with his manuscript before him, he shall be followed 
 with a judicial incapacity for copying it ; with his 
 printed book before him, he shall be followed with 
 the like judicial incapacity for construing it ; yet, if 
 he be master of a style which pleases some tastes, the 
 tastes which delight in sneers and metaphors, in^ 
 
TEE FALSE AND THE TRUE HISTORIAN. 101 
 
 scraps of strange tongues and in the newest improve- 
 ments that the newspapers have given to the lan- 
 guage — above all, if he uses his gifts, such as they are, 
 to set forth paradoxes at which common sense and 
 morality revolt — then he shah be hailed as a master 
 of history; volume after volume shall be received 
 with the applause of raptured admirers, and even 
 honest searchers after truth, if they have no means at 
 their disposal for testing the accuracy of statements, 
 shall be led away — and small blame to them — into 
 the evil fortune of mistaking falsehood for truth. 
 And there shall be another man who, with an honest 
 and good heart, shall give himself to record the tale 
 of one of the great periods of his country's history; 
 he shall choose a yet later time, a time whose under- 
 standing implies no slight knowledge of every cen- 
 tury that went before it, and he shall not shrink 
 from the long, perhaps weary, preparation which is 
 needed for his immediate work ; he shall not venture 
 to grapple with the details of his chosen age tiU he 
 has fully mastered its relation to the ages before it 
 and the ages after it ; he shall make himself master 
 of all points^of law and custom and language which 
 may illustrate the work which he has in hand ; 
 and when he draws near to his immediate work, he 
 shall never shrink from labour, from searching, from 
 journeying, from poring one day over a forgotten 
 record and the next day tracing a forgotten field 
 of battle ; he shall choose a controversial time, a time 
 beset with disputes and prejudices on every side, 
 and he shall so deal with it, perhaps not so as to 
 
102 THE BIFFIGULTIES OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 satisfy every zealous disputant, but so that none can 
 charge him with letting indolence or caprice or 
 prejudice ever stand in the way of a honest desire to 
 set forth the truth at any price. He shall, it may be, 
 forbear to deck his tale, or feel no call to deck it, with 
 the metaphors or the smartnesses of the novelist ; 
 but he shall tell it in clear and manly English, 
 perhaps not tickling the fancies of his readers, but 
 being satisfied with appealing to their reason ; and 
 he shall do all this with but scant encouragement 
 save from the few who are Hke-minded with himself ; 
 his volumes shall come forth, pair after pair, growing 
 in value as he feels himself surer on his ground, but 
 drawing to himself only a small share of the applause 
 and incense which wait on the steps of his rival. 
 To the one with whom truth is nothing, or rather 
 to whom truth is simply unattainable, fame shall 
 come as to a favoured and spoiled child of fortune ; 
 to the other, to whom truth is everything, fame 
 shall come only slowly and painfully, as he toils on 
 with undaunted heart tiU men's eyes are at last 
 taught to know the true light of day from the 
 ignis fatuus that guides only to darkness. Nor is 
 the injustice done to particular men the worst thing, 
 nor yet the particular errors and delusions which 
 must follow if men prefer mere prettiness and start- 
 ling paradox to sound sense and sound learning. 
 It is an evil greater still that history, as a branch of 
 knowledge, is lowered from its true place, that it is 
 judged by a false standard. Silently, almost openly, 
 it is accepted that truth, accuracy, careful and honest 
 
MATTER OR MANNER. 103 
 
 dealing with authorities, are matters of less account 
 than a way of writing which tickles the popular 
 fancy. We are told, almost in so many words, that 
 the story is so pleasant to read that it matters nothing 
 whether it be accurate or not ; it is almost deemed a 
 crime to give a warning against so pleasant a delu* 
 sion. The champion of truth against falsehood has 
 indeed an uphiU fight to wage, when truth has come 
 to be so little cared for that love of truth for its own 
 sake has become a motive which not a few seem to 
 have lost the power of understanding. 
 
 Here we have perhaps reached the fullest develope- 
 ment of the notion that history is an easy business 
 on both sides, that any man with a fluent pen is 
 qualified to write it, and that any man to whom the 
 work of a fluent pen gives pleasure is qualified to 
 judge of it. And this degradation of our subject is 
 a direct result, by no means a necessary result, but a 
 result against which we must always be on our guard, 
 of that literary character of our work which cannot 
 be avoided. We must take things as we find them ; 
 we cannot help being judged, partly at least, not 
 only by the inherent value of what we have to say, 
 but by the kind of shape in which we are able to say 
 it. The sternest seeker after truth will welcome 
 truth more gladly if it comes in a pleasing than if it 
 comes in a repulsive shape. How much more they 
 to whom truth is a secondary object compared with 
 the amusement of a moment, or even they who in 
 their hearts really wish for truth, but who have not 
 gone through the schooling which might enable them 
 
104 TEE DIFFICULTIES OF EIBTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 to discern trutli from fakeliood. Style then and 
 form are not to be scorned ; a narrative that is true 
 and dull is better than one that is false and lively; 
 but best of all is the narrative which unites accuracy 
 of matter with vigour and eloquence of style. Eng- 
 lish historical literature can boast of at least three 
 great writers, each of whom knew how to tell his 
 tale, though they told it in three ways as unhke one 
 another as if the later in each case had striven to 
 avoid the manner of the earlier. The mighty work 
 of Gibbon, alone among the works of his age, still 
 keeps its place. Now and then, mainly by help of 
 lights that he had not, we can give a truer picture 
 than he gave of this or that part of his story; after 
 a hundred years we can put some things in propor- 
 tions and relations different from those in which he 
 put them ; but none of us can dream of displacing 
 that vast and wonderful and unrivalled whole. And 
 all this is largely by dint of a style which our reason 
 often condemns but which we admire in spite of our 
 yeason, a style which sometimes misleads by its gor- 
 geousness, but which none the less tells its tale in 
 such a way that we do not blindly admire but 
 understand and remember. Whatever else we read, 
 we must read Gibbon too, I leap to times within 
 the memory of some of us, to the lord and prede- 
 cessor as whose man I am proud to bear myself. 
 JSTo style can be more unlike the artistic pomp of 
 Gibbon than the native, unstudied, diction of Arnold, 
 rising and falling with every turn of his subject, 
 simple even in its highest flights of eloquence, but 
 
GIBBON, ARNOLD, MAC AULA Y. 105 
 
 akin to Gribbon in the main point, that of telling his 
 tale so that we can understand and remember. At 
 my third name I am prepared for an outcry; I know 
 that to run down Lord Macaulay is the fashion of the 
 day. I have heard some speak against him who 
 have a right to speak ; I have heard many more who 
 have none. I at least feel that I have none ; I do 
 not see how any man can have the right who has not 
 gone through the same work through which Mac- 
 aulay went, or at least through some no less thorough 
 ■work of a kindred sort. I can see Macaulay's great 
 and obvious faults as well as any man ; I know as 
 weU as any man the cautions with which his brilliant 
 pictures must be studied ; but I cannot feel that I 
 have any right to speak lightly of one to whom I 
 owe so much in the matter of actual knowledge, and 
 to whom I owe more than to any man as the master 
 of historical narrative. Eead a page of Macaulay ; 
 scan well his minute accuracy in every name and 
 phrase and title; contrast his English undefiled with 
 the slipshod jargon which from our newspapers has 
 run over into our books ; dwell on the style which 
 finds a fitting phrase in our own tongue to set forth 
 every thought, the style which never uses a single 
 word out of its true and honest meaning ; turn the 
 pages of the book in which no man ever read a sen- 
 tence a second time because he failed to catch its 
 meaning the first time, but in which all of us must 
 have read many sentences a second or a twentieth 
 time for the sheer pleasure of dwelling on the clear- 
 ness, the combined fulness and terseness, on the just 
 
106 TEE BIFFICULTIES OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 relation of every word to every other, on the happily 
 chosen epithet, on the sharply pointed sarcasm. These 
 are indeed books which it is dangerous to take down 
 to look at for any single fact or picture. Begin at 
 any random page, and it is hard to put the volume 
 again in its place tiU the rest of its pages have been 
 read for the hundredth time. 
 
 There is then no real opposition between excel- 
 lence of style and excellence of matter. The only 
 question that can ever arise is as to which shall have 
 the preference when they are unhappily divorced^ 
 The earnest student will always make one choice ; 
 it may be that the general reader- — though I believe 
 that the intelligence of that mysterious personage is 
 a good deal underrated by his patrons and caterers 
 — will make another. The danger may some- 
 times make us almost lament the unavoidable part- 
 nership between history and literature. We may be 
 tempted to envy the lot of the geometer or the 
 chemist in whose way are no such pitfalls. The 
 most winning style, the choicest metaphors, the 
 neatest phrases from foreign tongues, would all be 
 thrown away if they were devoted to proving that 
 any two sides of a triangle are not always greater 
 than the third side. When they are devoted to 
 prove that a man cut off his wife's head one day 
 and married her maid the next morning, out of 
 sheer love for his country, they win believers for 
 the paradox. 
 
 But the danger of deeming history an easy business 
 comes earlier in the Ufe-time of most of us. It comes 
 
EVERY ONE KNOWS SOME HISTORY, 107 
 
 before the stage when we are called on to eschew the 
 evil and choose the good among writers who tell the 
 tale of long periods of history in manyvolumes. We all 
 learn something of history from the very beginning; 
 it would seem impossible that any one should know 
 absolutely no history. Now I conceive that it is pos- 
 sible to know absolutely nothing of many forms of 
 natural science ; at least my own knowledge of many 
 of them comes so near to absolute nothingness that 
 the slight gap does not seem impassable. We all learn 
 some history from our cradles ; we hear something 
 about the place in which we live, something about 
 our own families, something about Ceesar or Alfred or 
 Oliver Cromwell, something about Eomans, Saxons, 
 and Danes, all which is history or something that 
 passes for history. We go on learning history, or 
 something that passes for history, every time we look 
 into a newspaper ; we hear it or we discuss it almost 
 every time that we enter into common conversation. 
 In this way, though we are commonly set very early in 
 life to read something that professes to be a formal 
 book of history, yet our earliest notions of history are 
 not so much drawn from any book, good or bad, as they 
 are picked up at random from all manner of chance 
 sources. I believe that I was exceptionally lucky. I 
 was told by my nurse that " an Emperor has a great 
 many kings under him." That saying was not strictly 
 true at the time when it was uttered ; but it had been 
 true only a few years before, and it was going to be 
 true again not very many years after. It is not im- 
 possible that that childish piece of teaching may have 
 
108 THE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 helped my way to a notion of the Eoman Empire in 
 East and West clearer than that of some other people. 
 But I fear that I did not get such helpful teaching as 
 to the relations of Romans, Celts, and Teutons in our 
 own island. It is this history picked up anyhow from 
 the beginning of our lives which really makes the deep- 
 est impression on us, and which, if the impression un- 
 luckily happeus to be wrong, it is the hardest to get 
 rid of in after life. But while we are thus picking 
 up a little history, we are most of us also learning a 
 little natural science in a graver way. Everybody, I 
 imagine, knows a little astronomy. He knows at 
 least that the earth is a sphere and that it goes round 
 the sun. Those who deny those doctrines do not deny 
 them for want of knowledge ; they have heard of 
 them, and have rejected them. Every one then knows 
 at once a little history and a little astronomy. But 
 how different is the astronomy of most of us from our 
 history. Our astronomy may be of the very smallest 
 in point of quantity, but it is right as far as it goes ; 
 it is so far sound knowledge, and it may at some 
 later time be made the path to wider knowledge. 
 But while our rudimentary astronomy is thus true 
 and wholesome, our rudimentary history is commonly 
 the exact opposite. One never comes across a man who 
 has a knowledge of history answering to that man's 
 knowledge of astronomy who knows the old solar 
 system and no more. He has commonly learned a 
 great deal more, but he has commonly learned it in 
 such a way that his first business in after life ought 
 to be to unlearn it. It is just in the simplest points 
 
KNOWLEDGE OF HISTORY AND ASTRONOMY. 109 
 
 of history, in the truths which answer to such truths 
 as that the earth goes round the sun, one might 
 almost say to such truths as that two straight lines 
 cannot enclose a space, that men's ideas get most 
 hopelessly astray. And, if I may speak as a pedant, 
 a confused nomenclature does no small part of the 
 mischief. Vague ideas of geography, a superstitious 
 carrying back of the modern map into all past ages, 
 also do a good deal. Or rather they are the same thing ; 
 geographical confusion is one of the most marked and 
 one of the most mischievous instances of confused no- 
 menclature. It is the greatest and broadest facts, alike 
 in the general history of the world and in the special 
 history of our own people, about which the mass of 
 mankind, includiug many who can be acute and well- 
 informed on particular points, have most to unlearn. 
 The madness of Anglo-Israel is not to be touched by 
 argument ; it must be dealt with as any other form 
 of madness. And the Anglo-Israelite at least knows 
 that there is another teaching, just as the man who 
 holds that the earth is flat knows that there is 
 another teaching. I wiU rather choose a case of 
 simple ignorance, ignorance of a kind which implies 
 that the great leading facts of the world's history 
 have been never heard of — I say never heard of, for, 
 if they had been heard of, they could hardly have 
 been read so utterly vsrong. It is ignorance such as 
 I can hardly conceive existing in the case of any 
 other branch of knowledge, at aU events on the part 
 of any one who undertakes to write even casually 
 about that branch of knowledge. It was not in the 
 
no TEE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 book of a dull man, but in the book of a man not 
 lacking intelligence, not lacking knowledge on some 
 other matters, that I read the statement that in 
 the ninth and tenth centuries the Eussians attacked 
 Constantinople, but found the Turks too strong for 
 them. 
 
 That such a saying as this is possible shows indeed 
 the difficulties of historical study; it shows the kind 
 of hindrances against which we have to strive. The 
 union of knowledge and ignorance which it implies is 
 really remarkable. To know that there was a Eussian 
 power in the ninth and tenth centuries, and to know 
 that the Eussians of those days made more than one 
 attack on Constantinople, is a kind of feat which- we 
 do not expect from everybody. It is a piece of know- 
 ledge which might almost be taken as a sign that its 
 possessor had made his way into the inner circle of 
 historic lore. But as we find it in this case, it simply 
 illustrates the danger of picked up knowledge — for 
 the process of picking up, which begins in childhood, 
 assuredly goes on in after life. The writer had 
 lighted somewhere or other on a statement, seemingly 
 quite accurate as far as it went, about the early 
 enterprises of those Scandinavian adventurers from 
 whom the Eussian name has passed on to one of 
 the great branches of the Slavonic family. The fact 
 was striking ; to him it was probably new; it looked 
 as if it might be given a convenient turn in a bit of 
 political rhetoric. But the man who thus picked up 
 this isolated and rather out-of-the-way piece of know- 
 ledge had no notion of its right place in the history of 
 
INQENIO US IGNORANCE. 1 1 1 
 
 the world. It is in truth part of a very long series of 
 facts, a series which has not yet come to an end, part 
 of that rivahy between Greek and Slave which is the 
 great inherent difficulty of South-E astern Europe. 
 But our writer mistook it for part of another series 
 of facts which also has not come to an end, but whose 
 beginning is a good deal later. To him Constanti- 
 nople was simply the city of the Turk, and nothing 
 else. Those who attacked Constantinople must have 
 found Turks, and not any other people, ready to 
 withstand them. In short to his mind the whole 
 history of the Eastern Eome was a blank. So it is to 
 not a few minds, even to many who show plenty of 
 acuteness, plenty of knowledge, on other subjects, 
 even on other branches of history. Yet without the 
 history of the Eastern Empire of Eome the main 
 story of the world becomes an insoluble riddle. If 
 there had been Turks at Constantinople in the ninth 
 and tenth centuries, the names Europe and Christen- 
 dom could never have had so nearly the same mean- 
 ing as they have had for ages. And one thing is 
 more certain still ; if the Latin and English tongues, 
 if the Christian religion and European civilization, 
 had continued to live on or to come into being, one 
 object at least of the most enlightened modern re- 
 formers would have been fully secured. With the 
 barbarian on the throne of Constantine instead of the 
 Macedonian defenders of the laws and creed of 
 Europe, there would have been no danger of the 
 tongue and Hterature of Greece forming a part of any 
 man's studies in the islands of the Northern Ocean. 
 
112 THE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 In all these ways we have to struggle with 
 difficulties which surely do not beset other pur- 
 suits in anything like the same measure. Nowhere 
 else is half knowledge so likely to be mistaken for 
 real knowledge. Nowhere else is it so large a part 
 of the work of him who would really understand his 
 subject, first of aU to unlearn a vast proportion of 
 aU that he has learned. The work of unlearning 
 must have its turn in all studies whenever a new 
 light shows the old doctrines to be mistaken. In 
 historical study it is needful, not only because new 
 light is often thrown on this or that point, but 
 because so many directly prefer darkness to light, old 
 or new. The seeming ease of the subject, its freedom 
 from technicalities, the way in which it connects 
 itself with aU other studies and pursuits, the 
 necessity which is laid on all of learning, or at least 
 of picking up, some scraps of it, all help to make 
 history the special sport of the unlearned. It be- 
 comes the field where every one, prepared or unpre- 
 pared, has a right to speak his mind, where one man 
 has as good a right to be listened to as another, and 
 where a man commonly gains or fails to gain a hearing 
 on grounds altogether foreign to the real matter of 
 what he says. These are our difficulties, difficulties 
 which, as being in the nature of things, we shall never 
 wholly get rid of, and which we must strive against 
 how we can. And in a place like this, we have the 
 best remedy in our own hands, if we only choose to 
 use it. Here we have the means of learning to 
 distinguish good and evil in this as in other matters. 
 
THE OLD OXFORD SCHOOLS. 113 
 
 Our old time-honoured studies will help us in this 
 as in other things. He who had mastered the books 
 that were read in the old Literse Humaniores School 
 of Oxford had made the best of beginnings ; he had 
 made the best preparation for doing justice to his- 
 torical study or to any other study. He had taken 
 in the training of the mind ; he had sharpened his 
 faculties as no other process could sharpen them ; 
 he had learned what thought is, what study is ; he 
 had only to go on, to use the intellectual habits which 
 he had gained, to use them for any studies to which 
 he might have a call. I remember what an epoch in 
 my life it was when I read the Ethics of Aristotle. 
 I should be sorry to be examined in them now ; 
 but from reading them I seemed to gain a new 
 power which I had not before, a power of discerning 
 and distinguishing, which was ready for use on 
 subjects which had little to do with the matter of 
 the book which thus endowed me with a fresh 
 faculty. He who has cleared his brain by the study 
 of the Ethics, above all if he obeys the precept 
 given in its last sentence and goes on from the 
 Ethics to the matchless Politics — if he grasps the full 
 force of every distinction and definition set forth 
 with all the clearness of that perfect speech, the 
 attempt to represent which in any other tongue 
 must ever be a mockery — he has swept away not 
 a few of the difficulties of historical study from his 
 path. If he still has to unlearn, he has been work- 
 ing in the best school for unlearning as well as for 
 learning. To some parts of history he has, in the 
 
114 THE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 kindred studies of the elder school been already- 
 taught to apply the mental training which he has 
 gained ; he has only to leap over the fatal wall of 
 partition, and to apply the same training to other 
 parts of history. He has only to grasp the truth 
 on which, in season, out of season, I must insist as 
 long as I hold this chair, that facts on one side of 
 some arbitrary line, drawn or not drawn, are as worthy 
 of his attention as facts on the other side, and that 
 the same process of thought which is needful for one 
 is needful for the other. Let him who has made 
 himself master of a century or two of the history of 
 Greece and a century or two of the history of Italy 
 only stoop to believe that that century or two does 
 not take in the whole history of those two illustrious 
 peninsulas, and that beyond the bounds of those 
 peninsulas there is the history of the Teutonic and 
 the Gaulish mainland, of the lesser England in an 
 European island and of the wider England in the 
 world beyond the Ocean. Let him convince himself 
 that he who, in his Thucydides, his Arigtotle, and his 
 Tacitus, has learned how history should be read has 
 advantages above all men in carrying on his*>work 
 to later times. Let him further convince himself 
 that, unless he does carry it on to later times, his 
 own work is utterly imperfect, a means without an 
 object, a beginning without an ending, a foundation 
 without a superstructure. It is strange indeed to see 
 and hear men who have mastered in the minutest detail 
 some little chosen spot in the wide field of history 
 and language turn aside with scorn from the records 
 
THE UNITY OF HISTORY. 115 
 
 of tlieir own land, their own speech, and their own 
 folk. Stranger still is it to see men turn away with 
 the like scorn from all the ages of the lands and the 
 tongues to which they deem themselves specially 
 devoted, save some small fragments here and there 
 which would seem to have been picked out by the 
 chances of the lot or the dice-box. I do not say that 
 even to them the history of the European world, that 
 long tale which gathers around the fortunes of the 
 elder and the younger Eome, will be wholly free from 
 difficulty. But with them the chief difficulty is 
 of their own making. It is the strange prejudice 
 which parts asunder two things either of which 
 loses half its value without the other, the strange 
 unwillingness to acknowledge the near kindred, the 
 equal worthiness, of studies whose essential unity is 
 the, life of both ; it is this which forms the main dif- 
 ficulty which keeps so many who have made a good 
 beginning from going on to its natural ending, and 
 leads them rather to look on the ending as the natural 
 work of those who have made no beginning. Is 
 there any one here fresh from mastering his Spartan 
 ephors and Athenian generals, his Eoman kings and 
 consuls, and who has perhaps even followed his 
 Eoman Csesars for a little space 1 He has made 
 a good beginning; let him not deem that he has 
 made an ending ; he has shown himself a worthy 
 learner ; let him not deem that he is as yet fit 
 to be a teacher. Let him come and walk in the 
 path which lies naturally open to him, a path which 
 will not be free from difficulties even for him, but 
 
 I 2 
 
116 TUE DIFFICULTIES OF HISTORICAL STUDY. 
 
 which if any man has a right to call easy, it is he. 
 The speech of one age of Kome is fresh on his lips, 
 the deeds of the great men of one age of Rome are 
 fresh on his memory ; let him not halt where there 
 is no halting-place ; let him come on and see what 
 Eome did when she at last came to fulfil her mission, 
 when she truly became the mistress and teacher of 
 the world. Let him come and stand on that narrow 
 threshold of the ages, when the victorious Groth, our 
 kinsman in blood and speech, debated in his own 
 mind whether Eomania should be swept from the 
 earth to make room for Gothia, and when he ruled 
 that Eomania without Gothia and Gothia without 
 Romania was alike unable to do the work which 
 the world needed. That decision of Ataulf the West- 
 Goth made it possible that the world that now is 
 shoiild come into being, but it made it possible only 
 by proclaiming the necessary fellowship of that 
 world's older and younger elements. You, men of 
 Eomania, men of a world older than Eomania, men 
 of Hellas itself — we, men of Gothia, men, that is, of 
 Germany, of England, and of America, call on you 
 to join us, to help us, in a work which will be at 
 least less hard for you than it is for others. We bid 
 you, as elder brethren, to join our fellowship ; apart, 
 the work of either is lame and imperfect ; our 
 studies apart from yours rest on no sound founda- 
 tion ; your studies apart from ours lie open to the 
 reproach of those who begin to build, but who, being 
 able to finish, are not willing. 
 
LECTUEE III. 
 
 THE NATUEE OF HISTOEICAL 
 EVIDENCE. 
 
 We have not as yet. defined history, perhaps after 
 all we shall be wise if we do not try very rigidly to 
 define it. If I were called on so to do, I should be 
 most inclined to give some such definition as this ; to 
 say that history is the science of man in his character 
 as a political being. And yet such a definition 
 would hardly be satisfactory; we must at least 
 attach some adjective to the word " science." In- 
 deed I use the word science at all simply to assert 
 our right to use it, if we please ; for our own use 
 I far better like such plain English words as 
 knowledge and learning. But if any one likes better 
 to talk of Latin science than of English knowledge, 
 we have a right to remind him that the two words 
 are simply English and Latin for one another, and 
 that whatever has a right to be called knowledge has 
 an eqtial right to be called science. When I was 
 young, science in this place meant chiefly the know- 
 ledge of man's moral faculties, the lore which we 
 learned from Aristotle and Butler. It has now taken 
 to itself other meanings, sometimes rather strange 
 ones. But students of our branch of science and of 
 other kindred branches have assuredly never denied 
 the right of other branches of science, of all branches 
 
118 TEE NATURE OF HISTOlilCAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 that can be pursued by lawful means, to rank fully 
 on a level witb our own. All that we have ever 
 spoken against is the strange way in which the 
 name of science is often confined to certain branches 
 of knowledge, and the yet stranger way in which 
 some special merit and dignity is often claimed for 
 those branches on the strength of this unfair mono- 
 poly of a name. We have too deep a regard alike 
 for the English and the Latin tongue to wish to be 
 called scientists ; but we do claim for our studies 
 a place among the sciences. We claim no superiority; 
 we' claim simple equality; the various branches of 
 knowledge should be content to stand side by side as 
 brethren in a free democracy ; yearnings after oligar- 
 chic or tyrannical precedence on the part of any one 
 branch of knowledge over another simply show that 
 the votaries of that branch have some little lurking 
 doubt of the soundness of their own position. 
 Asserting then our right to the name of science 
 whenever we choose to use it, we shall hardly care 
 to make much use of it. Teutonic knowledge comes 
 more kindly to English lips, and, when we have 
 learned to distinguish false knowledge from true, we 
 shall assuredly allow nothing to claim the name of 
 knowledge to which we should not, were we in a 
 Latinizing fit, be ready to apply the other name. If 
 Polybios and Tacitus, if Waitz and Stubbs, are not 
 allowed to be men of science, the name may even go 
 to any that may choose to take it up. 
 
 But we must go back to our attempted definition. 
 I said that we were tempted to define history as the 
 
THE "SCIENCE" OF HISTORY. 119 
 
 science or knowledge of man in his political character, 
 and yet that that definition was not altogether satisfac- 
 tory. That definition is perhaps a description of the 
 highest aims of history, of the highest objects to 
 which history can lead, rather than a strict definition 
 of history itself We cannot conceive such a science 
 of man independent of history ; for its teaching must 
 be grounded on history; its conclusions must be 
 deductions from the facts of history; an abstract 
 science of political man, fovmded on theory and not 
 on experience, would be little worth indeed. Yet 
 we can conceive such a science distinct from history; 
 for iise has attached to the word history the sense of 
 narrative, and political science, though founded on 
 the results of narratives, is not bound itself to put 
 on a narrative shape. And again, to such a science 
 many things will seem altogether secondary, almost 
 incidental, which must hold a foremost place in 
 a narrative history. The science of man in his 
 political character would hardly deal directly with 
 the character and actions of particular men. Battles, 
 negotiations, debates in ruling assemblies, a great 
 deal else which must necessarily fill a large space in 
 a historical narrative, wUl come within the range of 
 such a science, but they wiU come only incidentally. 
 They wUl come only as illustrative examples, show- 
 ing what course, whether of true growth or of back- 
 sliding, the mind of man was taking at the particular 
 time spoken of. And again, even if we accept the 
 establishment of such a political science as the 
 highest aim of our historical researches, we cannot 
 
120 THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 deny the fact that much, and very good, historical 
 work may be done and has been done, by men who 
 have thought very little about any such science. 
 Much work indeed that was doubtless agreeable and 
 interesting to themselves, much which certainly has 
 been profitable to others, has been done by men who 
 have had a distinct unwillingness to be looked at as 
 working for any such purpose. And certainly so much 
 manifest nonsense has been talked about the " philo- 
 sophy of history," so much too which may possibly 
 be sense but which comes in a garb which gives 
 it the air of nonsense, that one does not wonder 
 at sensible men sometimes shrinking from applying 
 the words " philosophy," "science," or any other terms 
 of the kind, to their historical studies. And it is 
 plain that history has both its pleasures and its uses 
 without looking beyond them to the establishment 
 of any general teaching of any kind. If we do set 
 up our scientific object as something which it is well, 
 if possible, to seek for, we set it up rather as a 
 counsel of perfection for a few, than as a rule to 
 be necessarily followed by every disciple. On the 
 whole perhaps we gain most real knowledge in 
 a kind of irregular way, and we use it in a kind 
 of irregular way, without ever putting it into very 
 accurate scientific shape. And, when we do try to 
 put things into an accurate scientific shape, to 
 arrange them, that is, under neat formulae and well- 
 defined classes, we only find ourselves beset with new 
 difiiculties and dangers besides those with which we 
 had to struggle in the process of gaining our know- 
 
DA.XGEE OF RIGID DEFINITIONS. 121 
 
 ledge. If we define our classes too rigidly, if we lay 
 down our general formulge witli too much confidence, 
 we shall run the chance of being mistaken. We 
 must at least so word everything as to allow for the 
 possibility of exceptions. We cannot affirm the cause 
 of a past political event with the same certainty with 
 which a natural philosopher can affirm the cause of a 
 past event in his department. We cannot foretell 
 a coming political event with the same certainty 
 with which the astronomer can foretell a coming 
 eclipse. Sometimes indeed we can come very near 
 to such certainty. There is one rule to which in 
 my own experience I have never known an excep- 
 tion ; but I am far from asserting even that rule so 
 positively as to deny that there may be either past 
 or future exceptions. When statesmen who pride 
 themselves chiefly on common sense, when news- 
 papers which pride themselves on a certain air of 
 dignified infallibility, make light of a question or 
 a movement, when they scorn it, when they snub it, 
 when they call it " sentimental," when they rule it 
 to be "beyond the range of practical politics," we 
 know, almost as certainly as we know the next 
 eclipse of the moon, that that question will be the 
 most practical of all questions before long. 
 
 If then we establish a science of man in his political 
 character, it must be a science which does not pre- 
 tend to reach absolute certainty, which does not 
 pretend to come so near to absolute certainty as 
 some other sciences come. And this is true, not 
 only when we look forward to the future, but when 
 
122 THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 we look back to the past. Such a science depends 
 on the facts of history, and we must confess, without 
 trying to blink the truth, that the facts of history 
 are not so nearly certain as the facts of some other 
 branches of knowledge. One does not like to refer 
 to one's own writings, but I believe ifc is only false 
 shame that makes one not like to do so. I have 
 therefore summoned up courage to tell you that I 
 have gone into this matter, in a somewhat more 
 minute and abstract way than I can venture to do in 
 a spoken lecture, in the paper headed Eace and Lan- 
 guage in the third series of my Historical Essays. 
 But a very little thought will bring any of you to see 
 that absolute certainty is unattainable by the very 
 best historical evidence. Be the witness who he 
 may, there is always the possibility both of error and 
 of falsehood. We are worse off in this matter than 
 our fellows in some of the studies which I claim as 
 most nearly akin to our own. The geologist may 
 err in interpreting the witness of the rocks ; but the 
 rocks themselves can neither err nor lie. Now not 
 only may the historian err in interpreting the wit- 
 ness of records, but the records themselves may 
 either err or lie. Even when we reach what we 
 think a nearer approach to a certainty than that of 
 any written records, we still are a long way from 
 absolute certainty. Let any man take his own per- 
 sonal experience. Let him begin at the beginning. 
 Every man fancies that he knows who he is ; but he 
 does not really know it for certain. He knows it 
 only as he knows a fact of past history. No man 
 
ITS UNCERTAINTY. 123 
 
 can say of his own knowledge that he is really the 
 son of those whom he believes to be his parents ; he 
 believes that he is so only as he believes that William 
 the Conqueror landed at Pevensey; he believes it 
 because he has been told it on what he believes to 
 be trustworthy evidence. When we go on to things 
 which do come within our own knowledge, to things 
 which we have ourselves heard and seen, each man 
 may seem to himself to have reached absolute cer- 
 tainty. Yet, first of all, he cannot pass on that 
 absolute certainty to anybody else ; however certain 
 he may feel in his own mind, others will accept 
 his statement only so far as he is deemed to be 
 trustworthy. And besides this, he cannot be abso- 
 lutely certain even in his own mind ; he has been 
 at a certain place ; he has seen a certain action ; he 
 has listened to a certain speech ; but he has to trust 
 others as to the identity of the place, the actor, the 
 speaker. Error or falsehood, though often very un- 
 likely, is always possible. Men have often made very 
 strange mistakes of themselves, they have often been 
 very strangely deluded by others, on matters about 
 which they might seem to have reached that ap- 
 proach to certainty which is implied in their own 
 personal presence. It has become almost a proverb 
 that no two eye-witnesses describe the same event in 
 exactly the same way. For, in describing an event 
 on a great scale, say a battle, they will often not 
 really have the same thing to describe. They have 
 seen different parts of the main action ; though 
 therefore there may be no actual contradiction in the 
 
124 THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 two stories, eacli will put things in quite different 
 relations from those in which they are put by the 
 other. But even if exactly the same things are put 
 before their eyes, it does not follow that they will 
 see exactly the same things. This may be even 
 physically true, according to a difference of eyesight 
 or according to even a very slight difference of phy- 
 sical position. But it is true in another sense also. 
 According to the different turns of men's minds, one 
 man wiU be most struck by one aspect of what he 
 sees and another by another ; in their reports there- 
 fore, though again there may be no real contradiction, 
 yet there is likely to be a wide difference in the 
 relations and proportions in which things are put. 
 All this is so fully acknowledged that it is under- 
 stood that sKght differences in the accounts of the 
 same event are a sign of trustworthiness in those 
 who describe it, while exact agreement in every 
 minute detail is held to be a little suspicious. But if 
 several narrators of the same event, while telling 
 other points of the story in different ways, all tell 
 some one point in the same way, that is accepted as 
 one of the very highest forms of testimony. The 
 thing which struck every witness in the same way we 
 set down as pretty certain to have happened in that 
 way and in no other. Yet even this witness does 
 not amount to absolute certainty; it is possible that 
 even independent witnesses may all be lying ; it is 
 also possible that all of them may severally have 
 been deceived. All these are very familiar facts, 
 which must, one would think, come into the head of 
 
UNAVOIDABLE CONTRADICTIONS. 125 
 
 every one for himself. Yet it is not useless to 
 enlarge upon them, in order to show what kind of evi- 
 dence it is with which in our own studies we have to 
 deal, how far removed it is, not only from the absolute 
 certainty of the geometer, but from various degrees of 
 assurance which come at different stages of the region 
 which lies between his measure of conviction and ours. 
 Some curious illustrations of the uncertainty of 
 even the best evidence often come out if we compare 
 the kind of evidence which we often accept in a 
 historical inquiry with our experience of the same 
 kind of evidence in real life. In our researches we 
 are often set upon questions of nomenclature and 
 family relations ; it is often important, or at any 
 rate interesting, to make out in what degree of 
 kindred, if any, people stood to one another, and 
 we often have no guide towards fixing the degree of 
 kindred except by the names. And the customs of 
 nomenclature in different times and places often 
 enable us to fix it with a high degree of probability, 
 but still only with a high degree of probability, by 
 no means with absolute certainty. I read the re- 
 mark of a writer on Eoman history the other day, 
 that, as it was the custom at Eome for the eldest 
 son to bear the pr^nomen of his father, we may 
 infer that Tiberius Gracchus, famous as tribune, was 
 the eldest of the many sons of the elder Tiberius 
 Gracchus, tribune also and hardly less famous. But 
 we cannot be certain about it. The elder Tiberius 
 might have departed from usage, as Sulla departed 
 from usage when he gave one of his sons the jprie- 
 
126 THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 nomen of Faustus, ■which no man is known to have 
 borne before him. It was not more usual for an 
 Athenian eldest son to take the name of his grand- 
 father, and for a Koman eldest son to take the name 
 of his father, than it is for an English peer to be 
 succeeded by his eldest son. Yet, by virtue of a 
 special patent, the dukedom of Edward Duke of 
 Somerset passed first to the descendants of his second 
 son, a singularity which afforded room for a remark- 
 able dialogue between the Prince of Orange and the 
 representative of the elder branch. " I believe, Sir 
 Edward, you are of the Duke of Somerset's family." 
 " Pardon me, your Highness, the Duke of Somerset is 
 of my family." The Prince here made a very natural 
 inference, but it happened to be a wrong one. In 
 my work in the eleventh and twelfth centuries I 
 have found the study of personal nomenclature a 
 matter of no small importance, and I have often had 
 to make inferences as to the descent and even the 
 nationality of various persons from their names only. 
 The custom of taking the name of a godfather was 
 so common that, when I have found a Norman, in 
 the days of the Confessor or in the early days of the 
 Conqueror, bearing an English or Danish name, the 
 name of some leading Englishman of the time, I 
 have inferred with some confidence that that Eng- 
 lishman was his godfather. To take two cases out 
 of many, it looks as if Harold son of King Edward's 
 nephew Earl Ralph of Hereford was a godson of 
 Harold Earl and King, and as if Edith daughter of 
 WiUiam of Warren was the god-daughter of Edith 
 
CASES OF NOMENCLATURE. 127 
 
 the Lady. One feels pretty sure of such an infer- 
 ence, one feels rather pleased with it ; but how far 
 it is from real certainty may be judged from an in- 
 stance in my own personal experience. Many of 
 you, I hope, know well the name of my late friend 
 Mr. Dimock, editor of several volumes of the Chro- 
 nicles and Memorials, of some of the works of Giral- 
 dus and of the Life of Saint Hugh — the real Life, the 
 real text, not the grotesque attempt at reproducing 
 it which some may have seen in a more popular book. 
 Now if you read in a chronicle that I was godfather to 
 a son of Mr. Dimock, and if you read in another chro- 
 nicle that Mr. Dimock had a son baptized by the 
 name of Edward Freeman, I think you would infer, 
 and that you would think that you were inferring 
 with certainty, that Edward Freeman Dimock was 
 my godson. In making that inference you have 
 reached a much higher degree of probability than 
 was reached in my cases from the eleventh century. 
 You seem to have reached the stage of that argu- 
 ment from undesigned coincidences which we may call 
 the very highest degree of probability. Yet in this 
 case the argument from undesigned coincidences 
 would be mistaken. Edward Freeman Dimock is 
 not my godson ; he was called after another Edward 
 and another Freeman, and his brother who is my 
 godson bears the name of Hugh Percival. 
 
 This little bit of modern nomenclature is, I believe, 
 one of the most unhkely things that could have hap- 
 pened. I do not understand the doctrine of chances j 
 but I should like to know how those who do under- 
 
128 THE NATURE OF HISTORIC AL EVIDENCE. 
 
 stand it would reckon the odds on either side. But 
 it helps us to one of our most useful canons in 
 weighing of evidence. " Credo, quia impossibile 
 est," is a rule which we should always bear in mind, 
 though it is a rule which needs much caution in its 
 application. A thing which is really physically im- 
 possible — though even about physical impossibihty 
 I may have something to say before I have done — 
 we do not, under ordinary circumstances, believe. 
 But those things which we often loosely call impos- 
 sible merely because they are very unlikely, are 
 often the more likely to be true because they are so 
 very unlikely. That is to say, they are so unlikely 
 that no one is likely to have said that they happened 
 unless they really did happen. And when we can 
 say this, it amounts to a very high degree of pro- 
 bability indeed. Let us suppose that one who had 
 read my two imaginary chronicles, one of which re- 
 corded the existence of Edward Freeman Dimock and 
 the other recorded my gossipred to one of his father's 
 sons, had gone on and found a third chronicle which 
 recorded the seemingly very unlikely fact that Edward 
 Freeman Dimock was not my godson but the godson 
 of somebody else. Such an one would have done 
 utterly wrong if he looked on this third statement 
 as set aside by the undersigned coincidence of the 
 other two. For there would be no real contradiction, 
 no real impossibility; the third statement would 
 have the force of an explanatory comment on the 
 other two ; its very unlikelihood when compared with 
 the natural inference from the other two would be 
 
"CREDO, QUIA IMPOSSIBILE EST." 129 
 
 the best reason for accepting it. But this is because, 
 in my imaginary case, as in many real ones, it is 
 hard to conceive any one making a wilful misstate- 
 ment about the matter. A man might indeed 
 blunder, but, with any man who is not physically 
 incapable of making an accurate statement, the very 
 oddness of the story would be hkely to keep him 
 from blundering, while for wilful misstatement there 
 is no room for any motive. 
 
 It is another case when motives can be supposed 
 to come in. Yet people who invent a story with a 
 motive, unless they are very subtle indeed, will com- 
 monly invent a story that is likely, or at least one 
 which they think is likely, not one which is mani- 
 festly unlikely. A made-up story, like that of the 
 false Ingulf, is commonly not unlikely in itself The 
 Ingulf legend reads very much as if it were true ; 
 it did not seem unlikely to its author, and it has not 
 seemed unlikely to many of his readers. It is proved 
 to be false, not by inherent unlikelihood, but by mis- 
 takes in the dates, by the introduction of words, cus- 
 toms, details of every kind, at a certain period which 
 are known not to have been in use at that period. 
 That Ingulf, if he went to Constantinople, should be 
 presented to the Emperor was likely enough ; but it 
 is not only unlikely but impossible that he should 
 have been presented to the Emperor Alexios twenty 
 years before Alexios began to reign. We find him 
 out by this kind of blunder ; we find him out when 
 he talks of a certain canon holding " pinguissimam 
 prsebendam," at a time before capitular revenues were 
 
 K 
 
130 THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 divided into prebends. The false Ingulf broke down 
 because, though he was an ingenious inventor of a 
 tale, he had not antiquarian knowledge enough to 
 invent a possible tale of a time three or four centuries 
 before his own day. Otherwise a forger, if only to 
 make men believe in his forgery, will commonly be 
 accurate in all points which do not touch the matter 
 of his invention. A false charter therefore is often, 
 on incidental points which do not concern the object 
 of the forgery, as good evidence as a true one. 
 Therefore, even where there is a motive for inven- 
 tion, the range of invention is limited ; a forger who 
 knows how to compass his own purposes will not 
 venture on anything which he knows can be at once 
 exposed. Where to draw the line is hard, as it de- 
 pends so much on the amount of knowledge to be 
 reckoned on in such and such an age, and among 
 such and such classes of people. But it certainly was 
 going a long way when the burgesses of Barnstaple 
 in the time of Edward the Third brought forward a 
 charter of ^thelstan, which not only gave them the 
 right of sending two burgesses to Parliament, but 
 further — such was the Glorious King's eagerness to 
 be enlightened by the advice of the representatives 
 of Barnstaple — relieved them from divers services 
 and payments on condition of their sending those 
 burgesses. The power of shameless fiction could 
 hardly go further ; but we learn something from 
 the story. We not only learn how shameless forgers 
 can be, and how great sometimes is the public igno- 
 rance on which they think they can reckon. The 
 
CASES OF SHEER INVENTION. 131 
 
 notion about ^thelstan's favour to Barnstaple is not 
 a whit more monstrous, it reckons on not a whit 
 more of ignorance, than the equally shameless fiction 
 which used to tell us that Alfred founded this Uni- 
 versity or some college in it. Yet we know that 
 not many years ago eminent statesmen and popular 
 writers dined in honour of this last fiction. But our 
 Barnstaple fiction teaches us more than this. It 
 surely shows that in Edward the Third's day the 
 burgesses of Barnstaple had already come to see that 
 the right of sending two of their number to Parlia- 
 ment was a privilege, a privilege to be sure out of 
 which they hoped to gain something, but not, as 
 many boroughs looked on it, a mere burthen. 
 
 Now in the Barnstaple case, the motive is plain 
 enough; but it is hard, to see on what ground the 
 forgers could have gone. Some circumstance of which 
 we know nothing must have suggested the fiction. 
 Let us take another case of local assertion from an- 
 other land, where the pretension is at any rate the 
 exaggeration of something real. The local annals of 
 Monza record coronations of several kings in the 
 church of Monza of which no record is to be found 
 elsewhere. They assert the right of the Archpriest 
 of Monza, the head of the coUegiate chapter, to crown 
 the King of Italy, if the Archbishop of Milan refused 
 to do so. In all this there is some falsehood, but 
 there is a groundwork of truth. There is the un- 
 doubted fact that the Italian crown was kept at 
 Monza and had to be taken to Milan — once to 
 Bologna — for each coronation. This certainly looks 
 
 K 2 
 
132 THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 as if Monza was the original crowning-place, and, 
 though some of the alleged coronations are certainly 
 fictitious, it might make ns shrink from saying that 
 they all are. The claim of the archpriest we may be 
 inclined, to dismiss. Our kings are crowned at 
 Westminster, not at Canterbury, but they are not 
 crowned by the abbots or deans of Westminster. 
 Yet this is not proof; the use of Monza may have 
 been different. Let us take one case more, a case of 
 which I have said, something in the fourth volume 
 of the Norman Conquest. There is no evidence 
 at aU, nothing but what is called local tradition, 
 for the story that Henry the First was born at Selby. 
 Now we know what local tradition is. It is one of 
 the most precious things in the world when we can 
 get it ; only we never can get it. What passes for 
 it is as a rule the guess of some antiquary of the 
 seventeenth or eighteenth century which has won 
 for itself local belief But the guess of the antiquary, 
 though commonly wrong, goes on some kind of 
 ground ; it stands in some kind of relation to the 
 facts. But what should make anybody say that 
 Henry the First was born at Selby 1 One is inclined 
 to say again, " Credo quia impossibile est ;" what 
 could put the thought into anybody's head if it were 
 not so 1 And when we think a moment, we see that, 
 besides this argument, a kind of Hkelihood comes out 
 of the very unlikelihood. Selby was certainly a most 
 unlikely place to be chosen for the birth of an setheling. 
 But York, or any convenient spot in Yorkshire, was 
 a most likely place to be chosen for the birth of 
 
CASES OF LOCAL TRADITION. 133 
 
 that particular setheliug, the English-bom son of the 
 Norman Conqueror. The policy would be the same 
 as that which caused a son of the conqueror of North 
 Wales to be Edward of Caernarvon, horn beyond 
 doubt at Caernarvon, though assuredly not in the 
 tower of his own building. And some unforeseen 
 accident might cause Henry to be born at Selby, 
 especially if Selby was, as one form of the story 
 implies, already drawing notice to itself as the 
 dwelling-place of a holy man, though hardly as yet 
 the site of a great abbey. That a building far later 
 than his time was shown as Henry's actual birth- 
 place is only the common run of such stories. It 
 no more proves that Henry was not born at Selby 
 than the fact that the Eagle tower is, I believe, still 
 shown as the birth-place of Edward the Second 
 proves that Edward the Second was not born at 
 Caernarvon. Only we have distinct evidence that 
 Edward was born at Caernarvon ; we have no evi- 
 dence that Henry was bom at Selby. All that we 
 know is that he was born in England ; when we 
 come to think, we see that it is very Hkely that he 
 was born in Yorkshire ; if he was born in Yorkshire, 
 it is not at aU likely in -itself, but it is made likely 
 by the very unlikelihood, that he was born at Selby. 
 Here we have looked into a legend, and we have 
 left mere likelihood in its slenderest form. We have 
 not got so far as believing, and so far as we have 
 looked in the direction of believing, it has been 
 wholly " quia impossibile est." Now, if we rule that 
 the unlikely is, in some sort, likely by dint of very 
 
134 THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 unlikelihood, we can hardly go so far on the other 
 side ; we cannot rule that a story is unlikely because 
 it is likely. This would be going too far ; yet short 
 of direct disproof, there is no argument so strong 
 against any story as the argument that it is too 
 obvious, that it is the kind of story that is sure to 
 arise under the circumstances, that it is, with the 
 needful change of names, really the same story which 
 has arisen over and over again in the like case. Yet 
 even here we are followed by a difficulty. We see 
 plainly that stories of this kind do, as I have said 
 before now, go about the world with blanks for the 
 names, and get fitted with different names in 
 different times and places. We feel sure that in 
 most cases these stories are sheer fiction devised 
 after the pattern of some other stories. But the 
 question always thrusts itself in. Are all these tales 
 fiction ? Was the very first story of the kind an 
 invention ? Or did something of the kind once 
 really happen somewhere, and so set the pattern for 
 all the false stories 1 You aU know the almost 
 invariable legend of an underground passage wher- 
 ever two ancient buildings stand within perhaps 
 several miles of one another. The notion is so very 
 general, and yet so very strange, that I have some- 
 times been tempted to stop and think whether there 
 must not be somewhere or other a real underground 
 passage which has set the pattern for all the ima- 
 ginary ones. With the oldest story of all, if we 
 knew which that was, the rule " Credo quia im- 
 possibile est " would again come in ; but it could 
 
CASES OF SUPPOSED REPETITION. 135 
 
 come in only with the oldest story of all. In all. 
 these cases therefore of current stories with blanks 
 for the names it is quite possible that all may have 
 arisen out of one true story. And now and then, 
 though not often, we can see what that story was. 
 When we cannot do so, though on the whole we do 
 wisely in rejecting the whole mass of stories, yet it 
 is always possible that, in casting aside many 
 fictions, we may be casting aside one truth. We 
 often cast a story aside because it seems to be a 
 mere repetition of another ; we specially do this in 
 the history of the Roman commonwealth. And 
 there is no doubt that we often act quite soundly 
 in so doing. The Eoman stories are so very often 
 evident repetitions of one another, sometimes perhaps 
 through sheer invention, sometimes perhaps through 
 that process whereby two versions of the same event, 
 differing in some small point, are mistaken for 
 accounts of two different events. But there is 
 however in some quarters a tendency to take for 
 granted that any story which seems to repeat another 
 must necessarily be a repetition of it, a repetition of 
 it in the sense which implies that the second story 
 never happened. I have read a German writer who 
 holds that the devotion of the second Publius Decius 
 at Sentinum is simply the devotion of the first Publius 
 Decius by Vesuvius over again. Now, setting aside 
 whatever amount of evidence we may think that we 
 have for the second story, if we bring it to a question 
 of likelihood, there is certainly the Hkelihood that 
 the exploit of the father should be told again as an 
 
136 TEE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 exploit of the son ; but there is also the likelihood 
 that the son, finding himself in the like case with his 
 father, should be stirred up to follow the example of 
 his father. Most people, I fancy, accept the story of the 
 second Decius ; very few, I fancy, accept the story of 
 the devotion of yet a third Decius in the war with 
 Pyrrhos. And we act rightly, as it seems to me, in 
 accepting the second and rejecting the third. For 
 against the second there is really nothing to be said 
 except the suspicion that it may be a repeated story, 
 while against the third there is the existence of an- 
 other version which bears the distinct stamp of truth. 
 This is the story that the third Decius thought of 
 renewing the exploit of his father and grandfather, 
 but was hindered from so doing by a proclamation of 
 Pyrrhos, which ordered that, if any Koman was seen 
 attempting to perform any such ceremony, he should 
 not be killed in the battle, but should be taken alive 
 and put to death as an impostor. It is hard to say 
 how this story could have arisen if a real act of self- 
 devotion had been carried out. We are here led to 
 that well-known law of criticism which applies to 
 judgements in our study and in many others. Critics 
 of texts prefer the more difficult reading ; they 
 prefer the reading which the copyist would be 
 likely to alter into something else. So it is with 
 historical criticism. We have two stories of an 
 event. They stand in this relation to one another 
 that, if version A is true, we at once understand how 
 version B arose, while, if version B is true, we cannot 
 understand how A arose. This is one of the strongest 
 
THE DECII. 137 
 
 possible arguments in favour of A. If the third 
 Decius had really devoted himself, no one would 
 have invented the story of the proclamation of 
 Pyrrhos ; but to many the story of a third devotion 
 would be so taking that they would not scruple to 
 tell it even in the teeth of the fact which upset 
 it. And I should be half-inclined to carry on the 
 same argument to another detail of the story. I fear 
 that many will cry out if I suggest the possibility, 
 the bare possibility, that, instead of the grand pic- 
 ture of the devoted consul riding to seek death in 
 the ranks of the enemy, the devotion was in truth a 
 human sacrifice. John Zonaras at least says that 
 the first Decius, when he had devoted himself, was 
 put to death by one of his own soldiers. Now 
 neither Z6naras nor Dio Cassius, whom he commonly 
 follows, was likely to invent this; he must surely 
 have found it in some early record ; and we can 
 well believe that the splendid story in Livy is a 
 softening of an ugly truth. On the other hand, 
 the formiila and ritual in Livy must be genuine ; 
 those are things which may be trusted, even when 
 the event is purely fictitious. TuUus Hostilius 
 may be an imaginary king ; but his " lex horrendi 
 carminis " is quite trustworthy. It is open to any 
 one to suggest that, as the gladiator-fights were a 
 softening of the original human sacrifice, so the riding 
 of the devoted general into the ranks of the enemy 
 may be a softening of the same kind ; he may even sug- 
 gest that this softening took place in the time between 
 the devotion of the first Decius and that of the second. 
 
138 THE SATIRE OF HISTOEICAL EVIDESCE. 
 
 It may be so ; but a warv oritic will bardly build 
 much on so slender a foundation of possibility. 
 
 At every step of this argument we are reminded 
 of the uncertainty of historical e\'idence ; and yet at 
 every step we meet with something which warns us 
 that the practice of rejecting a story merely because 
 something very like it happened once before, is one 
 that must be used with great caution. As a matter 
 of fact, events often do repeat one another; it is 
 likely that they should repeat one another ; not only 
 are like causes likely to produce like results, but in 
 events that depend on the human will it is often likely 
 that one man will act in a certain Avay simply because 
 another man acted in the same way before him. I 
 have often thought how easily two important reigns 
 in our own history might be dealt with in the way that 
 I have spoken of, how easily the later reign might be 
 judged to be a mere rej^etition of the former, if we 
 knew no more of them than we kno\\' of some other 
 parts of history. Let us suppose that the reigns of 
 Henry the First and Henry the Second were known 
 to us only in the same meagre way that we know the 
 reigns of some of the ancient potentates of the East. 
 In short and dry annals tliey might easily be told so 
 as to look like the same story. Each king beai-s the 
 same name ; each reigns the same number of years ; 
 each comes to the ero\An in a ^A'aj' other than succes- 
 sion from father to son ; each restores order after a 
 time of confusion ; each improves his political posi- 
 tion by his marriage ; eacli is hailed as a restorer 
 of the old native kingship; each loses his eldest son ; 
 
DECEPTIVE PARALLELS. 139 
 
 each gives his daughter Matilda to a Henry in 
 Germany; each has a controversy with his arch- 
 bishop ; each wages war with France ; each dies in 
 his continental dominions ; each, if our supposed 
 meagre annals can be supposed to tell us of such 
 points, shows himself a great lawgiver and adminis- 
 trator, and each, to some extent, displays the same 
 personal qualities, good and bad. Now when we 
 come really to study the two reigns, we see that the 
 details of all these supposed points of likeness are 
 utterly different; but I am supposing very meagre 
 annals, such as very often are all that we can get, 
 and, in such annals, the two tales would very likely 
 be so told that a master of the higher criticism 
 might cast aside Henry the Second and his acts as a 
 mere double of his grandfather and his acts. We 
 know how very far wrong such a judgement would 
 be ; and this should make us be cautious in applying 
 a rule which, though often very useful, is always 
 dangerous in cases where we may get utterly wrong 
 without knowing it. 
 
 When I suggested the possibihty that the noble 
 tale of the death of Publius Decius may have grown 
 out of an ugly story of human sacrifice, I did no 
 more than suggest a possibility. But we have often 
 to apply the same kind of process with much greater 
 confidence. I need not tell you that the result of 
 historical criticism constantly is to tear away all 
 shreds of likelihood, all shreds of possibihty, from 
 the choicest, the most beautiful, the most cherished, 
 legends. And this often makes our studies un- 
 
140 THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 popular ; people quarrel with us because we rob 
 them of their beloved fables, and they turn round 
 and say that they will believe the fables in spite 
 of us and our evidence. When it comes to this, 
 there is of course no more to be said ; we have led 
 the horse to the water, but we cannot make him 
 drink. One may doubt whether the same direct 
 refusal to accept truth is encountered in the same 
 way, or at least to tlie same extent, by the teachers 
 of other branches of knowledge. Something like it 
 doubtless comes in when a strong theological or 
 political conviction is touched ; that is, a man 
 declines to listen to arguments which he fears 
 might, if they were allowed a full and fair hearing, 
 compel him to give up that conviction. And in such 
 cases we must remember that, if a man does wrong 
 to refuse a fair hearing to arguments which tell 
 against his conviction, he does a worse wrong if he 
 gives up his conviction lightly, without that stress of 
 argument which is really needed to upset it. But 
 I am speaking, not of serious convictions of this kind, 
 but of the ten thousand cases in which people cleave 
 to a mere legend, simply because it is the story that 
 they have always heard, or because they think it 
 prettier than the true story. Surely the astronomer, 
 to turn to him again, does not meet with this par- 
 ticular form of opposition. There is something very 
 pretty in the old superstition that the sun dances for 
 joy on Easter-day; but I cannot fancy that anybody 
 rejects the truths of astronomy on the ground of its 
 prettiness. The votaries of the Bible Earth do not 
 
VALUE OF NEGATIVE PROOF. 141 
 
 cleave to their errors because they are pretty, but out 
 of a solemn conviction that they are true and good 
 for their souls. But the argument from prettiness is 
 one which he who acts at all as a missionary of sound 
 historic knowledge comes across daily. It comes into 
 play even when it is possible actually to disprove the 
 legend, much more does it come into play in those 
 many cases where positive proof and disproof cannot 
 come in. Many people seem to think that a proposition 
 is proved, if it cannot be disproved. It is a deep 
 saying of Grote that, if a man chooses to say that 
 rain fell on the site of New York on the day of the 
 battle of Plataia, no one can prove that it did not ; 
 only he cannot prove that it did. In a case like this, 
 where it must be clear to every one that no one can 
 know anything about the matter, perhaps every one 
 would allow the lawfulness of ignorance. But where 
 the case is not so clear, where knowledge may 
 possibly be reached, but where it does not happen to 
 have been reached, he who affirms has with many 
 minds a great advantage over him who simply denies; 
 he who professes knowledge has a great advantage 
 over him who confesses ignorance. Yery few see with 
 Sir George Lewis — though Sir Greorge Lewis perhaps 
 carried his own doctrine a little too far — that in a 
 great many cases we ought to be satisfied with a 
 negative result, that we must often put up with 
 knowing that a thing did not happen in a particular 
 way or did not happen at all, without being furnished 
 with any counter-statement to put in the place of 
 that which we reject. Nothing is more common, but 
 
142 THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 nothing is more unreasonable, than, when a man has 
 shown that a favourite legend is a mere legend with- 
 out a scrap of evidence for it, to ask him what he 
 puts in its place. If he has nothing to put in its 
 place, many will think that his case has broken 
 down. Yet he has done all that he undertook to do ; 
 all that he undertook was to show that the legend 
 was a mere legend resting on no evidence ; he did 
 not undertake to put something else instead of the 
 legend ; nay, he did not necessarily undertake to 
 prove that the legend was false. If any hitherto 
 unknown evidence should be found in favour of the 
 popular story, he will at once withdraw his objection 
 to it, and that without in the least damaging the 
 position which he held when he made the objection. 
 
 Let us see how the case stands with regard to the 
 most famous of all legends. As we have no right to 
 say that rain did not fall on the site of New York 
 on the day of the battle of Plataia, so neither have 
 we any right to say that Eome was not founded 
 by twins who had been suckled by a wolf. I speak 
 on the supposition that certain modern stories from 
 India of children suckled by wolves are trustworthy ; 
 if they are not, we may perhaps go a step further. 
 If those Indian stories are trustworthy, we have 
 no right to say that the legend of Eomulus and 
 Kemus is false. All that we have a right to say 
 is that there is no evidence for it ; to say that it 
 is not proved by the Palatine being a likely place 
 for a wolf's lair — for how should the story arise in 
 an unlikely place 1 — to say that it is not proved 
 
THE FOUNDATION LEGEND OF ROME. 143 
 
 by the existence of Fasti of the time of Augustus 
 beginning with " Eomulus filius Martis " — that it is not 
 proved by the existence of certain pieces of very ancient 
 masonry which do prove a great deal in other ways. 
 We may go on to say that the story is simply one of 
 countless stories of the foundation of Eome which 
 has happened to become more famous than the 
 others, but which has not a scrap more of real 
 evidence in its favour. We may add, what the 
 comparative method teaches us, that it is one of 
 a whole class of legends of the foundation of cities, 
 and that the legends of the foundation of Ardea and 
 Tusculum, which no one cares to believe, are worth 
 just as much and just as little as the more famous 
 legend of the foundation of Eome. Therefore, while 
 the story is most unlikely, its unlikelihood is not 
 of the kind which grows into likelihood ; we see how 
 it came into men's heads to imagine it. Eome must 
 have its foundation-legend as well as other cities, 
 and a legend that suited a wooded hill by the Tiber 
 grew up. Nor is there even the desperate chance 
 that the Eoman story might be the one true story 
 after the pattern of which other stories were in- 
 vented. For the legend itself, backed up so far by 
 every evidence of geography and nomenclature, points 
 to Eome, not as the eldest city of Latium, but as the 
 youngest. In the Eoman legend we have perhaps 
 reached the very highest degree of inherent unlikeli- 
 hood; and it does seem absolutely impossible that 
 any external evidence should ever be found to 
 confirm it. It is the highest degree of unlikelihood ; 
 
144 THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 still it is mere unlikelihood. We are not inclined 
 to believe that Eome was founded by a king who 
 was suckled by a wolf and who killed his brother ; 
 but we cannot deny that position with the same 
 undoubting confidence with which we can deny the 
 position that University College was founded by a 
 king who let the girdle-cake burn when it was his 
 business to turn it. 
 
 Now in all these various ways which we have 
 been speaking of, it may be said that, if we have 
 established anything, it has been the uncertainty of 
 all historical evidence of every kind. It may be said 
 that, if there is such a thing as the science that I 
 hinted at, the science which, if not the same thing as 
 history, must take history as its ground-work, the 
 science of man in his political character, that science 
 must be a science of a very uncertain kind. It must 
 be very unlike other sciences, sciences whose pro- 
 positions may be made with certainty, where, given 
 such and such combinations, such and such results 
 may be looked for with perfect confidence. Such 
 a science, many will be tempted to say, is no science 
 at all ; it is simple guess-work, following at its best 
 no higher law than the law of chances. Now it is 
 easy to make an answer which may lead us into 
 very deep questions indeed. We might ask whether 
 the difference between the nature of the evidence 
 with which we have to deal and the nature of the 
 evidence with which some of the sciences have to 
 deal is not sometimes exaggerated. We surely 
 sometimes over-rate the degree of certainty, perhaps 
 
DEGREES OF LIKELIHOOD. 145 
 
 rather the approach to certainty, which is reached by 
 sonie of the natural sciences. It certainly seems to 
 me that their professors sometimes mistake for cer- 
 tainty something which is only the highest degree of 
 likelihood, and that they are apt to draw too wide a 
 line between their very high degree of likelihood 
 and the much lower degrees of Hkelihood with which 
 we have often to put up. The difference between 
 their evidence and ours is surely a difference only of 
 degree and not of kind. Complete certainty is the 
 possession of very few, some say of none. For I had 
 once gone on to say that no one is really certain except 
 the mathematician ; but I have since been warned 
 that even the mathematician is not really certain, that 
 even the truths of geometry are dependent on our 
 present conditions of being, and that there might be 
 a world, as Mill put it, in which two and two should 
 make five. Such speculations are rather beyond me ; 
 but there surely is at least a difference in kind between 
 the evidence of the geometer and the evidence of any 
 other of us. The geometer can not only say that a 
 thing is, but he can say why it is. I tremble when I 
 say it, but it seems to me that in most branches of 
 knowledge, in many of those whose results are 
 deemed to be most certain, their professors can after 
 all only tell us that a thing is so ; they cannot tell 
 us why it is so. I even venture to think, if it be not 
 a contradiction to say so, that, while the historian 
 must have less confidence than the natural philo- 
 sopher has in saying that things are so, yet, granting 
 that they are so, he can come nearer than the natural 
 
 L 
 
146 THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 philosoplier can to saying why things are so. The 
 laws of natural science are after all only deductions 
 from experience. As far as experience goes, things 
 always do happen in a particular way; the philo- 
 sopher cannot tell us why they happen in that way. 
 He can give us immediate cause after immediate 
 cause ; but, if pressed to tell us the ultimate cause, 
 he can only say it is Force. That is really only a 
 philosophical way of saying that he does not know. 
 Follow even the law of gravitation into aU its endless 
 and wonderful applications ; still, after all, we cannot 
 say why things gravitate ; we can only say that they 
 do. I may be saying something very old-fashioned, 
 very unscientific, but surely, when we accept every 
 fact and every classification of facts that modern 
 science has brought to light, to say that those facts 
 are the results of a personal will which rules that 
 they shall happen in a certain way, is at least as 
 philosophical as to say that they are the result of Force, 
 when nobody can tell us what Force is. The truths 
 of natural science are the result of experience ; we 
 feel sure that there must be an inherent connexion 
 between the effect and the immediate cause, because, 
 as far as experience goes, the effect always follows on 
 the immediate cause. But, before experience,' we 
 could never see the connexion between the cause and 
 the effect. We believe that the sun did rise on any 
 past day that may be named, even millenniums before 
 the beginning of recorded history. We believe that 
 the sun will rise on any future day that may be 
 named, be that day never so distant. That is to say. 
 
EVIDENCE OF NATURAL SCIENCE. 147 
 
 we believe it both ways subject to the contingency — 
 for after all it is only a contingency — that the exist- 
 ing state of things was in being at the past date and 
 that it will remain in being at the future date. But 
 we believe it only because, within the whole range of 
 human experience, that process which in popular 
 language we call the rising of the sun always has 
 taken place once in twenty-four hours. The 
 astronomer can tell us the immediate causes why it 
 takes place ; he can tell us the causes of those causes 
 through a long series ; but he cannot reach the 
 ultimate cause. He cannot reach the certainty — if 
 I may call it certainty — of a proposition in Euclid. 
 He cannot show that there is not a cause beyond all 
 other causes which once set to work the causes which 
 he knows, a cause which may again cause them to 
 cease working. In other words, Omniisotence may 
 have called the solar system into being and Omnipo- 
 tence may put an end to the solar system. So to hold 
 is at least as philosophical as any other theory on a 
 matter which is really beyond our faculties, faculties 
 which cannot understand either absolute beginning 
 or the absence of absolute beginning, which cannot 
 •understand either the absence of an ultimate cause 
 or the nature of the ultimate cause. That is to say 
 once more, none but the mathematician is really 
 certain ; in other matters we cannot get beyond 
 higher and lower degrees of likelihood. As to facts, 
 present and future, the natural philosopher, without 
 reaching the absolute certainty of the mathematician, 
 comes vastly nearer to it than the historian ever can 
 
 L 2 
 
148 THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 come. But when we have to do with the real causes 
 of the facts, I maintain that the historian comes 
 nearer to understanding their nature than the 
 natural philosopher can. We are often in doubt as 
 to our facts ; but we are never driven to explain our 
 facts by assigning as their cause a Force which is a 
 mere name, a decorous way of confessing ignorance. 
 
 Why are historical events uncertain, uncertain both 
 in themselves and in their evidence 1 Because they 
 depend on things which are in their own nature 
 uncertain. The event itself depends on the human 
 will, a very uncertain thing ; the evidence for it 
 depends on human truthfulness, another very un- 
 certain thing. When I say that the event depends 
 on the human wiU, I speak with all reverence, both 
 philosophical and religious. The Christian, the theist 
 of any kind, believes that man's wiU acts only in 
 subordination to a higher will. Nor would the 
 existence of that higher will be set aside, if it could 
 be shown, as some tell us, that we have no freedom 
 of the will, that we are all ingeniously constructed 
 machines, machines so ingeniously constructed as to 
 make us fancy that we have a free will when we 
 have none. Some of us may be unphUosophical 
 enough to say " Solvitur vellendo." It may be enough 
 to say that, if we have no free will, we live in a 
 world of sheer delusion, not only as to historical 
 knowledge, but as to all daily events, public or 
 private. In fact we are brought back to my favourite 
 proposition that history is past politics and politics 
 present history. Past history is uncertain, but so are 
 
UNCERTAINTY OF HISTORICAL EVENTS. 149 
 
 the things that go on under our own eyes. Every- 
 body felt quite certain that Parliament would meet on 
 a certain Thursday ^. Everybody who was concerned 
 acted as if its meeting was quite certain, as certain as 
 the rising of the sun on that Thursday morning. Yet 
 nobody could be really certain about the matter. So 
 far from having the certainty of the mathematician, 
 no one had the certainty of the chemist or the 
 astronomer. We do not, I venture to say it, know 
 why the sun rises, but no power within the range of 
 our faculties can stop it from rising. A thousand 
 things quite within the range of our faculties might 
 have hindered Parliament from meeting. The thought 
 that Parhament might not meet most likely did not 
 come into the head of any one on whom its expected 
 meeting imposed a certain course of action. Yet 
 after all it was only very likely that Parliament 
 would meet ; it was very unhkely that anything 
 should hinder it from meeting ; but something might 
 have hindered it, and that without any miracle, 
 without the world coming to an end before the 
 appointed day. Some moral or some physical cause, 
 some unexpected revolution in the world of matter or 
 in the world of man's will, might have made it 
 impossible for the Estates of the United Kingdom to 
 come together on the appointed day. The same un- 
 certainty follows us as to all our schemes and engage- 
 ments, public or private ; something may disappomt 
 all our expectations, and that without any change in 
 the ordinary course of nature. But the expectations 
 ' [October, 1884]. 
 
150 THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIBENCE. 
 
 of the natural pliilosopher that certain events will 
 happen, that certain results will follow from certain 
 causes, cannot be disappointed, except by a change 
 in the ordinary course of things. But high above all 
 is the position of the geometer, who has no expecta- 
 tions but certainties, to whom even the abiding of 
 the ordinary course of nature is a slight matter. To 
 him we may apply the old stock quotation, 
 
 " Si fractus illabatur orbis, 
 Impavidum ferient ruinae;" 
 
 for the truths of his science will go on, untouched 
 and unshaken, in boundless and empty space. We 
 attain not to his heights ; but we say that, if we do 
 not attain to them, neither does the natural philo- 
 sopher. Only the natural philosopher Hes under a 
 temptation from which we are free, the temptation 
 of fancying that he has attained to them. He is 
 tempted to think that, because nothing short of a 
 change in the order to which we are accustomed 
 can set aside his reckonings, therefore his reckonings 
 can never be set aside. He comes so near to certainty 
 that he is tempted to think that he has reached 
 it ; he is tempted to think that the order to which 
 we are accustomed is eternal and unchangeable, of 
 which there is not and cannot be any proof He is 
 tempted to forget that the laws, that is the de- 
 ductions from experience, which he establishes may 
 possibly be subordinate to higher laws, to laws which 
 he has not yet found out, because the occasions when 
 they come into play may be reckoned, not by days 
 or years, but by countless miUenniunis. He is tempted 
 
TEE HUMAN WILL. 151 
 
 in short to mistake high prohabihty for certainty, to 
 forget that the difference between him and us is only 
 a matter of degree. For our own parts, we do not 
 exercise ourselves in great matters which are too high 
 for us. We freely admit that all our reckonings may 
 be brought to naught without any change in the 
 order of nature. For the order of nature in no way 
 depends on that very uncertain thing, the human 
 will. But that with which we have to deal, that 
 course of human affairs which, when present, we call 
 politics, and which, when past, we call history, does 
 depend on the human wiU, and is therefore uncertain. 
 We cannot be sure of the future; because, setting 
 aside deeper contingencies, it depends on the human 
 will to fix what shall happen. We cannot be sure of 
 the past, because its evidence depends on human 
 truthfulness; that is, because it depends on the 
 human will to fix what shall be said to have 
 happened. 
 
 We can then reach in our historical studies, as 
 being studies of human affairs, the same kind of cer- 
 tainty which we reach in ordinary human affairs, 
 public or private. We cannot reach mathematical 
 certainty, we cannot reach a degree of certainty a 
 good deal lower than mathematical certainty. But 
 we can reach that high degree of likelihood which we 
 call moral certainty, that approach to certainty on 
 which reasonable men are content to act even in the 
 gravest concerns of life. You believe that I am Eegius 
 Professor of Modern History ; I believe it myself. But 
 you have no proof of the fact, neither have I. Yet I 
 
152 THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 did not decline to act because it is possible tbat what 
 I believe to be Her Majesty's sign-manual appointing 
 me may have been a forgery — for I certainly did not 
 myself see Her Majesty sign it. You do not decline 
 to come to my lectures because you have not seen 
 the sign-manual, because you have no evidence for 
 my appointment beyond my own word or common 
 fame. And this kind of evidence, evidence on which 
 we act every day, evidence on which we stake our 
 fortunes, our honour, and our hves, is the kind of 
 evidence which we get in our historical studies. 
 Whether such evidence is enough to make history 
 a science or the pathway to a science is really a 
 question of words and nothing else. By this kind of 
 evidence we can gain a vast mass of knowledge, of 
 knowledge that is pleasant in itself, of knowledge 
 that disciplines the mind, of knowledge that is of 
 no small practical use. And I suppose that, if we 
 had to speak of such knowledge in the Latin tongue, 
 we should call it by no name but " scientia." 
 
 Our evidence then for the facts of our branch of 
 knowledge or science is less strong than the evidence 
 for the facts of some other branches. But do we not 
 nevertheless know more than some of our neighbours 
 as to the causes of the facts with which we deall 
 Surely we know more about the human will than we 
 know about Force. Certainly we do so in that rough 
 practical way which perhaps suits our rough practical 
 subject, the affairs of men. And we can after all 
 make some inferences from the course of those affairs, 
 we can lay down some rules which may almost be 
 
MORAL CERTAINTY. 153 
 
 called laws, and of wliich I venture to think that we 
 can see the why and because more clearly than we 
 can in the case of physical laws. Nothing is more 
 morally certain, that is, nothing reaches a higher 
 degree of likelihood, than the position at which I 
 hinted at the beginning, that every worthy move- 
 ment, be it on behalf of learning or of higher 
 objects than learning, on behalf of freedom or hu- 
 manity or right in any shape, will have to go through 
 much opposition, much ridicule, that it will have to 
 live through many adverse votes, through many scorn- 
 ful articles in newspapers, but that, if its promoters 
 bear up stoutly, it will win in the end. To take an 
 example from the history of natural science itself, 
 how the Times jeered at the British Association fifty 
 years back ; how respectfully the Times speaks of it 
 now. But it would never do to make the converse 
 inference, and to hold that every movement that is 
 spoken against and laughed at is necessarily a great 
 and good movement, fated to be successful. All that 
 we can say is that opposition and sneering prove 
 nothing against a thing ; they may be rightly applied 
 or they may be utterly misapplied. Good is very 
 likely, almost certain, to be evil spoken of; but we 
 cannot say that whatever is evil spoken of is therefore 
 good, or even likely to be good. It would be easy to 
 put together a whole string of propositions which we 
 might call axioms, except that they are deductions 
 from experience, propositions which come very near to 
 moral certainty, but to which it is still possible that 
 there may be exceptions without any change in the 
 
154 THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 general order of nature. Some nation may find itself 
 in so unusual a set of circumstances, some one man's 
 will may be so strong or so capricious, as to baffle all 
 expectations and to belie all ordinary rules. The man 
 may be lacking to the hour, or the hour may be 
 lacking to the man. Compared with the fixity of 
 physical rules, human affairs may seem to be the 
 sport of chance ; the science which deals with them 
 may s'eem to lack the attributes of science. What 
 seems certain to one inquirer may seem whoUy un- 
 certain to another. We admit the charge, so far as it 
 is a charge. If it be an evil, it is an evil inherent in 
 our subject. Evil or not, it is something which we 
 cannot get rid of. And we may be inclined to think 
 that it is not an evil, that it is in truth a sign of the 
 worthiness and greatness of our subject. If mind is 
 higher than matter, if moral causes are higher than 
 physical, for that very reason they come less under 
 the dominion of rigid rules ; their details are, by 
 reason of the very height of the subject, less certain 
 than the details of those studies which deal with 
 lower subjects. Because we can come nearer than 
 the followers of some other studies to the real know- 
 ledge of the causes with which we deal, because we 
 can better understand the working of an intelligent 
 will than we can understand the working of an unex- 
 plained Force, for that very reason we cannot be so 
 sure, either in the past or in the future, as to results 
 which depend on an intelligent will. Thus each 
 pursuit has some advantages over its fellows. We 
 claim no superiority over other branches of know- 
 
MORAL AND PHYSICAL CAUSES. 155 
 
 ledge ; only we confess no inferiority. If we proclaim 
 the greater height of our subject, we allow with the 
 same breath that our means for gaining an exact 
 knowledge of it are smaller. But we do protest 
 against the exclusive claim of any branch of know- 
 ledge to boast itself as if itself and its fellows alone 
 were knowledge. We protest specially against the 
 attempt to support the boast by the mere legerde- 
 main, the prestige — shall we say, the ]prmstigix diaboli 1 
 — of calling certain studies exclusively by a Latin 
 name, a name which simply translates the plain 
 Teutonic word which should surely come with a more 
 kindly sound to English ears. 
 
LECTUEE lY. 
 
 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 The kernel of all sound teaching in historical 
 matters is the doctrine that no historical study is of 
 any value which does not take in a knowledge of 
 original authorities. Let no one mistake this saying, 
 as if I were laying down a rule that no knowledge of 
 any historical matter can be of any value which does 
 not come straight from an original authority. If 
 this were so, both I and many others, living and 
 dead, must have spent a great deal of time to very 
 little profit in cumbering the earth with not a few 
 volumes which certainly have no claim to rank as 
 original authorities. Such a doctrine would be at 
 once confuted by the slightest thought. For it would 
 not be a counsel of perfection, but a counsel of im- 
 possibility. If that be the duty of the historical 
 inquirer, no man can do his duty. The field of 
 history is so wide, even any one of its great branches 
 is so wide, that no man can hope to master all 
 history, or all mediaeval history, or all English 
 history, in the original authorities for every period. 
 And, if he could master it aU in the original authori- 
 ties, he would hardly be wise if he looked at nothing 
 
LIMITS TO ORIGINAL STUDY. 157 
 
 but the original authorities, and scorned to ask for 
 any help from those who had worked at the original 
 authorities before him. No ; if any man ever dreamed 
 of mastering the original authorities for all history, 
 for all European history, for all English history, the 
 dream must have been dreamed very early in hfe, 
 when the dreamer had as yet no kind of notion of 
 the nature of the gigantic task which he was setting 
 himself. It must have been dreamed, one would 
 think, before any original authority whatever had 
 been grappled with. Yet such a dream would be 
 creditable compared with another dream which has 
 been dreamed in real life. I know of an ingenious 
 gentleman who put forth the first part — certain 
 circumstances hindered him from ever putting forth 
 the second part — of a Synopsis, or some name to that 
 effect, of Modern History, which was not to demand 
 any knowledge of any original authority whatever 
 on the part of the reader or even of the writer. The 
 enterprising author, a man not without some reputa- 
 tion in other walks, thought himself able to grapple 
 with Modem History as a whole, to master it 
 himself and to expound it to others, on the strength 
 of having read, I think it was two modem English 
 books and one French. Nor do I greatly blame him; 
 the attempt was a fair inference from the principles of 
 those who set up a School of Modern History as an 
 easy study. I do not know that his attempt was at 
 all more contrary to sound learning than the course of 
 those who run off themselves, and bid others to run off 
 with them, post-haste to the French Kevolution, 
 
158 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 without stopping to take a turn, if only to pick up 
 habits of work, among the stiffer records of the 
 Wandering of the Nations. On the whole, we are 
 much more likely to be troubled with the error 
 which deems either that there are no original authori- 
 ties or that original authorities may safely be dis- 
 pensed with, than with the more generous error of 
 him to whom all original authorities shall seem so 
 attractive that there is none which he can bring 
 himself to forego the delight of mastering. The 
 path of practical study lies between the two errors. 
 Any knowledge of history which is good for anything 
 must be founded on the mastery of original authori- 
 ties; but it will not be founded on an attempt to 
 master all original authorities. Every student must 
 master some ; no student can master all. Even he 
 who makes historical study the main business of his 
 life cannot expect to master more than the original 
 authorities for a few specially chosen periods. As 
 for other periods, he must be content to know only so 
 much as will enable him to put them in. their right 
 relation to one another and to the periods of his own 
 choice. And this he must largely do by the help, 
 not of original authorities but of secondary writers. 
 Yet, even when he is learning from secondary writers, 
 he is in a sense making use of original authorities. 
 He is at least making use of the habits of mind which 
 he has gained from the use of original authorities. I 
 should not counsel a man who is fresh from thoroughly 
 getting up his Thucydides to rush straight at the 
 French Eevolution; but I will say this for him, that 
 
WHAT ARE ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 169 
 
 he will be far more likely to understand the French 
 Eevolution than the man who rushes straight at the 
 French Eevolution without thoroughly getting up 
 his Thucydides or anything else. 
 
 But before we go on to try to establish any rules 
 for the use of original authorities, it will be well to 
 make sure that we have a clear notion what original 
 authorities are. The very first business of the 
 historical student is to clear his mind of any popular 
 confusions on this head. It is wonderful how many 
 people there are, often people who might know better, 
 to whom a book is a book. Crowds of men who are 
 not stupid, but who have never really thought on 
 these matters, do not clearly see the difference between 
 two wholly different classes of men. There is the 
 man who writes a record of the events of his own 
 age, often of events of which he was himself a 
 spectator and very likely an actor, and there is the 
 man who ages after sits down to put together, by 
 comparing his evidence with other evidence, the 
 best critical narrative he can of the times which to 
 him are a far remote past, while to the other they 
 were a living present. Both write about the same 
 kind of subjects, and both are confounded under 
 the common title of historians. Thucydides is a 
 historian ; so is Grote ; Ammianus is a historian ; 
 so is Gibbon. And the matter is complicated by 
 the existence of a large class of writers who are also 
 called historians, but who hold a place intermediate 
 between these two classes. What are we to say 
 to the History of Livy, such parts of it as we have, 
 
160 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 to the Annals of Tacitus, to the Lives of Plutarch 1 
 Their authors are clearly not writers of the same class 
 as Thucydides and Ammianus ; stiU less, most people 
 will say and will say quite rightly, are they writers of 
 the same class as Grote and Gibbon. They did not 
 write down a record of things which they had them- 
 selves seen and heard. But still less, it might seem, 
 did they sit down to write a critical history of things 
 which had happened long before their own day. 
 Yet this is eminently what Livy did, as far as he 
 knew how. Some might be inclined cruelly to say 
 that Livy did not write a critical, but an uncriti- 
 cal history. But if so, it is because he missed his 
 aim. He tried to be critical, and now and then he 
 really was so. He used various earlier writers, and 
 sometimes he really weighed their statements and 
 exercised a sound judgement between them. The 
 unlucky thing was that Livy himself did not in the 
 least know what an original authority was. He had 
 sense enough to kick at anything very monstrous, 
 like the lies of Valerius Antias ; but on the whole 
 one book was to him, as it is to many people now, 
 of just as great authority as another. When he 
 speaks of " very ancient authors," he does not mean 
 aiithors contemporary with the alleged facts, but 
 men who lived at the outside three or four genera- 
 tions before himself. When he comes to Polybios, 
 he seems hardly to feel the difference between the 
 great master — in his eyes only " haudquaquam 
 spernendus auctor " — and this or that paltry com- 
 piler. For far the greater part of his story Livy 
 
POSITION OF LIVY. 161 
 
 is so far from being an original authority that he 
 had not himself any original authorities to make 
 use of. That is, he had no contemporary narrative. 
 He had fasti ; he had annals, and scraps of the 
 annals are always a relief. Cicero said truly of 
 the annals of the pontiffs that "nihil potest esse 
 jucundius." I cannot hearken to any criticism 
 that would change that word into "jejunius." It 
 is delightful, after pages of family panegyric, to 
 find oneself opposite to a line or two of real annals. 
 When the ox speaks, we may listen to his warn- 
 ings or not, though unluckily the matter of his 
 speech is revealed to us only now and then. 
 What concerns us is that the record of his speech 
 is surely contemporary. But if Livy had had 
 far better materials than he had, the fact that he 
 had to write from materials at all, that he put 
 together a story of times long before his own from 
 earlier accounts, parts him off at once from writers 
 like Thucydides, writers who recorded the events 
 of their own time from their own knowledge as 
 spectators and actors, or from what spectators and 
 actors told them. The distinction is clear ; yet 
 there are a crowd of temptations, a crowd of 
 reasons good and bad, which lead us to forget it, 
 and which often make tis, even against our wills, 
 put Livy more nearly than he ought to be put in 
 the same class with Thucydides. At any rate we 
 cannot help putting him nearer to Thucydides 
 than to Gibbon and Grote. A crowd of reasons, 
 good and bad, make us do so. First of all, Livy 
 
 M 
 
162 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 writes Latin, " classical " Latin ; he is one of 
 the " classics," the " ancients," the writers who are 
 read at school and college, the mysterious order of 
 men who stand all apart by themselves, altogether 
 aloof from men who lived in times not very far from 
 our own, and who wrote in our own tongue or 
 in some of the other tongues of modern Europe. 
 This fact makes some of us less alive than we should 
 be to the truth that Livy is no more an original 
 authority for any of the periods dealt with in his 
 extant books than Mommsen is. Still in the case of 
 Livy any one who thinks for a moment cannot fail 
 to grasp this very simple truth. In the case of 
 Tacitus it is harder. It really needs an effort 
 practically to remember, that is to carry the remem- 
 brance about with us, that Tacitus was not a con- 
 temporary with Tiberius and Claudius. It is just 
 the same with a writer so unlike Tacitus as 
 I Herodotus. It is very hard indeed to carry about 
 with us the truth that Herodotus was contemporary 
 with Thucydides and the Peloponnesian war, and not 
 with the men and the wars of which he writes. 
 And there is a real difference between the position 
 of Livy, in the books which have come down to us, 
 and the position of Herodotus and Tacitus. These 
 last, though not contemporary, lived much nearer to 
 the time ; Herodotus had largely talked with con- 
 temporaries ; so might Tacitus for parts of his Annals. 
 Neither sat down, like Livy in the greater part of his 
 work, to compile wholly from earher writers ; Hero- 
 dotus could have made very little use of earlier 
 
WRITERS WHO ARE PARTLY ORIGINAL. 1G3 
 
 writers at all. Livy, as far as we have to deal with 
 him, comes far nearer to the position of a modern 
 writer, and yet there are differences between the 
 position of Livy and the position of a modern writer 
 which are quite as great as the differences between 
 the position of Livy and that of Thucydides. It is 
 not merely that Livy is uncritical in the use of his 
 materials ; many modern writers still are quite as 
 uncritical as Livy; till two or three generations back, 
 most of them were so. The difference is that Livy 
 stands in a different relation to his materials and to 
 the facts or fictions which were recorded in those 
 materials. The fact that he is, at least that he 
 would be, if his work were perfect, a really original 
 authority for part of his story, that the parts for 
 which he was and those for which he was not an 
 original authority, all formed part of one whole, con- 
 ceived according to one plan, makes a real difference 
 in the way of feeling and looking at the matter on 
 the part both of the writer and of his readers. He 
 did not, like the modern critical historian, feel that 
 he was living altogether in the past, in a remote past, 
 cut off from the present. Between his two characters 
 of critical examiner of the past and contemporary 
 narrator of the present, between the facts with which 
 he had to deal in those two characters, there was no 
 very wide gap. He belongs in short to the same 
 class as a crowd of writers, so-called classical and 
 so-called mediaeval, who wrote histories which begin 
 long before their own times but which are continued 
 into their own times. The chief of all, Polybios 
 
 M 2 
 
164 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 himself, belongs to this class, and it is by virtue of 
 his belonging to this class that he is the chief of all. 
 Had he written only the history of his own times or 
 only the history of times before his own, in neither 
 case could he have reached to that clear oecumenical 
 view which makes him the teacher of all time. 
 Ammianus again has undergone the exactly opposite 
 fate to that of Livy. He too began before his own 
 time, though not so far before his own time as Livy 
 did ; but the part of his work which we have is that 
 for which he is really an original authority. A crowd 
 of later writers are in the same case as Livy and 
 / Ammianus ; take, as one out of many, Gregory of 
 Tours. A meagre chronicle starting from the begin- 
 ning of the world leads on, through a somewhat inac- 
 curate account of the early history of the Frankish 
 nation, to that minute and life-hke picture of the 
 events of Gregory's own day, events in which he was 
 himself no small actor, which forms our chief source 
 for any knowledge of Gaul in the sixth century. 
 These books of Grggory rank with the lost later books 
 of Livy, with the extant books of Ammianus, as an 
 original authority in the highest sense. The early 
 part of Gregory ranks with the extant part of Livy; 
 there is simply the immeasurable diflPerence between 
 the two as writers. Gregory could tell the tale of 
 what he had himself seen with Herodotean life and 
 simplicity; he had no share in Livy's gift of calling 
 up a real or imaginary picture of ages long since 
 past. Or, five hundred years later, take Lambert of 
 Hertzfeld. He begins with annals ; he gradually 
 
GREGORY OF TOURS AND OTHERS. 165 
 
 enlarges and warms, till his tale grows into that 
 precious and admirable narrative of the great 
 struggle between Pope and Caesar, that narrative so 
 clear, so full, so wisely treading the narrow path 
 between partisan writers on either side, that it has 
 won for a monk of the eleventh century his full right 
 to a place alongside of the foremost of the so-called 
 ancients. We may mark again that both Gregory 
 and Lambert, very unlike Livy, begin with mere 
 annals, very dry annals, which only gradually wake 
 to fulness and life as the writers draw near to their 
 own times. A nearer parallel to Livy will be 
 found in William of Malmesbury. He, like Livy, I 
 took for his subject the history of a single nation ; 
 and from the beginning he writes, like Livy, as a 
 historian, and not, like Gregory and Lambert in 
 their early stages, as a mere annalist. Besides 
 his merits as a writer, he has his value as pre- 
 serving to us not a little from lost writers in prose 
 and verse ; but it is only towards quite the end of 
 his story, in the Sistoria Novella more thoroughly 
 than in the Gesta Begum, that he becomes a real 
 original authority for his own times. All these writers 
 then, Polybios, Livy, Gregory, Lambert, William, aU 
 have something in common with the modern 
 critical writer ; but they have much more in 
 common with those writers who are original author- 
 ities pure and simple. The fact that they are 
 original authorities for part of their work makes 
 them come far - nearer to those who are original 
 authorities and nothing else. And this is specially 
 
166 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 true of those who, Hke Gregory and Lambert, begin 
 with mere annals. Their value lies almost wholly 
 in the parts where they are strictly original. 
 Gregory and Lambert are beyond all things the 
 living chroniclers of the days of Chilperic and 
 Guntchramn, of the days of Henry and Hildebrand. 
 And they are little else. William of Malmesbury, 
 after all, gives us no such living picture of the 
 days of Henry the First and Stephen ; but then 
 he has his use, no small use, if he is used warily, 
 for days long before Henry the First. 
 
 But there is another class of writers, " ancient " 
 writers, "classical" writers, who have no pretensions 
 at all in any part of their writings to rank as 
 original authorities in the strict sense, but who yet 
 seem to have more in common with real original 
 authorities than with modern critical writers. Take 
 Plutarch, for instance. He can hardly be called an 
 original authority, even in the one or two Lives for 
 which he may have had some slight knowledge of his 
 own. He is simply a compiler, though a compiler of 
 a special kind, and a kind not to be despised. And 
 yet, if we draw a hard and fast line, we can hardly 
 help placing him along with the original writers 
 rather than along with modern critics and com- 
 mentators. The fact is that Livy, Plutarch, and a 
 crowd of others, though they are not original author- 
 ities in themselves, are original authorities to us. 
 That is to say, we can for the most part get no 
 further than what they tell us. We know that they 
 copied earlier writers ; we often know what earlier 
 
qjJASl-ORIGINAL WRITERS. 167 
 
 writers they copied. But those earlier writers are 
 for the most part lost ; to us Livy and Plutarch are 
 their representatives. For a large part of their story 
 we have no appeal from them except either to in- 
 ternal evidence or to any fragmentary authorities of 
 other kinds that may be left to us. There is no 
 counter-narrative. Some of the earlier writers used by 
 Livy have been called into new life by the ingenuity 
 of German scholars ; but it is out of Livy's own sub- 
 stance that they have been called into hfe. A writer 
 of the last two or three centuries stands in altogether 
 another position. In all but the rarest cases, we have 
 an appeal ; we can test him by the original writers 
 whom he has used or whom he has failed to use. 
 His whole purpose, his whole way of looking at and 
 dealing with things, is altogether difiPerent from that 
 of the writers who, after compiling a history of 
 earlier times from earlier writers, went on to write 
 the history of their own times from their own know- 
 ledge. But his position is also altogether different 
 from that of those who seem to hold a place more 
 like his own, those who did not touch their own 
 times, who were simply compilers of past history, 
 but who might be, if they chose, critical compilers, 
 and who sometimes to some extent were so. On the 
 whole, the old Greek and Roman writers, even when 
 they were not really original authorities, have so 
 much in common with those who are, that, wide as 
 is the difference between Thucydides and Plutarch, 
 we cannot help placing Plutarch nearer to Thucy- 
 dides than to Curtius and Droysen. Whatever he 
 
168 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 was in his own day, he is an original authority to us. 
 We yearn for the autobiographies of Aratos and 
 Sulla ; but we yearn in vain. The kindly sage of 
 Chair6neia is the only substitute for them that we 
 are ever likely to have. 
 
 If then we are to define original authorities, we 
 might perhaps define them as those writers from 
 whom we have no appeal, except to other writers of 
 the same class. This distinguishes them from modern 
 critical writers, from whom we have an appeal to 
 writers of another class. And among the writers de- 
 fined as we have just defined originals, we must at 
 once distinguish a primary and a secondary class, those 
 from whom there never was any appeal and those from 
 whom there once was an appeal, but from whom there 
 is an appeal no longer. That is, we distinguish be- 
 tween writers who wrote from their own knowledge 
 and who are original authorities in the strictest sense, 
 and writers who did not write from their own know- 
 ledge, but who are the only representatives of earlier 
 writers who did, and who therefore, though not ori- 
 ginal authorities in themselves, are original authori- 
 ties to us. We are at this stage speaking of writers, 
 of men who have handed down to us a narrative of 
 some considerable part of the world's history. But 
 we must remember that even the best contemporary 
 writer is commonly a primary authority for a part 
 only of his subject. Though living at the time of 
 which he writes, though often an actor in the scenes 
 of which he writes, still he cannot always write from 
 personal knowledge ; he cannot have seen everything 
 
KARRATIYES AND D0CU2I£;x\TS. 169 
 
 with his own eyes ; he must constantly write only 
 what he has been told by others ; only he is able to 
 judge of what is told him by others in a way that a 
 later writer cannot do. And besides his narrative, 
 there is often other contemporary evidence which for 
 some purposes may be of higher authority than his 
 narrative. The text of a proclamation or a treaty is, 
 within its own range, of higher authority than the 
 very best contemporary narrative. I say within its 
 own range, because the official document, while it 
 always proves a great deal, does not always prove 
 everything. The doctrine that the history of Eng- j 
 land was to be studied in the statute-book had a large I 
 amount of truth in it. It was in some sort a needful 
 warning. Yet it was rather one side of the truth 
 than the whole truth, and it was a side that might 
 be used in a misleading way. That the history of 
 England cannot be rightly studied without a constant 
 reference to the statute-book is a perfectly true pro- 
 position, provided only that the statute-book made i 
 use of begins at a time not later than the Dooms of ' 
 ^thelberht. 
 
 The texts of documents then, along with inscrip- 
 tions — which in some ages are the shape which the 
 text of documents commonly takes — coins again, 
 which in truth are one particular class of inscriptions, 
 in short, contemporary monuments of any kind, are 
 all of them in a sense original authorities ; for some 
 purposes they are original authorities in a higher 
 sense than the narrative even of a contemporary 
 writer. Still, though their authority is often higher 
 
170 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 in itself, we cannot help using the narrative as our 
 primary authority and our other sources of know- 
 ledge as something subsidiary. The narrative is 
 commonly continuous ; if it does not tell us the 
 whole tale, it at least tells us the tale as a whole. 
 The documents and other sources of knowledge are 
 for the most part not continuous ; they come in only 
 now and then ; the knowledge that they give us is 
 piecemeal. Or if, like our own rolls and records for 
 many ages, they are chronologically continuous, still 
 they only show certain sides and aspects of the time, 
 and those mostly formal ones. We use evidence of 
 this kind to illustrate, to explain, often to correct, 
 our contemporary narratives ; but it is only by the 
 help of the contemporary narratives that we are able 
 to use it in this wav. The narrative without tbe 
 documents, if imperfect, is at least intelligible ; the 
 documents would be hardly intelligible without some 
 narrative. We can hardly be said to read the history 
 in the documents; we read it in the narrative, but we 
 keep the documents by us for constant reference. 
 In short by original authorities we mean, first of all, 
 contemporary narratives, or as near an approach to 
 contemporary narratives as we can get. Sources of 
 knowledge of other kinds, even if in themselves of 
 higher authority than the narratives, are still, as we 
 cannot help using them, something subsidiary, illus- 
 trative, corrective, to the narrative. In the present 
 lecture therefore I purpose to treat mainly of writers 
 of historical narratives, of the writers of those books 
 which we do not merely keep by us to refer to on 
 
"BOOKS." 171 
 
 occasion, but which we read steadily through from 
 one end to the other. I speak mainly of those writ- 
 ings, of whatever date, which have a good right to 
 count as " books " in the sense which the word 
 " books " bore in Oxford in my youthful days. In 
 the early stages of study, whether with view to ex- 
 aminations or not — though to be sure there is the 
 question whether mere reading for an examination is 
 worthy to be called study — it is well to draw a wider 
 distinction between books of this class and other 
 sources of knowledge than need be drawn at more 
 advanced periods of work. It is by thorough mas- 
 tery of a few well chosen books that we gain those 
 habits of mind which enable us somewhat later to 
 make use of other authorities besides our books. 
 There may be in these favoured days royal roads to 
 knowledge of which I have had no experience. Wis- 
 dom may, for ought I know, come of the crib and the 
 summary; it may come of views and theories, brilliant 
 and taking, I dare say, which are reached by some 
 other path than the somewhat thorny one of grinding 
 at the texts of writers in strange tongues. I can only 
 say that for me it was a white day when I began i 
 really to work at the history of Thucydides, not in ! 
 the glib English of the newspapers, but in the rough- 
 hewn sentences of his own tongue. For on that day 
 I assuredly took the first step towards one day writ- 
 ing the History of the Norman Conquest of England. 
 I suppose that, of aU the books ever written, Thucy- 
 dides, in his own text, is the best suited for this par- 
 ticular purpose, the purpose of teaching what history 
 
172 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 really is. The wider view of Polybios better suits a 
 later stage of intellectual growth, to say nothing of 
 his facts belonging to a later age. Still Thucydides, 
 prince of original writers, is simply foremost in his 
 own class, a class taking in many other writers of 
 many ages and tongues. My present object is to 
 speak mainly of those writers who may, like him, 
 each in his measure, be used as "books" in the special 
 sense, as texts, that is, to be mastered as centres, so 
 to speak, of historical knowledge for the times and 
 lands to which they belong. Of some such I have 
 already incidentally spoken. I will now go on with 
 a few words as to the way in which this primary 
 class of writers may be most profitably used. Other 
 sources of knowledge, sources which are more or less 
 incidental, documents, even the most precious, among 
 them, will have another lecture to themselves. 
 
 It at once follows that, for this particular purpose, 
 that of choosing writers who may serve as " books " 
 in the old Oxford sense, as means of introduction to 
 historic study, we must make a careful selection 
 among the vast mass of those who may fairly rank 
 as original authorities. Take the first class of all, 
 those who are original writers in the highest sense, 
 those who recorded the history of their own times 
 from their own knowledge. I reckon here all who 
 did so for even part of their story, whether they 
 confined themselves to the history of their own times 
 or began their narrative at some earlier time. The 
 authorities which come under this head vary not a 
 little in form and in value. They range from writers 
 
CHOICE AMONG AUTHORITIES. 173 
 
 of meagre though contemporary annals, up to states- 
 men and soldiers describing in full the great events 
 of the world in which they themselves took a part. 
 It would be going too far to say that aU are entitled 
 to equal credit ; for, as we see in daily life, the 
 degrees of credit due to this and that man even 
 as to contemporary matters are endless. A man 
 may record the events of his own time, and may yet 
 not record any of them fiom real personal know- 
 ledge. But on the other hand, as no man, hardly 
 the writer of an autobiography, can write wholly 
 from personal knowledge, the difference on this 
 head between one contemporary writer and another, 
 though in many cases a very great difference in 
 degree, is stiU only a difference in degree. All 
 form one great class, the class of men who do not 
 write from the records which others have given of 
 earlier times, but from their own knowledge, not 
 necessarily their personal knowledge, of things that 
 went on around them. They are all, in different 
 degrees, witnesses. Even those who are not in the 
 strictest sense witnesses to facts are witnesses to 
 reports as to the facts, and the reports are part of 
 the history. If even these writers cannot always 
 tell us how things happened, they can at least teU. 
 us how things seemed to happen, both to themselves 
 and to others. And, if not actually in this class, yet 
 just alongside of it, we must place some writers 
 whose writings are contemporary in date and narra- 
 tive in shape, but who wrote with some other purpose 
 than the mere handing down of historic truth. Those 
 
174 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 purposes may be of many kinds. The reports of an 
 ambassador to his own sovereign are not written with 
 any strictly historical purpose. They are not written 
 to hand down the memory of facts to future ages, 
 but to let certain persons know, for purely practical 
 ends, what is going on at the moment. Yet the 
 reports of ambassadors are at least an undesigned 
 source of history, and they are often among our most 
 valuable historical materials. Dealing, as they do, 
 directly with current events, not only with the events 
 of the time, but with the passing events of the 
 moment, often recording things which the ambassador 
 himself had seen, heard, or done, they rank, as far as 
 their matter goes, among the original sources of 
 history in the very strictest sense. Yet we can 
 hardly call them actual history ; we can hardly call 
 their writers historians. Another class of writers, 
 who are almost grotesquely unlike the ambassadors, 
 have still something in common with them, as being 
 like them narrative and not monumental, and yet 
 being only undesignedly historical. I mean those 
 writers of Lives of Saints, and even those collectors 
 of miracles, who deal with the events of their own 
 time. I do not mean writers like Eadmer and WilHam 
 Fitz-Stephen ; they belong to quite another class. 
 They are writers of real contemporary history in the 
 strictest sense, though the history that they write is 
 history of a special kind and written for a special 
 object. Eadmer and William are, in form, not pro- 
 fessed historians of a kingdom, but biographers of 
 a particular man. But Me place them in the same 
 
AMBASSADORS AND HAGIOGRAPHERS. 175 
 
 class, and judge them by the same standard, as the 
 professed historians of kingdoms. We only wish 
 that we had narratives such as theirs for much 
 larger portions of history. The ecclesiastical writers 
 of whom I am now speaking are of quite another 
 kind. I speak of those who write wholly for pur- 
 poses of devotion and edification, often with very little 
 heed to accuracy of mere statement. Yet they are 
 writers who have a very special value of their own. 
 Like forged charters, sometimes like real charters, 
 their value is for incidental points about which they 
 had no thought of conveying information to any- 
 body. I mean points which the writers take for 
 granted and about which their witness is quite 
 unconscious. Such are points of custom and lan- 
 guage, above all, illustrations of the customs and 
 language of classes of men whom the historians of 
 kingdoms are apt to pass by with very little mention. 
 The main fact of the story may be true or false ; but 
 its details are sure to teach us something which is 
 preeminently true. When stories of this kind are 
 strictly contemporary, we may fairly reckon them 
 among original authorities, though they are original 
 authorities of a very secondary and incidental kind. 
 It is indeed hard to draw the line between stories of this 
 kind and mere anecdotes ; and I suppose that the first 
 shape of an anecdote, that which was given to it while 
 it was still contemporary, may count as an original 
 authority in some lower sense. As a statement of 
 fact, even a contemporary anecdote is commonly of 
 very little value. Many of you, I dare say, know that 
 
176 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 in yoiir own persons ; I certainly do. But a con- 
 temporary anecdote, when we really can get it in its 
 contemporary shape, may give us the same kind of 
 illustration of manners and the like which a contem- 
 porary legend gives us. And however untrue the 
 anecdote may be as a statement of fact, however 
 exaggerated as a picture of character, yet, if it be 
 really contemporary, it has some value, even as a 
 picture of the man of whom it is told. It wiU com- 
 monly exaggerate and distort the real features of 
 his character ; it will not often fasten on him attri- 
 butes which are the exact opposite to the real ones. 
 But we so seldom get anecdotes in their really 
 contemporary shape, they are so largely improved 
 in passing from hand to hand, the bright side of one 
 man, the dark side of another, has its hue so carefully 
 heightened, the probabilities of time and place are 
 so utterly forgotten in the various stages of improve- 
 ment, that a mere anecdote, as it commonly reaches 
 us, is worth very little. In theory the anecdote is 
 part of our contemporary materials ; in practice it 
 very seldom is so. Collections of anecdotes, like those 
 of Plutarch and Valerius Maximus, are in their own 
 nature not contemporary materials. And the work 
 to which the name specially belongs, the Secret 
 History of Procopius, chiefly shows us in this relation 
 how widely the word anecdote has fallen away from 
 its original meaning. The Secret History must rank 
 among our contemporary authorities just as much as 
 the Gothic War ; the only question is whether it is 
 equally trustworthy with the Gothic War. If its 
 
ANECDOTES. 177 
 
 statements are false, they are not myths or legends or 
 anecdotes in our sense; but deliberate lies. 
 
 Now what will be said if, among the original 
 sources of history in this secondary sense, among 
 writings which are narrative and not monumental, 
 which are not written with the purpose of conveying 
 historical knowledge, which are therefore, though 
 original sources, yet undesigned sources, I place the 
 great national poems of the chief European nations, 
 the Homeric poems first of all ? My subject is but 
 little concerned with many of the disputes which 
 have raged around the earliest memorials of Greek 
 speech and Greek history. It matters a great deal 
 in itself, but it matters very little for my purposes, 
 whether the poems are the work of one gleeman or 
 a hundred, provided only that gleeman or gleemen 
 are allowed to have sung a good while earlier than 
 the fifth century B.C. Nor does it greatly concern 
 me whether the chief actors in the story were real 
 men or mere creatures of the imagination. The 
 historical value of the poems lies in the picture 
 which they give us of one form of Aryan life, of 
 the earliest Aryan life in Europe of which we 
 have any record. Above all it lies in that map 
 of prae-historic Hellas whose claim to belief does 
 indeed rest on the argument that it is impossible. 
 The Mykenaian empire, the position of the Bretwalda 
 of Hellas, his under-kings, his ealdormen, his faithful 
 thegns, the gatherings of his Witan and of his whole 
 folk, the whole picture of a life so unlike that of 
 democratic Athens or oligarchic Corinth, but a life so 
 
 N 
 
178 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 thoroughly the same as the life of our own branch of 
 the great family, that at least is history, "Credo 
 quia impossibile." No man in later Greece would 
 have placed the chief of Hellas at Myk^n^. No man 
 in later Greece would have conceived such a Thessaly, 
 such an Attica, such a Peloponn6sos, as we find in 
 the great Catalogue, the Domesday of the Pelopid 
 dominion. The instinct of our own Alfred saw deeper 
 into the matter than many a laborious scholar, when he 
 said that Ulixes held two kingdoms under the Em- 
 peror, and that the Emperor's name was Agamemn6n. 
 The Homeric poems then must count among our 
 original authorities; so must in their measure the 
 great national poems of other nations. We have 
 still perhaps to learn the exact amount of the 
 historical element in the great Teutonic poems, 
 English, German, and Scandinavian ; but there can 
 be no doubt or shrinking about the fact that some 
 poems, both English and Scandinavian, are among our 
 very best historical materials. In the saga of Harold 
 Hardrada it is clear that the part which is in verse 
 is far more ancient, far more trustworthy, than the 
 prose. Nowhere can we find such a living and 
 instructive picture of a fight between Englishman 
 and Northman as that which lives in our own song 
 of Maldon. It is a truly Homeric battle, but an 
 Homeric battle fought by men whose deeds were 
 sung on the morrow of the fight, and sung by a 
 gleeman who, we may well deem, had himself 
 wielded the sword of England among the immediate 
 following of the fallen Ealdorman. 
 
NATIONAL POEMS. 179 
 
 Our original authorities then, not to go beyond those 
 which are in the strictest sense entitled to that name, 
 speaking for the present of narrative writings only, and 
 reserving those which are documentary or monu- 
 mental, are very various in kind, very various, I need 
 hardly say, in strictly literary value. Now for strict 
 purposes of evidence literary value goes for nothing. 
 A picture wrought up by the master hand of Livy 
 is of far higher literary value than a dry entry in the 
 annals of the pontiffs. But, whatever the Greek Muses 
 may have done, it is the annals of the pontiffs, and 
 not the high-wrought romance, which the Camoenas 
 of Latin history did in truth dictate on the Alban 
 mount. Bvit when we come to the choice of authors 
 for " books " in the technical sense, then literary 
 value does come in. It comes in so far as this that, 
 among writings of sterhng historical value, we pick 
 out those which are of literary value also. When 
 I speak of literary value, I do not refer to mere style. 
 Ammianus is the very prince of surviving Latin 
 historians as an observant and thoughtful witness of 
 the events of his own time. Of his style, perhaps 
 rather the style of his age, it is unkind to speak. 
 Now I not long ago came across the writings of one 
 who thought himself a scholar, and who I fancy is 
 a scholar in some of the narrower walks of scholar- 
 ship, who went out of his way to sound a trumpet 
 before him to announce that he at least was far 
 above knowing anything of Ammianus. Students 
 of the world's history, students especially of the 
 great ruling ages of the world's history, will ven- 
 
 N 2 
 
180 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 ture, in defiance of such a warning, to place him 
 ■who worthily recorded the death of Julian and 
 the Gothic passage of the Danube among the 
 great masters of history, among the great teachers 
 of aU time. Ammianus is emphatically a " book," 
 alongside of Thucydides and Lambert. But that 
 which is to be a book, must really be a book ; 
 it must be a compact narrative, a literary work 
 in form, whatever it may be in mere style ; mere 
 annals, mere connected scraps, precious it may be 
 in the highest degree as pieces of evidence, will not 
 discharge this particular function. We want a book 
 that can be read as a book, whose text can be mastered 
 as a text. We want a book whose text, thoroughly 
 mastered, may serve as a centre round which to 
 group whatever other knowledge of the period is to 
 be had, whether from other original writers less happy 
 in their form, or from other sources of knowledge, 
 documentary, monumental, or any other. The trub 
 course of historical study is that for which the old 
 school of Literse Humaniores in this place gave a 
 man so admirable a start. Let the student pick out 
 two or three weU-chosen periods of history; one 
 man will be drawn to one, another to another, accord- 
 ing to the turn of his mind, and any period that can 
 produce an author or authors fitted to serve as 
 "books" will serve the purpose. I will not recom- 
 mend one period before another ; I will only go so 
 far as to hint that the second century B. c. and the 
 fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries a.d. have the two- 
 fold merit of being at once specially instructive 
 
CHOICE OF PERIODS. 181 
 
 and specially neglected. But whatever periods may 
 be chosen, the full benefit of such study is not 
 gained, unless more than one period is studied, and 
 the further apart those periods are from one another 
 the better. I have an American friend who has two 
 tastes which seem to have little to do with one 
 another. He studies everything that bears on the 
 history of Iceland and everything that bears on 
 the writings of Bante. His studies are of course 
 of a more advanced kind than those which I am 
 now speaking of; but his choice illustrates my 
 principle. If only he does not make his Iceland and 
 his Dante quite isolated, if he further masters in a 
 sound general way all that lies between and around, 
 before and after, Iceland and Dante, I maintain that 
 his choice of subjects is a thoroughly sound one. 
 But that very important proviso must come in. 
 Besides the periods of his choice which he studies 
 minutely, our historical scholar should know, accord- 
 ing to a formula which I have used already, enough 
 of the times which connect his chosen periods, of the 
 times before them and of the times after them, to 
 put those times into their true relations to his own 
 periods and to one another. To apply to historical 
 knowledge a saying which I remember being applied 
 years ago to knowledge of all kinds, he should know 
 something of everything and everything of some- 
 thing. Herein comes one great use of good modem 
 writers ; and herein too comes no small help in the 
 way of using them. He who has once gained the 
 habit of using primary authorities, of comparing and 
 
182 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 criticizing evidence, can trust himself among modern 
 guides in a way whicli is not safe for those who have 
 not gained that habit. He knows how to deal with 
 them; he is not at their mercy. His studies will 
 have given him a certain historic tact which will 
 largely enable him to discern between good and evil. 
 He will feel at once among modern writers who can 
 be trusted and who cannot. From mastering certain 
 periods in minute detail, he \sil\ gain a certain power 
 of putting out his hand and grasping the main out- 
 lines, the leading facts, even of periods which he has 
 not mastered in detail. And even for those periods 
 for which he has largely to trust to modern writers, he 
 will not wholly neglect original sources. He will at 
 least learn what the original sources are and what is 
 their character ; he wiU verify many of the references 
 for important matters ; great and weighty documents 
 he will make a point of reading in the original. No 
 man can read all history in original writers ; but in this 
 way a man may read — not all history, which is rather 
 too large a matter to be read anyhow by a single man 
 — but large parts of history, parts as large as any one 
 man can expect to master, not always directly from - 
 the original writers, but in such a way that he is 
 never out of sight of them, never wholly out of reach 
 of their help. I speak of those who are simply 
 teaching themselves. On those who take on them 
 to teach others a heavier burthen is laid. I cannot 
 believe that any man has a right to teach, at least 
 where teaching is supposed to have any kind of 
 thoroughness, any period of history which he has not 
 
USE OF MODERN WRITERS. 183 
 
 himself really mastered in the original sources. I can- 
 not believe that any kind of historical teaching can 
 be of any scientific value, that it can have any value 
 among the higher studies of this place — the passman 
 and his studies are things too mysterious for me to 
 presume to pass any judgement upon them — if it be 
 not grounded on reference to the original authorities 
 at every step. 
 
 But while we pick out certain writers in various 
 periods for our special study, while we make them 
 the centres of our work for their several periods, we 
 must beware of making idols of them. We must 
 remember that they are after all not infallible ; we 
 may sometimes correct them by the help of writers 
 very inferior to themselves ; we may sometimes even 
 correct them by our own inferences from their own 
 statements. The very greatest of original writers, 
 being after all only men, have sometimes passed 
 judgements which their own statements did not bear 
 out. Thucydides himself, who surely never perverted 
 his statement of a fact, who seldom indeed allowed 
 his feelings to pervert his judgement of facts, did yet 
 allow himself to be unduly favourable to his master 
 Antiphon, to be unduly hard upon his enemy Kle6n. 
 Yet how fierce a storm arose when a great modern 
 historian dared to set forth this last manifest truth. 
 Some of us may remember the Cambridge tutor who, 
 because he could write clever imitative verses, thought 
 himself fit to judge between what he called " Thucy- 
 dides or Grote," and rejoiced that the great historian 
 of Athenian democracy had not been brought up at 
 
184 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 either of the ancient Universities of the land. How 
 amusing it was, when Tr6ilos thus challenged Achil- 
 leus, to see the self-chosen champion of Thucydides 
 show his own incapacity to understand his Thucy- 
 dides ; to see too how the little scholar, in a vulgar 
 attempt to sneer at the great one, let out the further 
 fact that he had not even read his Plutarch. So again 
 Polybios, calm master of the world's history, could not 
 look with calmness on those parts of the local history 
 of his own peninsula which were to him the imme- 
 diate tradition of the elders, He who could look at 
 the history of the world as a citizen of the world, 
 could look at Kleomen6s only with the narrow pre- 
 judice of a citizen of Megalopolis. Nor was he free 
 from the constant temptation of men who rise above 
 their own day; he was too apt to look on men as 
 either foolish or corrupt, simply because they had not, 
 like him, learned to look on their own age with the 
 eyes of all the ages. This criticism may, I believe, 
 be safely ventured. The class of scholars who might 
 be likely to write pamphlets like " Thucydides or 
 Grote" are likely to throw Polybios aside alto- 
 gether, because his Greek is not exactly the Greek of 
 Thucydides, any more than the Greek of Thucydides 
 is exactly the Greek of Homer. We must avpid the 
 temptation of blind following; we must also avoid 
 the opposite temptation which delights in mere 
 paradox, which thinks it fine to upset estabHshed 
 beliefs, established reputations, simply because they 
 are established beliefs and established reputations. 
 The statement of Thucydides or Polybios is not an 
 
AUTHORITIES NOT INFALLIBLE. 185 
 
 infallible oracle ; it may be set aside by other evi- 
 dence ; but it is a very strong presumption in favour 
 of any position ; it needs very strong evidence indeed 
 to set it aside. He who chooses a great writer of 
 any age as his " book " does in some sort enroll him- 
 self in the comitatus of the writer of that book. He 
 seeks him to lord ; he becomes his man ; he owes him 
 the honourable duty of a faithful eraipos or gesi'S ; he 
 does not owe him the cringmg worship of the SovXos 
 or the Ipeow. 
 
 Let us take a leap for one moment from the great 
 writers of Greece to some of the original authorities 
 for our own history. We should hardly be wise if 
 we put any contemporary writer of English history 
 on a level either with the undying masterpieces of 
 Hellas or with some of the historians of Glermany and 
 Sicily in far later times. But we have two possessions, 
 one narrative, one documentary, such as no other 
 nation can boast of. We have our Chronicles from 
 the beginning in our own tongue ; we have Domes- 
 day in the common tongue of Western Christendom. 
 I will not again sing their praises ; emboldened by 
 the example of my colleague of the Fine Arts, I will 
 not scruple to refer to the volumes in which I have 
 sung them already. And I will not scruple to refer 
 to one particular point which I believe myself to 
 have established. I do so both because I cannot see 
 that anybody has ever taken the slightest notice of it, 
 and because I nevertheless believe that it is both a 
 discovery of some importance in itself and one that 
 well illustrates the way in which, after some practice, 
 
186 ORIGINAL AUTEOEITIES. 
 
 we come to use our authorities to throw light upon 
 one another. If any one found it out before me — 
 and it is very hard to find out anything which some 
 German scholar has not found out before one — I both 
 mourn and rejoice ; I mourn because I have unwit- 
 tingly done him wrong. Still I am not aware that any 
 one ever noticed before me, and I am pretty sure that 
 no one has noticed since me, the manifest connexion 
 between a few speaking words of that hurried narra- 
 tive of the Peterborough Chronicle, in which, hurried 
 as it is, every word has the force of volumes, and a 
 few no less speaking words of the Bast-Anglian 
 Domesday which, in a casual mention of a single 
 private transaction, gives us a living picture of the fate 
 of all the lands of England. The Chronicle tells us 
 how, after the Conqueror's crowning, men paid him 
 geld and gave him hostages and bought their land. 
 " Men guidon him gyld and gislas sealdon and hear a 
 land loJitan." Domesday tells us how the Abbot of 
 Saint Bdmundsbury held certain lands in pledge 
 which were given him on the day when the English 
 redeemed their lands. " Quando Anglici redimebant 
 terras suas." Surely I am not wrong in putting 
 these two passages together as one of the best 
 examples of an undesigned coincidence. The formal 
 and legal language of Domesday shows that the 
 words of the Chronicle are not used lightly or 
 casually, but that they are to be taken in their 
 strictest sense. The words of the Chronicle tell us 
 the date and circumstances of the transaction which 
 Domesday records without a date. These few words 
 
DOMESDAY AND THE CHRONICLES. 187 
 
 in the great narrative and the great document explain 
 one another; they are the key to a thousand other 
 phrases in Domesday and elsewhere; they set before 
 us the whole legal theory of the Conquest. Duke 
 William, lawful heir of the English crown, is kept 
 out of his kingdom by an usurper and his followers ; 
 he is driven to assert his rights by force of arms ; a 
 disloyal people — see how William of Poitiers speaks 
 of us — withstands him; no man fights for him ; many 
 fight against him ; but God gives him the victory. 
 The whole land of a nation of traitors becomes his, 
 not by force but by law, forfeited by the active or 
 passive treason of their owners. But the mild and. 
 merciful king will not press his rights to the utter- 
 most; to the less guilty — the more guilty had fallen 
 on the hill of slaughter — he will grant their lands 
 back again, but not without a reasonable payment for 
 so gracious an act. And so men, in the phrase of the 
 Chronicler, bought their lands; they bought their own 
 back again for a price ; they held them by a new 
 tenure, by the grant of King William, without whose 
 writ and seal or some evidence equivalent to his writ 
 and seal, no man's holding of land was henceforth to 
 be lawful. This legal fiction on a gigantic scale is the 
 key to the whole position of William in England, and 
 thereby, we may say, to the whole later history of 
 England, above all to the history of the law of 
 England. We see that the lawyers' doctrine about 
 all land being held of the Crown, though far indeed 
 from being an eternal truth, has yet a basis in historic 
 fact, a sounder basis in truth than the elder school of 
 
188 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 lawyers thought for. And all this is made out, at 
 least it is all put into a clear and consistent shape, 
 by the simple process of putting together two inde- 
 pendent statements, each found in an original autho- 
 rity, in original authorities which stand alone and 
 without rival, precious possessions of English history 
 to which the history of no other land can show the 
 like. 
 
 Of these two great national records, Domesday, chief 
 of documents, can hardly be called a book in the sense 
 in which I have used the word hooTc in this lecture. 
 But I can conceive no human writing better suited 
 for use as a book than large parts of our national 
 Chronicles, above all the last hundred and twenty 
 years or so of the Peterborough version, from the 
 accession of Eadward the Confessor to the end. There 
 is no human writing in which the text better 
 deserves to be studied word by word ; for every 
 word has its meaning, every word teaches us its 
 lesson. Nowhere surely is a tale told with more 
 life than the tale of the banishment and return of 
 Godwine ; nowhere surely does human speech, ap- 
 plied to something between narrative, comment, and 
 exhortation, reach a higher level than the tongue of 
 Englishmen had reached when it told what manner 
 of man was the Conqueror of England. And what life 
 is there, what pent-up force, in the awful picture of the 
 nineteen winters that we tholed for our sins, the tale 
 of the anarchy, told in English well nigh as rude as 
 the Latin of Gregory of Tours, but from which no 
 man turns away because its grammar, if it can be said 
 
INVITATION TO "CLASSICAL" STUDENTS. 189 
 
 to have any, is not exactly the grammar of the 
 days of Alfred. Our own tongue, our own history, 
 have drawn some advantages from their very 
 neglect. Here at least men have not set np an 
 arbitrary standard, as they have in the case of certain 
 forms of the Greek and Latin tongues, with the effect 
 of leading not a few to despise some of the most 
 precious monuments of both those tongues. Lord 
 Chatham said of three words in the Great Charter 
 that they were "worth all the classics." I will make 
 no such harsh comparison, as my calling is to assert, 
 not the rivalry but the brotherhood, of all periods 
 and all subjects, of all nations and all languages, at 
 least within the pale of Aryan Europe. I would 
 only again appeal, as I appealed once before, to 
 those who are fresh from the mastery of other lands 
 and of elder ages. They have done right well in what 
 they have done; let them only come on further in 
 the same path ; let them not scorn the records 
 of our own folk, written, as no other land can boast 
 them written, in our own tongue in which we were 
 born. Let them even learn what may be the harder 
 lesson, not to scorn the later days of the tongues 
 and the lands towards the knowledge of which they 
 have made so good a beginning. It may seem a 
 hard saying when I call on you to look to the bishop 
 of a Gaulish city, speaking his native Latin almost 
 with a stammering tongue, to look to the monk of 
 an English or German cloister who comes a degree 
 nearer to the rules of Priscian only because Latin 
 was to him a strange tongue learned as we ourselves 
 
190 ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES. 
 
 learn it, and to place them as original authorities side 
 by side with the great master-pieces of earlier times, 
 as texts to be studied with the same care and the 
 same reverence. But so to do is the only way to 
 grasp as a whole the truths of history and even the 
 truths of language. It is on you who have already 
 learned what work is, who have already gone 
 through that sound training of the mind which is 
 needed for the true mastery of any subject, that I 
 call on for help in the work that is laid upon me, 
 a help which you can give in a shape so much 
 sounder than any can give it who have been unluckily 
 led astray into the false hope that they can crown 
 the edifice before they have laid its foundation-stone. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 CLASSICAL AND MEDIAEVAL WRITERS. 
 
 I HAVE been told more than once, and in more 
 shapes than one, since I began my work in this 
 chair, that I have been waging a battle which there 
 is no need to wage, seeing it is already won. No- 
 body, I am told, disputes my doctrine, let me rather 
 say Arnold's doctrine, of the Unity of History. I 
 should be very glad to believe this ; but I cannot 
 see the signs of it. A little time back that doctrine 
 had certainly not won for itself universal acknow- 
 ledgement either in Oxford or elsewhere, and I am 
 not vain enough to think that a lecture or two 
 here can have carried this general conviction even 
 throughout Oxford, much less throughout the whole 
 world. But those who tell me that my doctrine is 
 universally accepted tell me further that it is 
 accepted with a somewhat large reservation, namely 
 that the doctrine cannot be carried out in practice. 
 The distinction between "ancient" and "modern" 
 can be defended by no reasonable argument ; but it 
 must be kept up on the grounds of practical con- 
 venience. That is to say, unreasonable as it is, it 
 must be kept up because to put something more 
 
192 CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL WRITERS. 
 
 reasonable in its place would take a good deal of 
 trouble. That I fully allow; it would take a good 
 deal of trouble. But then I never heard that any 
 great object ever was gained, that any great subject 
 ever was mastered, without a good deal of trouble. 
 Even the " easy " study of " modern " history needs 
 some trouble. And' to devise a practical scheme to 
 put the study of " modern " history in this place 
 into a good working relation with the study of other 
 branches of history woiild take a great deal of 
 trouble indeed. It would take so much trouble that 
 I do not expect ever to see it done in my time ; I 
 certainly do not wish to see it even attempted just 
 yet. If my doctrine, that is Arnold's doctrine, is so 
 universally accepted as I am told it is, it will 
 bear to wait awhile, to work itself into men's minds, 
 to bring forth fruit gradually, till it is so truly and 
 thoroughly accepted that the notion of keeping up 
 an unreal distinction for practical convenience shall 
 have passed away from men's minds. By that time 
 it will be found that there is no real convenience 
 in keeping up arrangements which, however much 
 trouble they may save, have the slight inconveni- 
 ence of being wholly inconsistent with any clear 
 views of the history of the world. 
 
 Meanwhile there is nothing to be done but to 
 show in every shape and at every opportunity how 
 much is lost by a division which tempts the students 
 of one period to try to begin where there is no 
 beginning, and which tempts the students of another 
 period to make an end where there is no ending. 
 
THE EARLY MIDDLE AGE. 193 
 
 Something may be doue towards that object, as in 
 other ways, so by showing how impossible it is, in 
 any general view of the whole of Europe, to draw 
 a hard line between the writers of the so-called 
 " classical " and the so-called " mediaeval " periods. 
 I in no way deny that it is possible to attach 
 meanings to those words, and to use them as the 
 names of two classes of writers between which there 
 is a real difference. It is clear that, in the so-called 
 mediaeval writers, as contrasted with those that went 
 before them, some new elements are coming in 
 and some old elements are dying out. All that is 
 expressed by the words Christian and Teutonic 
 is coming in ; all that is expressed by the words 
 Pagan and Eoman is dying out. Or rather perhaps 
 we might say that the older elements are living 
 on, but living no independent life, surviving only 
 as something to modify the elements which have 
 now become at least their fellows. It had been 
 at last ruled, in the spirit of Ataulf, that the 
 dominion of Eome should not come to an end, but 
 that, in the Western lands at least, it should go on 
 as a dominion of influence. The Teuton rent away 
 the provinces of the Empire ; but, in rending them 
 away, he accepted the faith, the tongue, and, to a 
 great extent, the law, of the Empire. This was 
 of a truth the greatest conquest that Home ever 
 made ; if Greece had once led captive her Eoman 
 conqueror, far more thoroughly did Eome lead 
 captive her Teutonic conqueror. Her tongue be- 
 came for ages the tongue of government, of learning, 
 
 
 
194 CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL WRITERS. 
 
 and of religion, in all tlie Western lands. We speak 
 in the West of " classical " and of " mediaeval " 
 writers; but both come under the head of Latin 
 writers. From one point of view we may look on 
 it as a great evil that it should be so ; and doubtless 
 the abiding of Latin as the accepted tongue for so 
 many purposes in the Teutonic lands had an evil 
 side. But, good or evil, it is the surest and most 
 abiding side of the continued domination of Rome, 
 as a power no longer ruling over men's bodies, but 
 more than ever influencing their minds. In the 
 Teutonic lands the conquest was never perfect ; the 
 native speech never died out on the tongues of the 
 people ; it even became a written speech as soon 
 as Teutonic hands had learned to handle the pen 
 of the writer. First and most venerable among the 
 monuments of Teutonic prose is the Bible of Ulfilas. 
 But the Gothic Scriptures, and the other small frag- 
 ments of Gothic speech, stand by themselves. They 
 had no influence on ought that was to come. The 
 professor of an Arian or semi-Arian creed could not 
 become the apostle of Teutonic Christendom, and 
 the Goth, foremost and noblest branch of the great 
 family, was too soon cut ofi" by the sword of the 
 East-Eoman or trampled under the horse-hoofs of 
 the Saracen to do ought abiding for the kinsfolk 
 who lagged behind him in the race of history. It 
 was among our own folk in our own land, the land 
 and the folk which received the torch of the Gospel 
 from Eome herself and handed it on to other Teutonic 
 lands, that a lasting literature at once Teutonic and 
 
EARLY TEUTONIC WRITINGS. 195 
 
 Christian was first to arise. Heroic lays of heathen 
 times had lived on on condition of putting on more 
 or less of a Christian garb. A distinctively Christian 
 poetry arose when Csedmon — if Csedmon we are still 
 allowed to call him — sang the tale which Avitus 
 had sung before him, and which Milton was to sing 
 after him. At last came the great step of all. The 
 English speech, still in its undefiled Teutonic purity, 
 became, at a single step, at the bidding of a single 
 man, the mother of a rich and varied literature of 
 prose. Not only did it show itself a fit means for 
 handing on the thoughts of the wise men of earlier 
 days and of other tongues ; the Bible of Ulfilas had 
 been that and more than that. It arose to show 
 itself fit for the greater work of handing on the 
 contemporary record of a nation, the contemporary 
 record of that nation's greatest king. What abiding 
 life a Teutonic tongue could keep after ages of 
 Roman influence we see in our national Chronicles, 
 the worthy fellows of the Gothic Scriptures. In the 
 history of the two great intellectual conquests, the 
 Hellenic conquest of the Roman and the Eoman 
 conquest of the Teuton, all honour must be paid to 
 two men, to two champions of national life and 
 national speech, to whom, each in his own age, it is 
 owing that there is a literature of prose either in 
 the tongue of Latium or in the tongue of England. 
 The yeoman from Tusculum and the king from 
 Wantage must be bracketted together. The elder 
 Cato taught the Eoman, as J]]lfred taught the 
 Englishman, that his own tongue, the tongue of his 
 
 2 
 
196 CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL WRITERS. 
 
 fathers, was the best tongue in which at once to 
 hand on the deeds of his fathers and to put forth a 
 varied lore for the teaching of his children. Every 
 writer of Latin prose, classical, mediaeval, imitative 
 modern, has been the intellectual child of Cato ; 
 every writer of English prose, from the Chronicler 
 whom he himself inspired to him who speaks before 
 you this day, has faUed in the duty of a man to his 
 lord, if he bears himself as other than the intellectual 
 child of Alfred. 
 
 The independent Teutonic tongues, which no man 
 could mistake for dialects or corruptions of Latin, 
 were thus the first to spring up as rivals to the 
 supremacy of Latin. The Eomance tongues began 
 their work later. It was only by slow steps that 
 men found out that the lingua Bomana which they 
 spoke had parted off so widely from the lingua Latina 
 which they wrote that they had practically become 
 distinct tongues, and that it was possible to write in 
 the Roman speech no less than in the Latin. Gaul, 
 where the spoken tongue had gone through greater 
 changes than it underwent in Italy, naturally awoke 
 to this truth sooner than Italy. From the eleventh 
 century onwards we must reckon among our original 
 authorities a series of Old-French writers, beginning 
 with Aimd's history of Norman warfare in southern 
 Italy. Villehardouin and JoinviUe, Froissart and 
 Monstrelet, and a crowd of others continue the tradi- 
 tion of French prose ; nor must we forget the gleemen 
 of foreign speech to whom we have often to turn for 
 large parts of our own history, Geoffrey Gaimar, 
 
ROMANCE WRITINGS. 197 
 
 Master Wace of Bayeux, and Benolt of Sainte-More. 
 Later, but rising to a far higher level, came the great 
 writers of Italy, ushered in by their chief and cap- 
 tive ; for surely Dante, if any writer of any age and 
 tongue, claims his place among the original authori- 
 ties of history. He must indeed be reckoned among 
 the foremost witnesses of an age of great men and great 
 deeds, an age of many sides of which we learn more 
 from him than we can learn from any other source. 
 
 Now the first aspect of the history of language 
 for the space of seven or eight centuries is that 
 each nation gradually learned to write in its own 
 native tongue, Romance or Teutonic, and that this 
 use of the native tongue gradually supplanted the 
 elder use of Latin. I was going to say that the 
 use of Latin prose had gone on uninterruptedly 
 from the days of Cato the Censor. And it would 
 be going too far on the other side to say that 
 there was any time when the custom of Latin 
 prose composition, and even of Latin historical com- 
 position, altogether died out. But it is well to re- 
 member how very nearly, at one stage of the history 
 of the Empire, Latin gave way to Greek. For a 
 season, even in the Western lands, Latin seemed to 
 have passed away as the tongue of anything that 
 claimed to be literature. A second Greek conquest 
 of the Eoman mind seems to mark the second and 
 third centuries of our ^ra. When Marcus wrote his 
 private meditations in Greek, it was a sign of the 
 times ; he seems to be fast ajjproaching the position 
 of his successors in the East with whom for so long 
 
198 CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL WRITERS. 
 
 Latin was the formal speech of government and war- 
 fare, but of nothing else. If the feeble thread of 
 the Augustan History did not bind together the age 
 of Trajan and the age of Diocletian, we might almost 
 say that it was by the Christian writers of Koman 
 Africa that the Latin tongue was kept alive. Then 
 came the day of reaction. Under the great Ulyrian 
 Emperors, under Jovius greatest of them all, Rome, 
 Eoman Eome, rose to life again, not indeed on the 
 seven hills of her birth, but wherever the needs of 
 a Eome of which York and Antioch were outlying 
 bulwarks might rule that her Augusti should dweU. 
 With the power of Eome her speech again came to 
 the front ; the richness of the Latin literature of the 
 fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries stands out in marked 
 contrast to the barrenness of the third and the greater 
 part of the second. Instead of the Eoman writing 
 Greek, the Greek now wrote Lalin ; Aramianus told 
 his tale of war and statesmanship, Claudian sang the 
 praises of Emperors and consuls, in a tongue which 
 was not theirs by birth. It was indeed needful that 
 Eome should again put on her old garb and her old 
 life ; for now she had to gird herself for her greatest 
 work ; it was not a Greek- but a Latin-speaking 
 Eome which was to be the teacher of our kinsfolk 
 and of ourselves. Now, from this great Latin reac- 
 tion to any date that we may choose in the so-called 
 middle ages, it is impossible to find any hard and fast 
 line between "classical" and "mediseval" writers. 
 There is really a greater gap between Tacitus and 
 Ammianus than there is between Ammianus and 
 
THE RENAISSANCE OF LATIN. 199 
 
 Hugo Falcandus. It is by a really sound instinct 
 from their own point of view that those who are too 
 superfinely classical to read Hugo Falcandus are 
 commonly too superfinely classical to read Ammianus 
 either. Indeed I am not sure that the Frenchman — 
 for so I suppose he was — who raised his wail over 
 the griefs of SicUy does not come nearer to the 
 standard of Livy or Cicero than the Greek soldier who 
 makes us at home with Constantius and Yalentinian. 
 I would venture to throw out the hint for the consi- 
 deration of those among us to whom the history of 
 language as such, and specially the history of the 
 Latin language, is a matter of more immediate con- 
 cern than it is to me, whether this Latin reaction 
 was not largely the child of the rhetorical schools of 
 Gaul. Certain it is that the new fashion seems to 
 be ushered in by those wonderful discourses which 
 panegyrists who had studied at Autun addressed to 
 Emperors who reigned at Trier. From this time 
 onwards Latin prose becomes artificial rhetoric, ex- 
 cept when by good luck it drops into the simplicity 
 of annals, meagre it may be but at least intelligible. 
 Happy are we when we get to writings in which men 
 who confessed their unskilfulness wrote as they spoke, 
 and who thereby help us to see some of the steps 
 by which the tongue of Latium changed into the 
 tongues of Aquitaine and France. The grand style, in 
 various forms, is the style of Ammianus, of Sidonius, 
 and of Cassiodorus ; the wonderful thing is how 
 much of sound wisdom, what a mass of precious facts, 
 could, by their inherent vigour, escape being utterly 
 
200 CLASSICAL AND MEDIJEVAL WBITEBS. 
 
 smothered by the mass of fine writing out of 
 •which they have to struggle. And this artificial 
 and vicious taste lived on ; it afiects most of those 
 writers of the middle ages who affect any prose style ; 
 Dudo of Saint-Quentin perhaps outdoes all who 
 went before or after him ; but our own Herbert of 
 Bosham could do a good deal in the way of the grand 
 style two centuries later. It is relief when a writer 
 is content to have no style at all, when he simply 
 tells us what he has to say, in such Latin, better or 
 worse, as he can give us, but without any pretence 
 at rhetoric. The point that concerns me now in all 
 of these writers is that, in this as in other matters, 
 no real line can be drawn between " ancient " and 
 " modern," " classical " and " mediaeval," or that, if a 
 line is drawn, it must be drawn at some point earlier 
 or later, which may be a Httle unexpected. There 
 is no real halting-place between the Renaissance of 
 the third century and the Benaissance of the fifteenth. 
 It is open to any man to class Eumenius of Autun 
 among the moderns, or to class the Crowland Con- 
 tinuator among the ancients. I deny the right of 
 any man to cleave asunder the unbroken series of 
 writers to which both of them belong. 
 
 And, if this is true in the Latin West, how much 
 more palpably true is it in the Greek Bast, In an 
 argument which some of you may have seen in an- 
 other shape, I have insisted on the unbroken con- 
 tinuity of Greek literature and the impossibility of 
 dividing the indivisible, unless it be at a point which 
 would rank not only Polybios but Aristotle among. 
 
CONTINUITY OF LATIN AND GREEK. 201 
 
 the moderns. In the fourth century B.C. began the 
 unbroken series of writers of Greek prose who talked 
 one kind of Greek and wrote another. They talked 
 whatever was the natural dialect of their age and 
 country; they wrote with as near an approach to 
 the Attic standard of purity as they were lucky 
 enough to attain to. That series takes in the whole 
 line of Byzantine writers ; it would not be too much 
 to extend it so far as to take in the literary Greek of 
 our own day. The last attempt at reviving ancient 
 forms, whatever we think of it, and I for one deeply re- 
 gret it, is simply one of several cases of Renaissance in 
 the history of the Greek tongue. One very clear case 
 of such Renaissance marks the age of Lucian ; another 
 marks the age of Anna Komnen6. Where are we 
 to draw the line ? Plutarch, I presume, is an " an- 
 cient ;" so must be his contemporary Di6n Chrysostom. 
 But what of his grandson the other Dion, who as- 
 suredly knew some things about Eoman history that 
 Livy did not know 1 Where are we to put the 
 Christian Fathers and the pagan philosophers 1 
 Where wiU come that great collection of historians, 
 ecclesiastical and secular. Christian and pagan, who, 
 some of them even in their fragments, set the history 
 of the fifth century before us, many parts of it in no 
 small fulness of detail"? The living picture which 
 Priscus has given us of the court of Attila makes us 
 yearn for more than fate has given us of a writer who 
 could observe so well and so well record what he 
 observed. In the next century we rise higher and 
 we fall deeper. It is a fall indeed .when, after 
 
202 CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL WRITERS. 
 
 reading the Gothic war in Procopius the statesman, 
 we go on to read the Frankish war in Agathias the 
 rhetorician. But the change is in the matter and 
 not in the form, in the man and not in the 
 tongue which he writes. In language, as in every- 
 thing else, the whole duration of the Eastern Em- 
 pire of Eome continues the elder state of things 
 with a continuity which is absolutely unbroken. If 
 we are to distinguish " ancient" and " modern "—that 
 is, if the words are to have any meaning, Greek and 
 Italian as distinguished from Teutonic and Slavonic 
 — we must allow that "ancient" and "modern" went 
 on side by side for at least a thousand years. In aU 
 that constitutes language in the strict sense, Laonikos 
 Chalkokondyl^s differs from Xenoph6n far less than 
 Xenoph6n differs from Homer, I beheve one might say 
 less than he differs from Herodotus. All Byzantine 
 Greek, if not Attic to the Hterary critic, is certainly 
 Attic to the historical phUologer. If we are to draw 
 a hne, it must be drawn between Xenoph6n who 
 wrote Attic because it was his natural dialect and 
 Aristotle who wrote Attic because Attic had in 
 those few years become the received shape of liter- 
 ary Greek prose. If Chalkokondylis is not allowed 
 to be an " ancient," we claim Aristotle as a modern. 
 
 There is another incidental feature in the Byzantine 
 writers which helps to make the continuity of ancient 
 and mediaeval Greek yet more marked than the con- 
 tinuity of ancient and mediaeval Latin. In both cases 
 the mediaeval tongue is an artificial dialect, a dialect 
 which the man who writes it does not speak in his 
 
LAY WRITERS OF GREEK. 203 
 
 familiar moments. But mediaeval Latin is tlie language 
 of a class in a way in which mediseval Greek is not. 
 Speaking roughly, medieval Latin is the language of 
 the clergy. Such a statement must be taken with 
 many modifications and exceptions ; but it has essen- 
 tial truth in it. The fact that the word clerk oould 
 ever come to mean a man who could write speaks 
 volumes. Latin, learning of any kind, was by no means 
 an exclusive possession of the clergy, but it was their 
 possession. The educated layman drew near to the 
 nature of the man in holy orders. Our first Henry, 
 master of three languages, perchance of four, is marked 
 off from his illiterate brothers as Henry the Clerk. 
 The writer of mediaeval Latin is, as a rule, a clei'k in 
 the strict sense, that is, if we may take cleric to include 
 monk. Einhard and Nithard belong to an exceptional 
 group in an exceptional age. We in England have 
 nothing to set against them better than Eabius Patri- 
 cius QuBestor Ethelwardus. And we cannot deny that, 
 though no hard and fast line can be drawn, a marked 
 change comes over Latin literature from the time 
 that it passes mainly into the hands of the clergy. 
 And in the West this change followed very soon upon 
 the change from paganism to Christianity. The last 
 doctrine is that Boetius was after all a Christian ; but 
 we cannot call the " Consolatio " a Christian writing. 
 Cassiodorus is the last of the unbroken succession of 
 great lay writers, and he in the end withdrew to a 
 monastery. But in the East the succession of lay 
 writers goes on unbroken to the end. Our Byzantine 
 volumes are quite as often, oftener, I should think, 
 
204. CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL WMITEliS. 
 
 the works of generals, statesmen, Emperors, as they 
 are the works of bishops or abbots. To be sure the 
 Byzantine laity would now-a-days be looked on as a 
 clerically-minded laity; the Emperor is commonly a 
 theologian quite as learned and quite as zealous as 
 the Patriarch. Still in the East history did continue 
 to be written by men of the world, men of the court 
 and the camp. There is no real break in the West any 
 more than in the East, but there is one marked change 
 in the West of which there is no trace in the East. 
 
 In the East then there is no time, no 'place, on 
 which we can fasten as the birth-time and the birth- 
 place of a mediseval as distinguished from a classical 
 literature. There are no men on whom we can fasten 
 as embodying the change in their own persons. In 
 the West we can in a very remarkable way connect the 
 change with one special land, with one special city 
 of that land, with two men before all others among 
 the inhabitants of that land and city. There are 
 some spots on the earth which seem to have a 
 mission of historic teaching, which seem to stand 
 as beacons to remind us of great events, of greater 
 combinations of effects, of cause steadUy working 
 in their effects. Such spots stand forth as the 
 homes, sometimes of men whose strong will must be 
 set down as not the least among historic causes, 
 sometimes of men who seem sent as examples of the 
 way in which their age worked upon them, but who 
 had hardly received a mission to work upon their 
 age. And among such spots, as some remind us of 
 warriors and statesmen who fixed the history of the 
 
IiXFLUENGE OF GAUL AND AU7EE0NE. 205 
 
 world, others remind us of the men whose names mark 
 the stages of human culture and human speech. So 
 there is one land, there is above all one spot, where 
 we may not say that the classical Latin literature 
 died out and the mediaeval Latin literature came to 
 life, but where, before all other spots, we may say 
 that the one changed into the other, without breach 
 of continuity, without change of personal being. It 
 changed by gentle and natural growth, or if you will by 
 gentle and natural decay, as the newly chosen scholar 
 may grow or decay by gentle and natural steps till he 
 finds himself changed into the newly named Professor, 
 fully qualified, as my Latin brother will teU you, for an 
 unwilling plunge from the Sublician bridge into the 
 yellow Tiber. The history of the later Eoman Htera- 
 ture was emphatically wrought on the soil of Gaul, and 
 there is one spot of Gaulish soil which, more nearly 
 than all others, beheld the great turning-point in that 
 history. There is a spot which was the home of two 
 men who, without willing it, almost without knowing 
 it, must rank as epoch-making men in the long story 
 of the tongue which they spoke and wrote. We are 
 among the peaks of the Arvernian land, where each 
 hill, great and small, rests, as Vesuvius rested when 
 Spartacus found shelter in his crater, from the 
 working of the fiery powers the signs of whose 
 strength meet us at every step. Let us stand on the 
 hill which later time called the Bright Mount, head 
 of all other Glari monies in the topography of Gaul. 
 There, from among churches and houses built, as at 
 Catania, of the dark lava — strange gift of the burning 
 
206 CLASSICAL AND MEDIJE7AL WRITERS. 
 
 hills for man's behoof — we look up at the long line of 
 the camp of old Gergovia, the hill where Caesar, 
 baffled for once, left his sword as the prize of Arvernian 
 victory. We look up too at the loftiest height of all, 
 the mighty peak on whose crown modern science tells 
 the stars and tracks their courses amid the ruins 
 alike of older nature and of an older creed. On that 
 height, by the quenched furnace of a world that has 
 passed away, lie the shattered temple-stones of the 
 gods of a mythology that has passed away after it — 
 shall we speak of the familiar Mercury of Italy ? shall 
 we speak of the mysterious Gaulish deity whose exact 
 description I leave to my Celtic brother? — and yet 
 further, may we deem that, when Crocus the heathen 
 Aleman shattered the stones, the carvings, the mosaics, 
 it was as an offering to our own Teutonic gods, and 
 that Woden and Thunder also have been worshipped 
 on the height of the Puy de D6me ? We look to the 
 hills, but we also look to the lower ground below the 
 Bright Mount itself, on that pleasant plain, that 
 wide Limagne, which a Frankish king yearned to see, 
 but saw not for the mists that shrouded it. Close at 
 our feet, hardly to be marked among other buildings, 
 we may trace out the castle of the princes, the chdteau 
 of the bishops, the waU that bears the name of the 
 Saracen invader, the wall of nobler workmanship 
 where we trace the abiding craft of Eome. Above 
 all, we see, beneath the city walls, the plain where 
 Urban told his tale in the ears of a world at once 
 shuddering and admiring, where — truly indeed vox 
 foj^uli vox Dei — assembled Christendom spake the 
 
SIDONIUS AND GREGORY. 207 
 
 great answer of Grod's will, and not only spake, but forth- 
 witb girded on its sword for the first and greatest Pil- 
 grimage of Grace. There, in the city around which 
 nature and art and history seem to have piled 
 together their choicest memories, but within whose 
 walls, among goodly piles of later days, no temple, 
 no church, no tower, no gateway as at Autun, no 
 baptistery as at Poitiers, abides on which the eyes of 
 its most famous citizens can have ever rested — in the 
 Arvernian city, the Nemetum of one age, the Cler- 
 mont of another, two men did their work, who joined 
 the highest nobility of the elder day to the highest 
 priesthood of the newer, two men whose days and 
 the space between them mark better than all else 
 the change between the pagan and the Christian 
 stages of the Latin speech on Gaulish soil. There 
 lived the last famous writer of its elder form, the 
 first famous writer of its newer form ; the prelate- 
 poet who felt ill at ease under the dominion of the 
 Goth, the prelate-historian who had learned to shape 
 himself to the dominion of the Frank ; within the 
 walls of the Arvernian city both were alike at home ; 
 there dwelled Sidonius ; there was born Gregory. 
 
 The difference between the two men is marked in- 
 deed ; the memorable century which passed between 
 them had, whether we deem it for good or for evil, 
 done no slight work. The change alike in language 
 and in feeling between Sidonius and Gregory would 
 seem to be a change of several centuries. Even the 
 name of each is significant. The full style of the 
 earlier writer is Gains SoUius ApoUinaris Sidonius. 
 
208 CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL WRITERS. 
 
 The personal nomenclature of the fifth century A. d. 
 is not exactly that of the first century b. c, but the 
 prsenomen of Marius and Csesar still lives on. When 
 we come to his foUower, we have not indeed come 
 back to the single baptismal name out of which 
 modern nomenclature rose again ; but we have no 
 Gaius or Marcus now ; the tria nomina of the sena- 
 torial-born Bishop are Georgius Florentius Gregorius. 
 The four names of Sidonius do not show among them 
 the slightest mark of Christianity. Of the three 
 names of Gregory, Tlorentius indeed is colourless, but 
 the other two belong to hagiography; Gregorius 
 indeed is a name saintly in its very essence, invented 
 to call men to the practice of a Christian virtue. So 
 when we turn from the names to the men, Sidonius 
 is a Christian, a bishop, even a saint, nor have we 
 anything to say of him that is directly inconsistent 
 with those characters. He is so far removed from 
 paganism, the paganism that his grandfather threw 
 aside, that he can afford to play with the subject, and 
 can venture, like a modern poet, to use the worn-out 
 mythology as a source of poetic ornament. Christian, 
 bishop, and saint, he is before all things a Eoman, 
 a Roman of Gaul, a skilled poet and rhetorician, 
 a master of the Latin tongue according to the taste 
 of his own time, a taste which was certainly not that 
 either of Horace or of a modern critic. In his varied 
 life, he had seen the world from many sides, and had 
 played many parts in it, before he put on that of 
 Bishop of Auvergne. Prsefect of Eome, son-in-law of 
 an Emperor, panegyrist alike of his father-in-law and 
 
CONTRAST IN THEIR LIVES. 209 
 
 of the prince who was exalted on his father-in-law's 
 overthrow, he had in his native Lyons, in his 
 adopted Auvergne, as well as in the eternal city 
 itself, good opportunities of studying his age, its men 
 and its events. And the outside at least of all 
 of them he had studied to some purpose. We have 
 to thank him for a clearer knowledge of the ordinary 
 life of Gaul in the fifth century than we have of the 
 ordinary life of most times and places. We know 
 how an Arvernian senator, yet more, we know how a 
 West-Gothic king, passed his daily life from morning 
 to evening. We thoroughly grasp the nature of the 
 society, refined, courtly, intellectual, if feeble and 
 lacking in political or military spirit, into which the 
 unpolished Germans suddenly burst. Sidonius did not 
 love his barbarian enemies ; he hardly loved even his 
 barbarian friends ; he was not at home with greasy- 
 haired Burgundians seven feet high, even when they 
 came as his kindly protectors. We turn to Gregory, 
 Roman, Hke Sidonius ; like Sidonius also. Christian, 
 bishop, and saint. But the tables are turned; 
 Sidonius is a Christian and a bishop, although he 
 is a Eoman ; Gregory is a Roman, although he is 
 a Christian and a bishop. His creed and his office 
 have taken possession of his whole soul; unlike 
 Sidonius, he had no long secular life before he took 
 to his sacred calling ; but we are sure that at no 
 time of his life would he have ventured to take the 
 names of the evil daemons Jupiter and Diana into his 
 mouth as names of harmless sport. He was a states- 
 man, because a bishop of his day was forced to be 
 
 p 
 
210 CLASSICAL AND MEDIjEVAL WRITERS. 
 
 a statesman ; he had to curb the fierce passions of 
 rival kings, to correct unworthy and to shelter 
 unlucky brethren, as he might find occasion. He 
 writes no sportive epigrams, no courtly panegyrics, 
 no rhetorical letters ; history, as he understood it, 
 history written for the confirmation of the faith, the 
 record of the worthy deeds of good men and the 
 unworthy deeds of evil men, the tale of the wonders 
 wrought by the saint, of the discomfiture brought 
 upon the heretic, form his grave and solemn task. To 
 graces of style he makes no claim ; by his own con- 
 fession, perhaps going a little too far in the way 
 of self-depreciation, he knew not the commonest 
 rules of grammar. All the better for the purposes 
 of history ; there is very little profit to be got from 
 writers who live under the rod of Donatus ; it is 
 when we get to false concords and false spellings that 
 we begin to learn something. The Latin of Gregory 
 teaches us what the Latin of Sidonius does not, 
 it shows us how Latin looked in the first stage of its 
 slow change into Provenjal and French. Gregory is 
 a Eoman ; but, if not thoroughly satisfied with Mero- 
 wingian rule, he at least accepts it as the inevitable 
 order of things ; he no more thinks of constructing 
 a world without Chlotachars and Chilperics than he 
 thinks of constructing a world without earthquakes 
 and pestilences. We feel that, in passing from 
 Sidonius to Gregory, we are passing into another 
 world, into another region of thought and feeling. 
 But there is no sudden break ; old elements are 
 weakened, new elements are strengthened; that is aU. 
 
GAP BETWEEN SIDONIUS AND GREGORY. 211 
 
 The change is great ; but it is hardly greater than 
 the change between Naevius and Ennius, assuredly 
 not greater than the change which parted Ennius 
 from Appius the Blind. The change from Herodotus 
 to Aristotle, one might almost say from Herodotus 
 to his contemporary Thucydides, is a change in the 
 opposite direction to the change from Sidonius to 
 Gregory; but it is assuredly a change as wide. 
 
 If then we are to draw a line between classical and 
 medigeval Latin anywhere, we are tempted to draw it 
 at a point that would make Sidonius the last of the 
 classical, and Gregory the first of the medieval 
 writers. Yet such a division would be utterly 
 deceptive, even in Gaul. Between Sidonius and 
 Gregory comes Alcimus Avitus ; contemporary with 
 Gregory comes Venantius Fortunatus. Both of 
 them are bishops and poets ; Avitus was also a busy 
 theologian, and a very clever and intriguing politician 
 who had, in the cause of orthodoxy, a good deal to 
 do with pulling the Burgundian down and setting 
 the Frank up. Both in point of language belong to 
 the fellowship of Sidonius rather than to the fellow- 
 ship of Gregory; in spirit and objects Avitus belongs 
 to the fellowship of Gregory rather than to that of 
 Sidonius ; he is before all things the churchman. 
 And it is needless to say that, long before Gregory or 
 Avitus, we find strong signs of the spirit of Gregory; 
 the change from Orosius to Sidonius is in some sort 
 a step back from the Christian Eoman to the Eoman 
 Christian ; so Yenantius, contemporary and friend of 
 Gregory, seems to belong to quite an earlier stage, 
 
 P 2 
 
212 CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL WRITEBS. 
 
 His chief business is to sing the hireling praises of 
 Frankish kings and great men, to enlarge on the merits 
 of Chilperic and Fredegun, to tell the more honest 
 tale of the fall of Thuringia and of the virtues of his 
 life-long friend the holy Eadegund. But he sings 
 them in true Koman style ; no forms of composition 
 can be more unlike than the verse of Venantius and 
 the prose of Gregory. It may of course be said that 
 Venantius, a man of Italian birth, would naturally 
 ■write in a purer style than the man of Gaul, in an 
 age when, as Gregory himself tells us, learning 
 had died out in the Gaulish cities. And so it may 
 be ; still we have side by side Venantius, who aims, 
 not unsuccessfully, at being classical, and Gregory 
 who makes no such claim, but confessedly writes the 
 rustic speech which he spoke. And Gregory stands 
 almost alone. When letters awake again under 
 Charles the Great, men A^Tote both in verse and 
 prose far more in the language of Sidonius and 
 Venantius than in that of Gregory. 
 
 Sidonius then cannot be set down as chronologically 
 the last of classical writers with anything like the 
 same approach to truth with which we can call Gre- 
 gory the first of mediseval writers. And yet he may 
 be well said to close the period. He was the last 
 eminent writer the main part of whose life was spent 
 as a subject of the West-Eoman Empire beyond the 
 Alps. Boetius and Cassiodorus wrote after him, but 
 they wrote in Italy as subjects of the Goth, and the 
 first aspect of Cassiodorus is that he was minister of 
 the Goth. But Sidonius is simply and purely Roman ; 
 
VALUE OF SIDONIUS. 213 
 
 it was only in the last years of his life that, deeply 
 against his wlII, he became a West-Gothic subject. 
 Those who came after him are survivals carried on 
 into a later state of things ; Sidonius is the last of 
 the old series, the last who grew up and flourished 
 and spent the best years of his life under the elder 
 state of things. The peculiar interest of his position, 
 the deeply instructive character of his writings, writ- 
 ings not in form historical but among the most im- 
 portant materials for history, have drawn to Sidonius 
 the careful attention of every student either of his- 
 tory or of language who has learned how great a 
 place in the history of the world is filled by the fifth 
 century after Christ. Guizot in one land, Hodgkin 
 in another, have gone to him — how could they fail to 
 go to him \ — as the chief interpreter of his age. 
 From the appreciation of scholars such as these, it is 
 curious, and if provoking, it is also both amusing and 
 instructive, to turn and see how a writer who has so 
 much to teach, who has taught so much to so many, 
 looks in the eyes of those who, walking round and 
 round in their narrow orbit, are so unlucky as to think 
 that they know everything already. I heard the other 
 day a story which, whether true or false, is illus- 
 trative, a story which, if any one disbelieves, it 
 will not be quia impossihile, but because it is almost 
 too obvious to have really happened. It is said that 
 a student, not of history but of language in the 
 strictest sense, but a student of language of the more 
 enlightened kind, one whose eyes had been opened 
 to see the need of knowing, not only whence his 
 
214 CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL WRITERS. 
 
 favourite tongues came, but whither they went, had, 
 in the course of a long study of Latin literature, 
 made his way at last to the pages of Sidonius. What 
 could be more natural 1 what could be a surer sign 
 of the deep and genuine nature of his Latin learning 1 
 Then, so the tale goes, a scholar of a narrower type, 
 finding him so employed, jeered at him for wasting 
 his time on " the smallest points in the smallest 
 writers." As a specimen of self-satisfied ignorance, 
 the tale is perfect. But the type of character which 
 it reveals to us is worth dissecting a little further. 
 It is self-satisfied ignorance, but it is not merely self- 
 satisfied ignorance. An element of a more respect- 
 able kind steps in. This narrow kind of scholarship, 
 which positively refuses to look beyond a few arbi- 
 trarily chosen centuries, is to some extent grounded 
 on a mistaken theory of the duty of a man to his 
 lord. Scholars of this type are the sworn votaries of 
 certain special authors, of certain special periods. I 
 can understand that an editor or translator of Virgil 
 might feel it a breach of loyalty, a failure to maintain 
 his lord's honour, if he thought Sidonius worthy of 
 so much as a glance. Such is not the feeling of the 
 historian ; it is not the feeling of the philologer ; but 
 it is a feeling by no means unnatural, by no means 
 unusual, among men whose whole line of study has 
 gone in one narrow groove. The meaner feeling of 
 jealousy towards knowledge which one does not 
 oneself share, the feeling which sometimes even 
 denies the name of knowledge to that which it does 
 not itself know, may doubtless come in in its measure. 
 
SIDONIUS IN THE E7ES OF IGNORANCE. 215 
 
 but I believe the comparatively worthy feeling to 
 come first. Certain writers are set up to be wor- 
 shipped with an exclusive worship ; honour, even 
 thought, bestowed on others, is treason against their 
 divinity. 
 
 Be this as it may, this exclusive feeling on the 
 part of the narrower scholarship undoubtedly exists ; 
 it forms one of the difficulties of our work ; it is one 
 of the enemies that have to be striven against by 
 every one who gives himself to any wider and more 
 enlightened study either of history or of language. 
 It sometimes shows itself in yet more remarkable 
 forms than that of looking on Sidonius ApoUinaris 
 as one of the smallest of writers. The line drawn is 
 not always chronological ; the ban is sometimes put 
 forth, not only against writers of what are held to be 
 inferior periods, but also against writers of the periods 
 which are most held in honour, if these do not them- 
 selves belong to the very chosen few. I remember 
 reading some years ago, in a book which I have not 
 now by me, a warning against bringing Thucydides 
 — he is so completely the chief and captain of original 
 authorities that we cannot help coming back to him 
 again and again — against bringing Thucydides into 
 any kind of fellowship, even with writers of his own 
 age, even with the great orator Lysias. The doc- 
 trine was set forth in a metaphorical strain ; but it 
 came to something like this ; Thucydides is so great 
 that he must stand by himself; we must take his 
 narrative as we find it ; we must not eke it out by 
 any other. Now, if any one had proposed. to put 
 
216 CLASSICAL AND MEDIjEVAL WRITERS. 
 
 forth an edition of Thucydides, patched up with scraps 
 from Lysias or Plutarch or any other writer, as Croker 
 patched up Boswell with scraps from a score of other 
 writers about Johnson, no warning could have been 
 more in place. But the warning, if I rightly un- 
 derstood it, was not against corrupting the text of 
 Thucydides, but agauist treating the narrative of 
 Thucydides as amenable to the common laws of his- 
 torical criticism. That narrative must be taken as 
 something altogether by itself; no other witness 
 must be brought either to confirm or to confute the 
 statements of the great master. This, it wUl be seen, 
 is exactly the spirit which dictated the outcry against 
 the free criticism of Mr. Grote. No spirit can be 
 more directly opposed to any method of sound his- 
 torical study than one which puts any writer, how- 
 ever illustrious, beyond the reach of that process of 
 comparison and criticism, which is the very life of all 
 historical research. Be he never so great, he cannot 
 bar us from the right and duty of weighing every 
 statement against some other statement, of filling up 
 the gaps in one narrative by statements and notices 
 in another. And the narrative of Thucydides, of all 
 narratives, needs filling up from other sources. His 
 subject is not the whole history of his times, but only 
 one aspect of it. He writes the story of the Pelo- 
 ponnesian War; he does not write the fuU story even 
 of Athens during the time of the Peloponnesian War. 
 To grasp that whole story in all its bearings, we must 
 turn to many sources of knowledge besides the head 
 one. We must eke Thucydides out with patchwork 
 
THUGYDIDES AND LYSIAS. 217 
 
 from many quarters, even from quarters very inferior 
 to himself And Lysias, a younger contemporary, a 
 careful spectator, indeed an actor in events only a 
 few years later, one of the greatest masters of one of 
 the greatest of arts, a witness who is inferior to 
 Thucydides only because the craft of the orator does 
 not bind a man to truth so strictly as the craft of the 
 historian — if he may not be referred to for events 
 within his own knowledge, our means of understand- 
 ing the days in which he lived are cruelly shortened 
 indeed. 
 
 I have referred to this last case, because it illus- 
 trates two opposite sources of danger which affect 
 the treatment of different periods of history. In my 
 last lecture I insisted on the necessity of choosing in 
 every period some special book as the centre of study, 
 of mastering its text minutely, and making all other 
 sources of knowledge for that period gather round 
 that one book as their chief. I applied this rule alike 
 to so-called classical and so-called mediseval stiidies. 
 Now in dealing with writers and materials which are 
 to be looked on as on any ground secondary, I find 
 that the danger on the classical side is exactly oppo- 
 site to the danger on the medieval side. In the 
 earlier time the danger is lest the inferior writers 
 should be thought too little of; in the later time the 
 danger is lest they should be thought too much of. 
 Eeal masters of the earlier Greek and Latin learning 
 — and not a few such real masters we have in this 
 place — of course know full well how to put the dif- 
 ferent authors in their own walks of learning in their 
 
218 CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL WRITERS. 
 
 true relations to each other ; and they do so with no 
 small effect. But the smaller sort are constantly 
 tempted to confine their studies, not only to a very 
 small range in point of time, but to a very few au- 
 thors within that range. They show a feeling of 
 surprise, almost a feeling of resentment, at the hint 
 that there are writers even in their favourite tongues 
 Avho are well worth studying, but of whom they 
 know nothing. The man who almost boasted that 
 he knew nothing of Ammianus, as if to know some- 
 thing of Ammianus would be to lose caste among 
 Latin scholars, may pass as the most fully developed 
 specimen of the class. This feeling is a curious re- 
 action from the way of thinking of a past age ; in the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries men seem hardly 
 to have grasped the fact that Thucydides was a 
 writer altogether different in kind from Diodoros and 
 Plutarch. The delusion, not unnatural in the days 
 of the Kenaissance, of thinking that " the ancients " 
 were another species of men, altogether apart from our- 
 selves, and further of practically thinking that these 
 " ancients " lived all at the same time, hindered men 
 from seeing the wide difference in value and authority 
 between one old Greek or Latin writer and another. 
 It is perhaps partly the habit of looking at things 
 too much according to a purely literary standard 
 which has led many to think that those Greek and 
 Latin writers who are not picked out as models are 
 not worthy of any attention at all. Diodoros is 
 a dull writer enough ; but he is our main authority 
 for some of the most stirring and instructive times of 
 
SECONDARY CLASSICAL WRITERS. 219 
 
 Greek history, for the larger part of the history of 
 his own island. The traveller in Sicily, if he remem- 
 bers his Thucydides on the shore of the G-reat Har- 
 bour, should not forget his Diod6ros on the heights 
 of Tauromenion. Dion Cassius wrote at a very late 
 time, and, what is worse, he rejoices in finding fault 
 with everybody ; but the senator and consul who had 
 studied the official documents of Eome understood 
 some things that Livy did not. Our knowledge of 
 old Greek and Eoman history, even our knowledge 
 of the Greek and Latin tongues, is imperfect indeed 
 if we do not take in as an essential part of our course 
 of study not a few writers who are now Linduly neg- 
 lected. Put them in their place ; I do not ask for 
 them more than their place ; I only ask that it should 
 be remembered that they have a place. 
 
 When we turn to mediaeval writers, the evil is 
 quite on the other side. Not a few students of 
 mediaeval subjects are still in the same state with 
 regard to their authorities in which the men of the 
 seventeenth century were with regard to earlier 
 writers. Of course the difficulty is increased by the 
 fact that everybody thinks himself qualified, if the 
 fit should take him, to write on a mediaeval subject, 
 while happily it is comparatively few who think 
 themselves qualified to write on classical subjects. 
 Look at a book, say on some part of English history, 
 whose author is not a mere compiler, not a copier 
 of copiers, but who stiU has not reached the level of 
 the real critical scholar; you will find his notes of 
 reference crowded with the names of a vast number 
 
220 CLASSICAL AND MEDIAEVAL WRITERS 
 
 of writers which seem thrown together anyhow. To 
 Augustine Thierry it is plain that any book older 
 than the invention of printing was as good as any 
 other. A great many people seem to think that a 
 fact becomes more certain merely because a great 
 number of writers have recorded it in the same way. 
 They do not stop to think which of these writers 
 had any means of knowledge which were not open 
 to, or were not used by, the earliest on the list, and 
 which simply copied those who went before them. It 
 is not uncommon to see a reference to the English 
 Chronicles followed by some such list as this — 
 Florence of Worcester, Simeon of Durham, Eoger of 
 Howden, Eoger of Wendover, Matthew Paris, perhaps 
 Matthew of Westminster. It seems to be thought 
 that all these are witnesses, and that their witness 
 adds something to the certainty of the fact. Now 
 it is always worth marking which earlier writers a 
 later writer chooses to follow; it is even worth 
 marking when a later writer misunderstands or per- 
 verts or colours the earlier writer ; nay, it ever and 
 anon happens that the later writer has got hold 
 of some real scrap of fact which the earlier writer 
 had neglected. It follows that the later writers are 
 by no means to be cast aside ; it is often very 
 important to see how they looked at the events 
 of earlier times. The point to be understood is 
 that they are not authorities, that they are not 
 witnesses, that a statement made by a contemporary 
 gains nothing in inherent value because it is copied 
 over and over again by a hundred writers who are 
 
SECONDARY MEDIAEVAL WRITERS. 221 
 
 not contemporaries. Whenever a man at any date 
 Las special means of knowledge, he becomes so far 
 an authority; a local writer or a man who has 
 specially studied some particular class of subjects 
 may be in this sense an authority, that is the nearest 
 approach to an authority that we can get, even for 
 times long before his own. He rises in short to the 
 level of Plutarch or Diodoros. And of course a 
 writer who is of no value for times before his own 
 may be of the highest value for his own time, for 
 times when he begins to be an authority. Matthew 
 Paris is a precious authority for some years of the 
 reign of Henry the Third ; for the days of the 
 Norman Conquest he is simply misleading ; he 
 awakens our curiosity to know where he found his 
 fables, and that is all. And it is very curious to see 
 how he, a strong Liberal, takes Eoger of Wendover, 
 decidedly a Conservative, and while copying his facts 
 changes his views of things into conformity with his own 
 notions. His story reads like a volume of Sir Archibald 
 Alison corrected into agreement with the politics of 
 Mr. Chamberlain. It does not very much matter 
 whether Archbishop Hubert really made his famous 
 speech on elective monarchy, or whether Matthew 
 Paris invented it for him. On the whole perhaps it 
 is better if it is the work of Matthew himself, as 
 thereby the sound tradition of the old time is carried 
 on a generation or two further. That the Waverley 
 Annalist chose the Peterborough Chronicle as his 
 guide is greatly to the credit of the Waverley Annalist; 
 but the fact adds nothing to the authority of the 
 
222 CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL WRITERS. 
 
 Peterborough Chronicle. That a crowd of later 
 writers copied Florence's account of the election and 
 reign of Harold rather than any of the alternative 
 Norman fables, is an important fact in tracing the 
 history of opinion on the subject ; it adds nothing to 
 the weight of Florence's own statement. We must 
 pick and choose equally among classical and among 
 mediaeval writers, but we shall not pick and choose 
 on exactly the same principles. The secondary 
 writers for the two periods — remembering that a 
 man who is secondary for one stage often becomes 
 of first-rate authority for a later stage — are for the 
 most part quite different in nature and value. The 
 secondary mediaeval writers are on the whole very 
 inferior in value to the secondary classical writers. 
 There are few among them who answer to those 
 writers of whom T said in my last lecture that, though 
 not original authorities in themselves, yet they are 
 original authorities to us, as reproducing the matter 
 of lost writers who were original. It is but seldom 
 that the later writers had any materials before them 
 which are not open to ourselves ; for the most part 
 they simply copied earlier writers by whom we can 
 test them. There is hardly any mediseval writers 
 like Plutarch, a direct authority for nothing, but the 
 only substitute that we can get for a crowd of 
 lost writers of the highest authority. The danger 
 then is that of underrating the value of secondary 
 writers in the earlier time and of overrating it in the 
 later. I do not the least fear that, if I make a 
 statement out of Thucydides anybody wiU get up 
 
iVO REAL BREAK BETWEEN THEM. 223 
 
 and correct me out of Diod6ros. But it has 
 happened to me — and I have told the story in print 
 — to bury my Conqueror according to the record of 
 Orderic, who was Hving at the time and who had 
 doubtless talked to people who were present, and 
 then to be called in question because I had neg- 
 lected to correct Orderic by the version of Paulus 
 ^milius, a rhetorician of the end of the fifteenth 
 century. 
 
 I could say much more as to both the likenesses 
 and the unlikenesses of the two classes of writers 
 of whom I have been speaking, the so-called classical 
 and the so-called medifeval writers. I trust that in 
 times to come I may be able to speak of many of 
 them more in detail. My business to-day has been 
 only to insist on the fact that there is no real break 
 between them. He who reads up to a certain point 
 and reads no further does himself injustice, but it is 
 an injustice that he may easily repair. Far woise 
 is the case of him who flies off to later times, showy 
 times, controversial times, with no sound and steady 
 knowledge of the times that went before them. To 
 all who have yet their line of study to choose, 
 whether for the meaner purposes of an examination 
 or for the higher purpose of improving and expand- 
 ing their own minds, I would give a word of warning. 
 Even reading for an examination may be of some 
 use, if it is well directed, according to some rational 
 system. He who is reading his Thucydides is well 
 employed ; he is laying the best of foundations. 
 He who is reading his Gregory or his Lambert is 
 
224 CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL WRITERS. 
 
 well employed, if he has read his Thucydides before 
 them. But he is not well employed who rushes off 
 to the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth centuries, 
 without even a general knowledge of the fifth 
 century before Christ and the fifth century after. 
 I would cry aloud, if any will hearken. Be not led 
 astray by any temptations however seducing, listen 
 to no teaching however winning, which would tempt 
 you to fly off at once to times which are of the 
 deepest interest and importance, which are worthy of 
 all the attention that you can give to them in after 
 life, but which are utterly un suited to be the be- 
 ginning of your studies. It is a grievous thing that 
 the fashion in this place now is — things were better 
 eight and twenty years back — to plunge at once into 
 these thorny times, more flashy perhaps, more showy, 
 and to neglect the steady work which is needed for 
 the study of earlier times, the sound knowledge 
 which is the result of that study. Is there any one 
 here who has yet to choose his period, his subject, 
 his book "? If he will hearken to me, I would say, 
 Begin at the beginning. If he has to make his 
 choice for an examination, I would say, Begin as 
 near the beginning as the rules of the examination 
 will let you. Do you want really to know about 
 Charles the Tiffch, or the Peace of Westfalia, or that 
 most mysterious being in all history, Maria Theresa 
 Queen of Hungary? Do you wish to know the 
 exact force of the acts which astounded the world 
 with an Emperor of the French and an Emperor of 
 Austria, an Emperor of Austria too who still kept 
 
STUDY OF THE EARLIER PERIODS. 225 
 
 some glimmering notion that he was also Emperor- 
 elect of the Romans, King of Germany and Jeru- 
 salem 1 You will never learn these things as they 
 should be learned, unless you grasp the great central 
 truth of all European history, the abiding life of 
 Rome and her Empire. Listen to no voice that 
 would tell you otherwise ; listen to no voice that 
 would bid you strive to crown the edifice, when as 
 yet you have not dug the ground for its foundations. 
 I bid you come with me and walk awhile in the 
 fellowship of Odowakar the Roman Patrician and of 
 Chlodowig the Roman Consul. They will guide us 
 on to Charles, Patrician, King, and Emperor, to Otto 
 answering the cry of an oppressed queen, to Henry 
 answering the prayer of a divided Church, to the 
 Frederick who fled from Legnano and who took 
 his crown at Aries, to the Frederick who won 
 his crown at Jerusalem and who sleeps in the 
 basilica of Palermo. From them you may well go 
 on to the voluntary fall of their latest successor ; 
 that path will be lighted by the true light of 
 sound historic knowledge — be not tempted to 
 stray from that narrow way by any ignis fatuus 
 which will only plunge you into a quagmire of 
 shallowness and half-knowledge, a quagmire out of 
 which it will be harder to find your way to solid 
 ground than if you were quartered in those "peni- 
 tissimae paludes " where the Frank still dwelled in 
 the days of Sidonius but from which he had come 
 forth to do great deeds before the days of Gregory. 
 
LEOTUEE Vr. 
 
 SUBSIDIARY AUTHORITIES. 
 
 In my lecture a fortnight back I pointed out the 
 general character of the class of authorities of which 
 I have to speak to-day. That class pretty well 
 amounts to all sources of historical knowledge other 
 than narrative histories. I speak of these as sub- 
 sidiary, not as secondary authorities, because, while 
 they are necessarily subsidiary in our use of them, 
 they are anything but secondary in point of 
 authority. Class against class, they are at least of 
 equal authority with narrative writings ; in many 
 cases they rise to even higher authority. Some 
 classes of them ate distinctly free from some of 
 the sources of uncertainty which beset historical 
 narratives, though it must be allowed that £ome 
 classes of them bring in other sources of uncertainty 
 which are altogether their own. One class of them, 
 like the sources of the geologist's knowledge, can 
 themselves neither err nor lie, but in return 
 they are more likely to be misunderstood than a 
 written record. Those of another class themselves 
 rank among written records, and form a class of 
 written records which are specially unlikely to err. 
 
THEIR NATURE. 227 
 
 but are specially likely to lie. This wide range 
 of sources of knowledge, all, as I just now said, 
 which do not come under the head of historical 
 narratives, fall into two classes, capable again of 
 further subdivisions, which we may call the monu- 
 mental and the documentary. Some branches of j 
 our monumental evidences come very near to the/ 
 domain of the natural sciences ; in fact they are the 
 application of natural science to serve as historic 
 evidence. Some examples of our documentary evi- 
 dences are actually historical narratives, only pre- 
 served in a shape different from the ordinary shape 
 of a book. It is hard to draw the line between the 
 autobiographical records which have been left us by 
 the first and by the second Caesar. The last Dictator 
 has left us the story of a large part of his life written 
 by himself in a book, on parchment or papyrus or 
 whatever was the material employed for the first 
 autograph. The first Augustus has left us the story 
 of his life, seemingly in his own words, graven by 
 his orders on the stones of a temple. There is no 
 difference between the two records, save any that 
 may arise from the difference of the shape in which 
 they appear ; in each a man in authority records the 
 deeds which he himself did. So at the other end, 
 in regions altogether beyond the range of written 
 evidence, we have been taught that much has been 
 proved by the shape of the skulls found in ancient 
 graves. Now the nature of men's bones is in itself 
 purely a matter of physiology; but incidentally the 
 bones become a record, and tell the history of times 
 
 Q2 
 
228 SUBSIDIARY A UTIIORITIES. 
 
 whose records have not been set down in writing. 
 The Monument of Ankyra and the contents of a 
 barrow are about the two ends of our subject to-day. 
 There are not a few links and shades between them. 
 I have used the word monumental to take in all 
 sources of knowledge which do not come under the 
 head of written records. Yet one doubts a httle as 
 to reckoniug the skulls among monuments. That is 
 to say, they are not works of man's skill in the same 
 sense as either a flint flake or a Corinthian capital. 
 In these last the shape is determined by the will of 
 the artist ; but no one can, by any exercise of the will, 
 determine the shape of his own skull, or even of the 
 skulls of his children. This might seem to be a real 
 distinction ; we have in some sort ruled that history 
 has wholly to do with matters which are under the 
 control of the human will, that will which deter- 
 mines alike the events which are recorded and the 
 shape of the records which record them. The skulls 
 seem rather to belong to the class of evidence 
 which is purely incidental, where the facts of some 
 other branch of knowledge may chance to throw 
 light on some historical question. And so in strict- 
 ness it is ; the evidence of the skulls is strictly of the 
 same kind as the incidental evidence on historical 
 matters which we may ever and anon get from the 
 strata of the earth or from almost any other source. 
 But the skull, though no more within the range of 
 the human will than the strata, is, unlike the strata, 
 part of the man himself, and therefore part of his 
 history in a way in which the strata are not. The 
 
SKULLS. 229 
 
 skulls form a kind of evidence which does not merely 
 come into play now and then, but which is abiding, 
 and may be applied in all times and places. The 
 evidence, in short, from the formation of man himself 
 is, as far as we are concerned, essentially of the same 
 kind as the evidence which we draw from the ruder 
 kinds of man's works. It is a kind of evidence in 
 which I venture to think that it is specially easy to 
 misinterpret the record ; but it is certainly one in 
 which the record itself can neither err nor lie. Flint 
 axes have been forged no less than Old-English 
 charters, but I never heard of any doctrines as to 
 the succession of races in Britain being supported by 
 a forgery of brachykephalic or dolichokephalic skuUs. 
 We will therefore place the skulls, and any other 
 parts of man's frame which are capable of giving 
 evidence of the same kind, among the most ancient 
 and primitive, no less than among the most modern, 
 of our monumental sources of knowledge. 
 
 Fast upon the evidence of man himself will come 
 the evidence of his works, especially his ruder works, 
 those primitive weapons, tools, and the like, from 
 which the primaeval antiquary draws his division 
 into the stone, the bronze, and the iron periods.. We 
 deal now with the flint arrow-head, the leaf-shaped 
 sword of bronze, the countless forms of primitive 
 utensils and ornaments, above all with the great monu- 
 ments, funereal, religious, or defensive, which are often 
 works of no small mechanical skill, but which do not 
 reach the character of works of art in the higher 
 sense. Here comes the kist-vaen, the cromlech, the 
 
230 S UBSIDIA RY A UTHORITIES. 
 
 dolmen, the hut-circle, the bee-hive house, the vitrified 
 fort, the walls and gateways of primaeval cities. Here 
 comes the barrow by the broad Hellespont to which 
 the sailor in days to come was to look up and think 
 of the warrior slain by the hand of Hekt6r ; here 
 too comes the barrow looking down on sandy Severn 
 which shelters the giants-chamber of the dead of 
 whom none could tell the race or name when 
 Ceawlin marched beneath it to receive the submis- 
 sion of Glevum after the great slaughter of the 
 kings. Here comes the cromlech on Kentish soil to 
 whose age a wrong has been done by calling it the 
 grave of one so modem as Horsa the Mscmg, and the 
 cromlech in the wilder land of Gower, high on its 
 ridge above the narrow seas, on which a like failure 
 to tell the untold ages has bestowed the name of 
 British Arthur. We may pass on by the vaster 
 graves piled by unrecorded hands where Saumur, 
 with all its later memories, rises above the rushing 
 Loire ; we may pass on by Long Meg and her daugh- 
 ters on the Cumbrian moor, by the wonders of Ave- 
 bury and of the Breton Carnac, to the roof and crown 
 of the works of prsehistoric man, to Stonehenge itself, 
 dance of the giants, not more mysterious now than it 
 was when Cynric smote the Briton by the ditches of 
 the elder Salisbury. From works of which, save by 
 the inferences of our own lore, we know not the name 
 or race of the makers, we may pass on to the walls 
 which fence in cities which have a name and a 
 memory, walls which often, after so many ages, still 
 keep watch over the dwelling-places of man. Time 
 
PRIMJEVAL WORKS. 231 
 
 would fail to tell of cities once great and fenced up to 
 heaven, which crown the hills of the Etruscan, the 
 Latin, and the Hernican, which crown too the more 
 famous heights of the elder Athens and the elder 
 Corinth, which crown withal not a few of the heights 
 of our own island on which no such wreath of fame as 
 theirs has ever lighted. From the names which 
 ring in our ears and kindle our souls as we tread the 
 land of the wars of new-born Eome — from the stirring 
 roll of the Thirty Cities in the lays of our own glee- 
 man — from"Norba's ancient wall," standing empty 
 of men from the days of Sulla — 
 
 " From the gigantic watcli-towers 
 No work of earthly men, 
 Whence Cora's sentinels o'erlook 
 The never-ending fen," — 
 
 from the stones of Signia, striving, like the stones of 
 Tiryns, to fit themselves to that order of the self- 
 sustaining arch, which men were feeling after but 
 which as yet they had not reached — from the would- 
 be cupola of Myk^n^ and the would-be cupola of New 
 Grange — from the stones which gird the height of 
 Tusculum and the stones which gird the height of 
 Worlebury — we make our way to " the great group 
 of village communities by the Tiber ; " we pay our 
 homage to the most renowned of all monuments of 
 unchronicled days, the scarping-waU that bears the 
 name of the wolf's nursling Eomulus, and the mighty 
 dyke that bears the name of Servius child of the 
 fire. 
 
 Our roll-call of primaeval works has brought us to 
 
232 SUBSIDIARY AUTHORITIES. 
 
 the very verge of recorded history; some may think 
 that it has overleaped the boundary. I have done so 
 of set purpose. It is of importance to mark that 
 the strictly monumental works of unrecorded and of 
 recorded times are in themselves evidence of exactly 
 the same kind. In each we have a work of man, a 
 work from which, even if it stands absolutely alone, if 
 we can bring no other sources of knowledge to bear 
 upon it, we can, with a fair approach to certainty, with 
 as near an approach as we ever reach in such matters, 
 make some inferences as to the state and habits of 
 the men who made them. When we can compare 
 several works of the kind, our knowledge increases ; 
 we can give no positive dates, but we can arrange 
 different modes of construction in chronological 
 order. The antiquary works with his buildings in 
 exactly the same way in which the geologist works 
 with his strata. He can say with very great con- 
 fidence that A is older than B ; he cannot even 
 guess, without information of some other kind, with- 
 out written records or something that may supply 
 their place, how much older A is than B. And the 
 argument from construction that A is older than 
 B applies only to different parts of the same building, 
 or at the outside to buildings in the same district. 
 Different countries did not develope their arts with 
 the same degree of speed ; a ruder wall in Latium 
 is pretty certainly older than a more finished waU in 
 Latium ; it may very likely be later than a highly- 
 finished wall in Etruria. We feel certain that the 
 Lion-Gate at Myk^ne is older than the gateway of 
 
ORDER OF UNRECORDED WORKS. 233 
 
 the great Treasury; the gateway at Tusculum, with 
 a piece of rock for its jamb, may, or it may not, be 
 later than the Lion-Gate. If New Grange stood at 
 Myken6, we should say that it was the oldest thing 
 there ; standing, as it does, in Ireland, it may be ages 
 later than the Pelopid empire, ages later than the 
 Athenian democracy. The Eeader in Anthropology 
 will tell you that some nations are still in the stone 
 age ; I have heard say that there are tribes in India 
 that build cromlechs to this day. The monuments 
 then themselves, by themselves, tell us a great deal ; 
 but it is not till we get written records, or some- 
 thing that may take their place, that we can fix 
 dates, even comparative or approximate dates. No 
 man can fix the date of the walls of Tiryas ; but we 
 may safely say that they are older than the Homeric 
 Catalogue ; we may safely say that at the time of 
 the Homeric Catalogue they were already ancient, 
 already things that men wondered at. 
 
 Now when we have got as far as this, it is a great 
 step in advance above the mere power of saying that 
 A is older than B ; but it is a long way from having 
 a building fixed by a record on stone or on parch- 
 ment to the archonship of this man or the consulship 
 of that. When we have reached this last point, we 
 can begin to construct a science of architectural 
 chronology, one of the branches, as I pointed out 
 before, of the wider science of history. We know 
 the dates of certain buildings, and we infer that 
 certain other buildings which show the same charac- 
 teristics must be of the same date. It was by 
 
234 SUBSIDIABY AUTHORITIES. 
 
 comparing the written record with the abiding monu- 
 ments that Professor Willis built up the science of 
 which he was so unrivalled a master. It was by the 
 same process applied to another class of objects that 
 Dr. Guest brought to light the earliest history of 
 England. "With the written witness in their hands 
 or in their memories, the one made columns and 
 windows tell their tale, the other made mounds and 
 ditches tell their more ancient tale. I have before 
 now heard people contrast historical evidence and 
 what they are pleased to call archaeological evidence, 
 almost as if they were things rival or hostile to each 
 other. They talk as if the stones could speak with 
 some mysterious voice of their own, a voice which is 
 sometimes deemed to speak all the clearer without the 
 help of written history. Now, as I have just shown, 
 the stones, even by themselves, do speak with a voice; 
 they do tell us something ; but by themselves they 
 tell us but little. Their voice is very indistinct, their 
 tale is very imperfect, till written records step in to 
 complete and to interpret it. The whole system, the 
 whole science, if we like so to call it, of architectural 
 chronology and architectural nomenclature rests on 
 no other ground than the union of monumental and 
 documentary evidence. Neither can stand for a 
 moment without the other. It is indeed true that 
 we should not hold that a single statement about 
 a single building which might seem to be contrary 
 to the whole received system of architectural chrono- 
 logy was enough to upset that system. We should 
 not accept a statement that work palpably of the 
 
ARCHEOLOGY AND HISTORY. 235 
 
 fifteenth century belonged to the twelfth. But whyl 
 Not because monum'ental evidence is distinct from 
 or superior to documentary evidence, but because it 
 is more likely that the author of such a statement 
 was mistaken in his fact, more likely that we have 
 misunderstood his meaning, than that a whole system 
 of inferences from a great number of documentary 
 statements should have gone utterly wrong. 
 
 I would here say a word or two more of this subject 
 of architectural history, architectural chronology, and 
 the like. There is something like a divorce between 
 studies of this kind and the more direct study of his- 
 tory which is much to be lamented. The historian 
 proper seems sometimes to think the antiquarian 
 branches of knowledge beneath him ; the student 
 of buildings seems sometimes to fancy that he can 
 get on in his own branch without any knowledge of 
 general history. Now I cannot conceive how either 
 the study of the general sequence of architectural 
 styles or the study of the history of particular build- 
 ings can be unworthy of the attention of any man. 
 Besides their deep interest in themselves, such 
 studies are really no small part of history. The way 
 in which any people built, the form taken by their 
 houses, their temples, their fortresses, their public" 
 buildings, is a part of their national life fully on a level 
 with their language and their political institutions. 
 And the buildings speak to us of the times to which 
 they belong in a more living and, as it were, personal 
 way than monuments or documents of almost any 
 other kind. Architectural monuments may be 
 
236 SUBSIDIARY AUTHORITIES. 
 
 studied, as anything else may be studied, in a M^eak 
 and unscientific way; only such weak and unscientific 
 study, whether of architectural monuments or of any- 
 thing else, is really no study at all. To study them 
 worthily calls for an exercise as diligent of faculties 
 as high as any that is called for by the study of any 
 other branches of history short of the very highest. 
 There have been few minds of greater power, though 
 there have been some of wider range, than the mind 
 of Professor Willis ; and we should not forget that 
 to the work for which I know him best, and for which 
 most people. know him best, he also added the special 
 work of his own professorial chair into which I at 
 least am quite unable to follow him. And, on the 
 other hand, no delusion can be greater than that of 
 attempting the study of architectural monuments 
 without a sound grasp of general history. The most 
 grotesque blunders, the wildest theories, have come of 
 this most hopeless undertaking. Mr. Petit, whose 
 name I hope is not wholly forgotten, was one of the 
 keenest of architectural observers ; every word that 
 he lets drop is precious ; yet even Mr. Petit, though 
 he at once sees the fact, is a little puzzled by the fact, 
 that the architecture of Elsass is, as it could not fail 
 to be, not French but German. Since his time wilder 
 things have been done. We have seen elaborate 
 books in which the buildings, the Eomanesque build- 
 ings, of those parts of the kingdoms of Germany, Bur- 
 gundy, and Italy, which in our own century received 
 for the first time the common name of Switzerland, 
 are grouped together under a common head of " Swiss 
 
ARCHITEGTURAL HISTORY. 237 
 
 architecture," and the facts that the architecture of 
 Germany is German, that of Burgundy Burgundian, 
 and that of Italy Itahan, are gravely discussed as 
 remarkable phsenomena. This architectural specula- 
 tion maybe bracketted with another statement bearing 
 on the same part of the world, one which I have seen 
 in a political book by a public official of some import- 
 ance, the statement that Duke Leopold at Morgarten 
 commanded an Imperial army. So in a division 
 headed " Scotch architecture," I have seen reckoned 
 the church of Saint Magnus at Kirkwall, the head 
 church of a Scandinavian earldom. This of course 
 wipes out the real lesson of the building, namely 
 how little the Scandinavian architecture of the 
 twelfth century differed from the architecture of the 
 lands in which Scandinavian builders would natu- 
 rally seek their models. And I have myself had 
 not a few strivings and fightings to make some minds 
 grasp the very simple fact that the early Eomanesque 
 buildings of England, the examples of so-called 
 "Saxon" style, are simply the same thing as the con- 
 temporary buildings of Western Europe generally. 
 It was hard to break through one of the cherished 
 dogmas of that curious faith which holds that Eng- 
 lishmen are anything else rather than Englishmen. 
 It was hard to fight against the dogma that " the 
 Saxons " were some strange and mysterious and alto- 
 gether vanished race, who lived all by themselves 
 without deahngs with the rest of the world, and who 
 seem, yet more unaccountably, to have all lived at 
 the same time. 
 
238 S UBSIDIA li Y A U THORITIES. 
 
 We are making our way gradually from the rudest 
 forms of monumental evidence up to those highest 
 forms of documentary evidence which are hardly to 
 be distinguished from historical narratives. And at 
 the point that we have reached, namely the discus- 
 sion of architectural monuments, we are tempted to 
 come to the subject of inscriptions strictly so called 
 by way of the architectural monuments. Not a few 
 buildings supply their own documentary evidence in 
 the shape of inscriptions recording the date, and 
 perhaps some circumstances, of their building. We 
 may dispute about the name and the purpose of the 
 great Pantheon at Kome ; there is no room for dis- 
 puting about its date or its founder, while the letters 
 graven on the frieze declare that it was built by 
 Marcus Agrippa in his third consulship. We have 
 as little doubt about the memorable church and sun- 
 dial of Kirkdale, that little minster of Saint Gregory 
 which Orm the son of Gamel bought when it was 
 all tobroken and tofallen, and set it up again in the 
 days of Eadward the King and Tostig the Earl. But 
 when a building in this way tells its own story by 
 way of an inscription on its walls, it is something 
 added to the building, something which is in no 
 way essential to it. Though the building and the 
 inscription have a physical unity, they are in idea 
 quite distinct ; the building is equally monumental 
 without the inscription ; the inscription is as strictly 
 documentary when written on the walls of the 
 building as if it had been written on an Egyptian 
 reed or on a Pergamenian skin. The inscribed build- 
 
COINS. 239 
 
 ings therefore are rather cases of the two classes of 
 evidence brought into near neighbourhood with one 
 another than cases of real transition between the 
 two. There is another class of objects which are 
 among the most valuable kinds of evidence that we 
 have, and which seem more strictly to form a transi- 
 tion from the monumental class of evidence to the 
 documentary. I refer to coins. A coin is in its 
 own nature a historical monument, in a way in which 
 we cannot say that buildings or any of the other 
 classes of objects of which we have been speaking 
 are historical monuments. A building or a weapon 
 is not, unless quite incidentally, as when a building 
 commemorates a particular event, meant to convey 
 historical knowledge. It is meant to discharge its 
 own object, whatever that object may be. So too 
 the coin is meant to discharge its own very practical 
 object, but it cannot discharge that practical object 
 without also conveying historical knowledge. It is 
 part of its very essence that it should announce 
 certain facts. As soon as a coin gets beyond the 
 state of a mere lump of metal of a certain weight, it 
 needs the image and superscription, or something 
 equivalent to the image or superscription. It is the 
 legend, the image, the conventional badge of any 
 kind, which declares that the coin is struck by the 
 authority of such and such a king or commonwealth, 
 which makes it a coin at all, which gives it the 
 special nature and value of a coin, as distinguished 
 from a mere piece of metal of a certain weight. 
 And the declaration made by the legend, image, or 
 
240 SUBSIDIARY AUTHORITIES. 
 
 badge, is the declaration of a historical fact. The 
 coin then is a historical monument, not merely in 
 the sense in which the other monuments are 
 historical, as illustrating either special historical 
 events or a general state of things; it is historical 
 directly and in its own nature. And when, from 
 conventional figures and badges, we pass to a legend 
 in writing, to the name of the king or city, some- 
 times to something more than the bare name, the 
 coin becomes not only historical but documentary. 
 The words of a coin are evidence of essentially the 
 same nature as the words of an inscription or of a 
 manuscript. The only difference is that the coin is a 
 document which cannot accomplish its own object, 
 unless many copies are made, while documents of 
 the other classes may often accomplish their objects 
 by means of a single copy. Coins therefore in 
 their own nature form the transition from our monu- 
 mental evidence which teaches otherwise than by 
 writing to our documentary evidence which teaches 
 by writing only. So far as the coin is a piece of 
 metal put into a certain shape for a certain use, 
 it ranks with weapons and implements ; so far as 
 it assumes an artistic shape, it ranks with other 
 works of art. So far it is, like our other monu- 
 mental evidence, a mere incidental source of his- 
 tory. As soon as it is stamped with the legend 
 in writing, or even with the badge which has con- 
 ventionally the same meaning as the legend in 
 writing, as soon as it directly proclaims the fact, 
 "I am the coin of Alexander the King" or "T am 
 
EVIDENCE OF COINS. 241 
 
 the coin of the city of Corinth," then it becomes 
 documentary. 
 
 Of the value of coins for historical purposes it 
 is needless to speak. There are periods of history 
 for which the coins are almost our whole means 
 of knowledge. Such for instance is the Greek 
 kingdom of Baktria. I may give an instance from 
 my own work of the way in which numismatic 
 evidence and evidence of other kinds may be made 
 to help one another. There is no extant list of 
 the cities of the Achalan League in its later days, 
 though we know the way in which their number 
 was largely increased, not only by the admission 
 of new members to the League, but by division of 
 the greater cantons into several smaller ones. This 
 is the same process which called into being Ken- 
 tucky in the early days of the American Union and 
 Western Virginia in our own time. By the help of 
 the numismatic knowledge of Mr. Leicester Warren, 
 I was enabled to put together, not a perfect list of 
 the cities, but a list much nearer to perfection than 
 I could ever have put together from my books 
 only. And that list was not without political value. 
 When we see the long list of insignificant towns 
 which had equal votes in the Federal Assembly 
 with Corinth and Argos, we better understand the 
 great difficulty of a federal system in earlier times. 
 This was the unavoidable alternative of swamping 
 either the greater members or the lesser, the first 
 attempt to grapple with which was made by the 
 wise Confederation of Lykia, though the problem 
 
242 SUBSIDIARY AUTHORITIES. 
 
 was never fully solved till the creation of the 
 two-chambered Congress of the United States. It 
 is a very significant fact that in the first presidency 
 of Washington his head appears on the coin, while 
 in the second it appears no longer. Five and twenty 
 years ago a handful of French money was a living 
 lesson in modern history, such as you could hardly 
 get in any other way. Things were brought home 
 to you in the liveliest of aU ways when, besides 
 intelligible kings and commonwealths, you traced 
 out the stages marked by "Bonaparte, Premier 
 Consul," " Napoleon Empefeur " with " R^publique " 
 on the other side, " Napoleon Empereur " with 
 " Empire " on the other side, and again the Common- 
 wealth of 185 1 changing into the "Louis Napoldon 
 Bonaparte" of 1852, and that into the "Napoleon 
 III Empereur" of 1853. "Napoleon III "it was, 
 according to the peculiar arithmetic of revolutions 
 and restorations, though the most grubbing collector 
 has never unearthed a coin of Napoldon the Second 
 any more than one of Lewis the Seventeenth. Or 
 again it is pleasant to see on a coin of the great island 
 of Western Greece the legend KOPKYPAIIIN. We 
 cannot help thinking with a smile of the small 
 scholars who buzzed about Mr. Grote — Kopaxes «? 
 Aio? Trpos opvixa Qeiov — because he, knowing what he 
 was about, used the true local name Xorkyra, while 
 they, not knowing what they were about, thought that 
 he was simply copying the Latin, and told him that, 
 if he used K at all, he ought to use the high-polite 
 Attic Kerkyra, the only form that they had come 
 
WITNESS TO LOCAL NOMENCLATURE. 243 
 
 across in their reading. One wished to know whether 
 they would have quarrelled with London and in- 
 sisted on Londres. Or again, our knowledge of the 
 Greek tongue is increased when we find that, though 
 Polybios talks of the men of Elis as 'HXeioi, they 
 figure on their own coins as FAAEIOI, with the 
 still abiding digamma. It comes to us as a strange 
 mixture of old and new, when we find this primaeval 
 shape of the name in combination with the latest 
 political formulae of independent HeUas, when the 
 coins of the Achaian canton of Elis bear the legend 
 FAAEIjCIN AXAinN. All these things, old and new, 
 come to us in a far clearer way when we thus 
 see them for ourselves on the coin than when we 
 simply read them in a book. None of the subsidiary 
 sources of history are of higher value than this of 
 coins, if they are only used rightly. And there is no 
 source of knowledge which there is so little temptation 
 to use wrongly, though there is a good deal of temp-, 
 tation not to use it at all. Though numismatics 
 are essentially a part of history, though, except from 
 the strictly artistic side, they have no value except 
 as part of history, yet their study needs a special 
 kind of knowledge ; it has a special lore of its own, 
 which does not come by the light of nature to the 
 most diligent student of books. I can tell a coin 
 of King Antiochos, because I can read the Greek 
 name ; but I can get no further. The professed 
 numismatist has signs by which he can tell which 
 Antiochos it is out of many. The students of coins 
 then, having this special knowledge, for which we 
 
 R 2 
 
244 SUBSIDIAR Y A UTHORITIES. 
 
 have to go to them, as men went to the pontiffs 
 before Gnseus Flavins wrote up his kalendar, are 
 sometimes tempted to separate their special pursuit 
 from the general study of history, and to look on it 
 as something which has a being by itself. There 
 is all the difference in the world between a numis- 
 matist who sees what his coins prove, and one who 
 does not trouble himself whether they prove anything 
 or not. The one is a scholar of a very high order ; 
 tbe other is a mere collector with his hobby. There 
 is nothing drearier than people who talk to you about 
 "third brass" and "the Lower Empire," that flexible 
 "Lower Empire" which seems sometimes to mean 
 Carausius and sometimes Constantino Palaiologos. 
 
 We were on the verge of speaking of inscriptions 
 when we were speaking of buildings. Coins bring us 
 to them yet more directly. A building is often a 
 convenient place for an inscription, but inscriptions 
 are no part of its necessary being ; a coin is hardly a 
 coin in the historical sense, unless it bears an in- 
 scription. Inscriptions naturally divide themselves 
 into two classes. There is the class where the in- 
 scription has some special connexion with the object 
 on which it is carved, and the class where it has 
 none. The inscription on a coin, on a tomb, on an 
 object such as JElfred's jewel, the dedicatory or com- 
 memorative inscription on a temple or other building, 
 belongs to the particular object or building on which 
 it is graven ; but for the sake of that object or build- 
 ing, it would not have been graven at all. In the 
 other class the inscription has nothing to do with the 
 
INSCRIPTIONS. 245 
 
 particular place where it is set up ; it is put there 
 simply for safe-keeping, like a manuscript in a library. 
 In the first class the inscription is monumental ; it is 
 put there to tell us something about the building or 
 object and its contents. That is its primary object ; 
 it may incidentally tell us something else. The 
 legend on the front of the Pantheon tells us the 
 founder and the date of the building ; but it tells us 
 something more. It tells us something about the 
 founder. Why Marcus Agrippa ? "Why not in full 
 Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa 1 Because, so we are told, 
 Marcus, thrice consul, did not care to blaze abroad 
 more than he could help the name of the very obscure 
 gens to which he belonged. He could put its name 
 aside in a more respectable way than Englishmen in 
 the hke frame of mind are apt to do. An Englishman 
 dissatisfied with the name of his forefathers, say 
 Smithson or Bugg — names, in both cases, ancient and 
 honourable — puts something else instead of his name. 
 He gets rid of Smithson or Bugg, and calls himself 
 Percy or Norfolk Howard. A Koman was not driven 
 to those lengths. His tria nomina supplied him with 
 easy means of dropping one. Marcus Yipsanius could 
 not help being Marcus Vipsanius in a legal docu- 
 ment where the cognomen Agrippa could come in only 
 after the pnenomina of his father and grandfather; 
 but he was Marcus Agrippa in common speech, and 
 he could, if he chose, call himself, in an inscription of 
 his own making, only by the prxnomen which he 
 shared with countless ancient worthies and the cog- 
 nomen which he had himself made illustrious. An 
 
246 SUBSIDIARY AUTHORITIES. 
 
 inscription of this kind reveals to us the weakness of 
 an eminent man more clearly than almost any other 
 way could have done. Or take the tombs of the 
 Scipios, the tombs which some one of the long series 
 of infallible robbers has stolen to set up in his own 
 house, and to record his own "munificence" in the 
 stealing. This last inscription, to be sure, also proves 
 something ; but that is not the inscription of which 
 I speak. I mean the elder ones, the most famous of 
 which begins " Cornelius Lucius Scipio Gnaivod 
 patre prognatus." The legend was carved to mark 
 the tomb of Lucius, and to commemorate his exploits. 
 To us it proves something more ; it proves some- 
 thing about the history of the Latin tongue ; ac- 
 cording to some scholars, it proves that it could 
 not have been written immediately after the death 
 of Lucius. And it tells us also very clearly some- 
 thing about Boman history and its sources. It has 
 often been remarked that the story of the exploits 
 of Lucius Scipio given on the tomb is utterly un- 
 like the story in Livy. Here we have a record, 
 contemporary or nearly so, which says one thing ; a 
 much later narrative says another thing. But then the 
 earlier narrative labours under the suspicion which 
 attaches to its whole class, that of lying like an 
 epitaph. 
 
 The legend on the front of the Pantheon is strictly 
 monumental ; it concerns only Agrippa and his build- 
 ing. It records a fact about them which nobody can 
 have any temptation to doubt. Any further value 
 that it has is purely incidental. But the legend on 
 
INSCRIPTIONS IN ITALY. 247 
 
 the grave of Lucius Scipio is in its own nature 
 documentary. It is a piece of Eoman history or 
 of something that professes to be Koman history; it 
 is a narrative, a meagre narrative certainly, but not 
 more meagre than annals commonly are ; its very 
 meagreness is somethmg in its favour. The charm 
 of the monumental inscriptions, pagan and Christian, 
 at Kome and elsewhere in Italy is beyond words. 
 They bring us home to the things and to the men. If 
 we learn nothing more from the inscriptions of the 
 Empire than the amazing scarcity of grandfathers, 
 the way in which we find ten freedmen or more to 
 one son, that is something. It is something more 
 when we light at Cora on two inscriptions of different 
 dates, one of which records the frsetors of the still 
 separate Latin town, the other the duumviri of the 
 Eoman municipium. It is pleasant to read the epitaph 
 of the clinical doctor and surgeon at Assissi, how 
 much he paid for a local magistracy, how much he 
 left behind him, how much he spent on repairing the 
 temple and how much on mending the roads. Such 
 local patriots and benefactors seem not uncommon ; 
 we feel brought near, and with feehngs of deep 
 friendliness, to a worthy man at Ferentinum of the 
 Hernicans, whose inscription shows that, Hke Sir 
 William Harpur at Bedford, he founded everything 
 that in his day could be founded, even to a benefaction 
 of nuts to be scrambled for by the boys of the town, 
 bond and free. But beyond all inscriptions of this 
 class that I have ever read in their own places come 
 the epitaphs in the Volumnian tomb at the foot of 
 
248 SUBSIDIARY AUTHORITIES. 
 
 the hill of Perugia. I remember no spot where 
 letters graven on the stone seem to bring us so near 
 to looking with our own eyes on the fates of men and 
 the fates of nations. There, amidst all the forms, all 
 the symbols, that mark a buj?ying-place of the myste- 
 rious Etruscan race, stands the tomb of the Lueumo, 
 the head of his house, his sons and grandsons sleeping 
 in their tombs around their chief in death as in life. 
 They are all of one house, but they have ceased to be 
 all of one people or all to speak one tongue. Some of 
 the descendants of the Etruscan Lueumo have ceased 
 to be Etruscans. I claim no knowledge of that speech 
 which has so long refused to be pressed into our 
 service, which has refused to tell us the tale of a folk 
 who, though their written records are there before our 
 eyes, still speak to us almost wholly by the more un- 
 certain voice of the symbolic forms of their monumental 
 art. Yet here and there even one who has no claim 
 to be an expert can spell out a name or two in an 
 alphabet which, among some forms that baffle him, 
 might so often pass for one of the older forms of the 
 graven speech of G-reece. On one of those tombs we 
 may spell out the name of the Etruscan father, bear- 
 ing, in letters traced from right to left, a name in his 
 own tongue, Avle Felimne. By him is his son ; but 
 on the son's tomb the letters are the familiar letters of 
 Latium ; they are written from left to right, accord- 
 ing to the common use of Europe ; the name needs 
 no more of painful spelling out than the name of 
 Marcus Agrippa ; it is a name which might meet us 
 in any year oi the fasti of commonwealth or empire. 
 
THE VOLUMNIAN TOMB. 249 
 
 The son of the Etruscan Avle Felimne has become 
 the Eoman Aulus Volumnius. That change, made 
 without comment, tells us that between father and son 
 a change had taken place of which we yearn indeed 
 to have fuller records. It needs an effort to believe 
 that in the days of Marius and Sulla those ancient 
 and mysterious forms of art and polity and religion 
 still lived on, and that it was only in that compara- 
 tively modern age, as the result of the great stirring 
 when Eome, head of the world, had again to strive for 
 the headship of her own Italy, that the old forms, the 
 old names, passed, with as slight a change as might 
 be, into names and forms which on that spot seem 
 those of a new and upstart people. And from the 
 first century before our sera our thoughts run on to the 
 eleventh century after it, when again sons bore names 
 of another type than the names of their fathers, when 
 the Englishman was content to veil his race under a 
 Norman garb, when it was no warrior from the land 
 of Eouen or the land of Coutances, but the man of 
 Hertfordshire, Eobert son of Godwine, who cut a path 
 for King Baldwin through the ranks of opposing 
 paynimrie, and who died for his faith, by the death 
 of Eadmund and Sebastian, in the market-place of 
 the Egyptian Babylon. 
 
 Inscriptions like these have a charm when read in 
 their own place which hardly follow them into the 
 printed pages of the Corpus Inscriptionum. There 
 was after all a glimmering of truth in the singular 
 remark that some of us may remember, that the 
 pleasure of spelling out an inscription on the spot 
 
2 50 S UBSIDIAR Y AUTHORITIES. 
 
 was something like the slight pleasure of spelling 
 out an autograph. The saying may rank with many 
 other sayings of men who are just clever enough to 
 catch at the most obvious side of a complicated ques- 
 tion. The sight of the autograph, of the letters actually 
 traced by the hand of a certain man, does seem to 
 bring us nearer to the man himself than we are 
 brought when we simply read about him. I shall 
 not lightly forget seeing in the archives of Calvados 
 the foundation charter of Saint Stephen's at Caen 
 with the crosses traced by the very fingers of William 
 and MatHda. The hand that could so well wield the 
 war -club wielded the pen after much the same 
 fashion; the two bold strokes traced by the hand- 
 of the Conqueror form a striking contrast to the 
 slight spider-legs which mark the witness and con- 
 sent of the Lady to her husband's gift. The auto- 
 graph does after all put us in a kind of relation to 
 the writer of the autograph, and thereby adds to the 
 clearness of our historic conception. There is a 
 likeness between the pleasure of spelling out an 
 inscription and the pleasure of spelling out an auto- 
 graph ; but then, I think, scholars at least will 
 allow that it is a likeness which tends rather to the 
 honour of the autograph than to the disparagement 
 of the inscription. It is perhaps not wise in the 
 special students of inscriptions to talk of " epigraphy" 
 as if it were a separate science, or at any rate a 
 separate branch of knowledge. The division of labour 
 is an useful thing, and it is well that some scholars 
 should give special heed to what is written on stone 
 
INSCRIPTIONS AND AUTOGRAPHS. 251 
 
 and brass, as it is well that others should give 
 special heed to what is written on parchment or 
 papyrus. Each needs for his own immediate purpose 
 a knowledge of some special details, some minute 
 niceties, which are of less importance to the other, 
 as well as of less importance to the more general 
 scholar who is satisfied to use the results of the 
 labour of both. AU three are fellow-workers in 
 the same field, though it may be convenient that 
 one should hold the plough while another guides the 
 horses. 
 
 It is in truth hardly possible to make too much of 
 inscriptions as one of the sources of history ; but it 
 must be always borne in mind that their value 
 consists in being one of the sources of history. The 
 slighting comparison of the inscription to the auto- 
 graph is forgotten in face of those great and 
 famous documents on stone than which there is 
 no higher class of evidence. There have been 
 times and places where to engrave a public act on 
 stone was as much the ordinary course of things 
 as it has been in other times and places to write it 
 on paper ; the material on which it is written makes 
 no difierence. The words, the formulae, the facts 
 recorded or left unrecorded, will be exactly the same 
 in the manuscript on stone and in the manuscript 
 on paper, in the inscription on paper and in the 
 inscription on stone. There are indeed some kinds 
 of writings in which one might conceive that the 
 difference between the two classes of writing, not so 
 much in their materials as in their circumstances. 
 
252 SUBSIDIAR Y A UTHORITIES. 
 
 has made a difference in style, perhaps even in 
 matter. We must first part off certain records on 
 the harder materials, in which the material is purely 
 a matter of accident. The speech of the Emperor 
 Claudius on behalf of the Gauhsh senators was not 
 composed with a special view to be written on 
 brazen tablets ; it was composed to be spoken in the 
 Senate ; it found its way to the brazen tablets only 
 because that was deemed to be the surest way of 
 handing down to posterity the fact that the speech 
 had been spoken. And the document thus called 
 into being is of no small value, both in itself and as 
 showing how near to fact Tacitus thought it his 
 business to come in reporting such speeches. He 
 has carefully reproduced the general drift of the 
 Imperial antiquary's argument ; he shows us fairly 
 what the general mind of Claudius was; but the 
 actual words, and even the particular illustrations, as 
 given by Tacitus, are quite different from those in 
 the genuine document. But there is another record, 
 of a still more directly historic character, which was 
 distinctly composed to be graven on stone, and which 
 owes much of its special character to that fact in 
 its composition. Earlier in this lecture I placed 
 together the autobiographies of two Csesars, the first 
 two of the series, which have come down to us on 
 two different materials. One feels that the form 
 given to the record of the deeds of Augustus in the 
 monument of Ankyra is not exactly the same as the 
 form which. a record of the saine deeds would have 
 taken, if it had been written in a book by the prince 
 
STYLE OF INSCRIPTIONS. 253 
 
 himself or by some otlier man at his bidding. But 
 this is not a direct consequence of the difference of 
 material ; it is rather the result of the circumstances 
 which dictated the choice of the material. The 
 record of Ankyra, surely not designed for Ankyra 
 only, but meant to be set up in the same form in 
 other places, was a record addressed to aU the people 
 of the Boman dominions, that all might know what 
 manner of man their ruler was. A book, like the 
 Commentaries of that ruler's legal father, would have 
 been addressed to a small class only, and would 
 therefore have taken another shape. But the record 
 of Ankyra, though a literary composition of a very 
 pecuHar kind, is still a literary composition; it 
 differs therefore from records, on whatever material 
 written, which are not literary compositions at all, 
 but purely documentary. And in such cases stone 
 has the advantage, as it pretty well shuts out aU 
 attempts at turning the document into a literary 
 composition. The wonderful strains of Latin 
 rhetoric which usher in the practical substance 
 of the charter of an English king in the tenth cen- 
 tury would certainly have been cut short if the 
 document had been meant to be graven on stone 
 or brass. But that came of writing in a strange 
 tongue, and of the supposed necessity for show- 
 ing off the writer's skill in that tongue, a ne- 
 cessity which gendered to a kind of Latin very like 
 the kind of English which we sometimes get from 
 Orientals trying to write in an unfamiliar speech. 
 When King Eadward or King William, Earl Harold 
 
254 SUBSIDIARY AUTHORITIES. 
 
 or Lady Edith, greeted men friendly in tlie kindly 
 English tongue, their will was as tersely set forth as 
 if it had been designed for stone and not for parch- 
 ment. The charter of the Conqueror on which rest 
 the liberties of the city of London is of small bulk 
 indeed alongside of some trifling modern deed paid 
 for at so much j^er folio. There is no difference what- 
 ever for historical purposes between such a docu- 
 ment on parchment and a Greek document on stone. 
 Both are original authorities, original authorities of 
 the very highest order, far higher in truth than any 
 narrative writer can be ; we put the narrative writer 
 first, and call the documents subsidiary, simply be- 
 cause that is the way in which we are driven to use 
 them. We cannot read the history consecutively 
 in the documents ; that is the whole difference. 
 
 Meanwhile there are other inscribed documents 
 which are themselves pieces of history, our sole 
 authorities for memorable historic facts. Sometimes 
 they give us in full what the narrative gives us only 
 in a few words ; sometimes they reveal to us 
 great events of which narrative history has revealed 
 nothing to us. Even an editor, even a translator, 
 of Thucydides — we cannot help ever coming back 
 to the fountain-head, to the KTrjfxa e'y ael, the abid- 
 ing efe'eZ or allod of every historical scholar, where 
 he makes his first home and whence he goes 
 forth in the comitatus of his lord to conquer other 
 fields — even an editor, I say, or a translator of 
 Thucydides will surely allow us to eke out or to 
 patch up his narrative with the very words of 
 
THE CHALKIDIAN TREATY. 255 
 
 the treaty, the ofioKoyla, by which Chalkis, after 
 its revolt, was allowed to come back to its old place, 
 or something less than its old place, in the dependent 
 fellowship of Athens. I well remember when the 
 words of the then newly discovered stone which re- 
 cords this piece of older Greek history were sent to 
 me as something new by one who has made no small 
 part of later Greek history, Charilaos Trikoup^s, 
 now Prime Minister of the Hellenic kingdom ^. 
 The text of Thucydides records the fact of the 
 treaty ; the stone gives us its terms. And terms 
 well worth study they are. Though the relation 
 between Athens and Chalkis can hardly be called 
 a federal one, yet those terms throw no small light 
 on federal politics. It shows that Eeserved Eights 
 may still be Eeserved Eights, even though they be 
 dwindled to the shortest span. Chalkis, by sub- 
 mitting to Athens, did not cease to be a separate 
 commonwealth ; Chalkis keeps all rights that it does 
 not surrender to Athens ; it may do any act that 
 a separate commonwealth can do, except when the 
 treaty forbids it to do so. Chalkidian action is the 
 rule, Athenian action is the exception ; only the 
 exceptions take in every kind of external action and 
 all kinds of internal action of any importance. The 
 higher justice, for instance, is moved to Athens ; 
 aU grave matters are to go to be j udged by Athenian 
 courts according to Athenian law. Chalkis is no 
 longer to see an assize or even a court of Quarter 
 Sessions ; but nothing hinders any two Chalkidian 
 ' November, 1884 ; unluckily not so in March, i886. 
 
256 SUBSIDIARY AUTHORITIES. 
 
 magistrates from sitting to judge common assaults 
 and petty larcenies according to the laws of Chalkis. 
 Is not sucli a record as this, itself a co-ordinate text, 
 a worthy commentaiy on the text, even of our 
 father and founder 1 But the great volumes of 
 inscriptions can give us more. We see how ruling 
 Athens treated with dependent Chalkis in the 
 fifth century B.C. ; let us go on and see how the 
 free city of Rome treated with the free city of 
 Astypalaia late in the second century B.C. The treaty 
 is well known, being in the great gathering of 
 Boeckh ; and I know it only there ; I have not had 
 the privilege, a privilege which I should greatly 
 enjoy, of reading it in the autograph. But for me 
 and for all of us the fact lives only in the inscrip- 
 tion ; there is no record of the transaction in any 
 narrative Greek or Latin writer now preserved to 
 us ; it is the stones onlv which are alive to tell us 
 the tale. Here, a good while after the mystic year 
 146 B.C., the fellow of the other mystic year 476 A.D., 
 we find Eome making a treaty with a Greek city, 
 a Greek city very far from being of the first rank, 
 on perfectly equal terms. Rome and Astypalaia are 
 to be true and faithful allies ; neither commonwealth 
 is to give any society, help, or comfort to the enemies 
 of the other ; nobody would find out from the 
 document that Rome was a very great power and 
 Astypalaia a very small one. In such an alliance 
 were of course involved all the consequences which 
 follow on alliance between the weak and the strong ; 
 it would have been well for Astypalaia if there had 
 
ROME AND ASTYPALAIA. 257 
 
 been no Eome in the world ; but, as Eome was in 
 the world, the downward path of Astypalaia was 
 a little smoothed by sinking gently from indepen- 
 dence to dependence and from dependence to sub- 
 jection, instead of being, like some other cities, 
 stormed, sacked, enslaved, out of hand. The cause of 
 so much Roman graciousness is plain ; Astypalaia had 
 a good haven, and, when Eome had to struggle with 
 the pirates, it was a gain that the haven of Astypalaia 
 should be open to the ships of Eome and not to the 
 ships of the pirates. But what a living hght of his- 
 torical teaching do the stones of the Astypalaian treaty 
 throw on the memorable and neglected age which 
 made Eome mistress of the Mediterranean lands. 
 
 Documents like these, formal treaties drawn up in 
 formal language, are, on the face of them, among the 
 most trustworthy of the materials of history. If they 
 mislead us as to the naked facts of the case, it must 
 be from our own ignorance. Thus the treaty between 
 Astypalaia and Eome might be easily misunderstood 
 by one who knew nothing of the state of the world 
 at the time. Such an one might be led to think that 
 the formal equality between Eome and Astypalaia 
 was much more of a reality than it was. Eightly to 
 apply a document of this kind we must know the cir- 
 cumstances of the times, and we must know the exact 
 force of the formal language employed. Such formal 
 language has sometimes been misunderstood, even by 
 the contracting parties to an engagement, as when 
 the Aitolians so rashly committed themselves to the 
 Eoman Faith, without first finding out what the 
 
 s 
 
258 SUBSIDIARY AUTHORITIES. 
 
 words " Koman Faith " meant in a Eoman mouth. 
 Disputes about SoOvai and cnroSovvai, about simple 
 homage and Hege homage, may spring up in any 
 age of the world. And when the parties to a treaty 
 make any very exalted professions as to their mo- 
 tives, when they express any very fervent affection 
 either towards each other or towards each other's 
 subjects, we feel somewhat as a waiy magistrate feels 
 when counsel begin to take a very high moral tone ; 
 he knows that there is some hole in the argument, 
 and he looks about to see where the hole is. But, on 
 the whole, treaties are not meant to deceive as to 
 mere facts ; each side commonly knows the facts too 
 well for that. For its own purpose therefore a treaty 
 ranks among sources of the very highest authority 
 for historical knowledge. So it is, within its own 
 range, with a law. As I said once before, though 
 English history cannot be studied in the statute- 
 book, yet it must be studied with the statute-book. 
 The statute-book often needs an interpreter in the 
 circumstances of the time ; bat granting that inter- 
 preter, it does itself interpret the circvimstances back 
 again. But when we come to manifestos, proclama- 
 tions, diplomatic documents which have not yet 
 reached the stage of treaties, the case is wholly 
 different. Here we are in the very chosen region of 
 lies ; everybody is, by the nature of the case, trying 
 to overreach everybody else. Yet they are instruc- 
 tive lies ; they are lies told by people who know the 
 truth ; truth may even, by various processes, be got 
 out of the lies ; but it will not be got out of them by 
 
SAYINGS OF AMBASSADORS. 259 
 
 tlie process of believing them. He is of child-like 
 simplicity indeed who believes every royal proclama- 
 tion or the preamble of every act of Parliament, as 
 telling us, not only what certain august persons did, 
 but the motives which led them to do it ; so is he 
 who believes that the verdict and sentence of every 
 court was necessarily perfect righteousness, even in 
 times where orders were sent beforehand for the trial 
 and execution of such a man. A little time back 
 there was a sect of such confiding innocents who 
 believed Henry the Eighth's reports of the inner 
 workings of his heart. They were prophesied against 
 beforehand by Gibbon, by Sismondi, and by Hallam ; 
 but we may go back earlier still ; we may go once 
 more to our great leader, and learn from him the 
 charitable form of rebuke, fxaKapl^ovre^ v/nwv to aireL- 
 poKaKov ov X,v^ovixev to a<ppov. Yet in the most 
 modern history of all, the history of the last two 
 daysS we have seen in high places a like memorable 
 instance of the harmlessness of the dove unluckily 
 not combined with any trace of the wisdom of the ser- 
 pent. Within these last few days, the cry has once more 
 come into our ears, the familiar cry of the oppressed and 
 the betrayed, " Gome over into Macedonia and help us." 
 And the Foreign Minister of England deems it an 
 answer to that cry to say that he has just met the 
 Turkish Ambassador, that the Turkish Ambassador 
 assures him that there is no ground for any cry at 
 all, that his Imperial Master is full of the most bene- 
 volent designs, and is daily carrying them out in the 
 
 ^ November 1884. 
 S 2 
 
260 SUBSIDIARY AUTHORITIES. 
 
 most benevolent acts, in those favoured regions of the 
 earth which are happy enough to be placed under 
 his rule. The oflScial words of an Ambassador, even 
 when yet unwritten, are in some sense a document. 
 In such a document the Foreign Secretary beheves 
 with the same child-like faith as the believers in 
 King Harry. A slight knowledge of man's nature, a 
 slight knowledge of men's deeds, that knowledge of 
 good and evil which is gained by the study of his- 
 toric records, and not least by weighing the utter- 
 ances of high diplomatic personages, might have 
 hindered displays of innocence so beautiful and so 
 baleful as that which believes the official words of 
 Henry the Eighth in a past age and that which be- 
 lieves the official words of the Grand Turk in our own. 
 Against such unhappy delusions either as to past 
 or present, the sound study of history, the careful 
 weighing of evidence, the thorough sifting of docu- 
 ments, is the best guard. In the present lecture we 
 have looked hastily at a vast stock of sources of know- 
 ledge of various kinds. We have dealt with skulls, 
 with weapons, with walls, with architecture of the 
 more artistic kind, with inscriptions, with documents 
 written or spoken. All are among our materials. I 
 trust that I have shown that, if the necessities of 
 our mode of study constrained us to give the pre- 
 cedence to narrative historians, it has at least not 
 been out of any undervaluing of other sources of know- 
 ledge. It is something to have one's words printed 
 in a book ; it is something more to have them graven 
 with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever. 
 
LECTUKE VII. 
 
 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 We come now, drawing near as we are to the end 
 of our course, to a class of writings which, from one 
 point of view, it might have not been out of place to 
 reckon among those subsidiary means of knowledge 
 of which I spoke in my last lecture. We now come 
 to the modern writers of history. I do not now 
 mean the writers of modern history. A man living in 
 the nineteenth century, and writing the history of the 
 nineteenth century, ought in theory to be an original 
 authority just as much as if he had lived in the ninth 
 century and written the history of the ninth. In 
 practice he will never fill quite the same place. I 
 suspect that he never wiU really fill it ; at any rate 
 he will never seem to his own contemporaries to fill 
 it. It needs a little effort to take in the fact, but 
 we ought not to forget that Thucydides himself 
 was not to his contemporaries all that he is to us. 
 That is no blame to his contemporaries ; it could not 
 be otherwise. It is not merely that no age can look 
 on men of its own age as it looks on men of a past 
 age. The difference goes deeper. A writer of con- 
 temporary history in times like ours comes much 
 nearer to the position of a writer of past history than 
 a writer of contemporary history did in earlier times^ 
 
262 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 In the same measure he departs from the position of 
 a contemporary historian of the elder class, from the 
 position of an original authority. The extent to 
 which he writes from his own personal knowledge is 
 likely to be much smaller ; it will certainly be much 
 smaller, if we compare him with those writers of 
 earlier times who were themselves spectators and 
 actors. Under personal knowledge we may fairly 
 reckon, not only those things which a man sees and 
 hears himself, but also those things which those who 
 have seen and heard them have made known specially 
 to him and not to the rest of the world. Now in the 
 wider world of modern times, a world in which the 
 means of communication have grown so infinitely, 
 even a spectator and actor of the first rank, if he 
 sits down to write the history of his own times, 
 will have to write, far more than a writer of earlier 
 times had, from sources of knowledge which are 
 open to all the world. Such an one can, if he 
 chooses, tell us, from his personal knowledge as just 
 now defined, many things which none of us here 
 know anything about ; but he will surely put 
 together a large part of his story from materials 
 which are as much open to us as they are to him. 
 And when an ordinary man, who has no such secret 
 stores of knowledge, sits down to write contemporary 
 history, he does it in very much the same way as if 
 he were writing past history. His personal know- 
 ledge, even in the sense defined above, will go but a 
 little way ; he has to collect and to examine, to weigh 
 and to judge, a vast mass of written and printed 
 
MODERN CONTEMPORARY WRITERS. 263 
 
 materials, just as if he were writing the history of a 
 thousand years back. The chief difference is that 
 his materials will be infinitely greater in amount, 
 incomparably harder to deal with, than if he were 
 writing the history of a thousand years back. There 
 will not really be so many chances of mistaking this 
 and of leaving out that, for such chances will neces- 
 sarily be thicker in the earlier time ; but there will 
 be many more people able to correct anything that is 
 reaUy mistaken or left out, and still more people who 
 will think themselves called upon to correct a great 
 deal that may be perfectly right. He who under- 
 takes to record a war of our own times has to set to 
 work, not quite in the same way as if he were about 
 to record the wars of Sparta and Athens, but in very 
 much the same way as if he were about to record a 
 war of two or three centuries back. The position of 
 Mr. Kinglake comes much nearer to the position 
 of Lord Macaulay than it does to that of Xenophdn. 
 In the actually contemporary time which is dealt 
 with by Mr. Kinglake, and in the time a little while 
 back which is dealt with by Lord Macaulay, there is 
 the same endlessness of materials, the same lack of 
 one great centre-piece round which to hang every- 
 thing. The old Greeks were not in the same way 
 overwhelmed by materials ; Thucydides had nothing 
 to help his own memory and the memories of his 
 personal informants beyond here and there an in- 
 scription read in the very freshest autograph. We 
 cannot in these days have contemporary histories 
 like that of Thucydides, or even like that of Procopius. 
 
264 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 Yet I have sometimes, in reading the contemporary- 
 narratives of the Greek War of Independence, es- 
 pecially in reading the Greek History of Spyrid6n 
 Trikoup^s, felt as if I had gone back to Procopius 
 at least, if not to Polybios. Perhaps the nature 
 t)f the story, the country in which it was laid, 
 in the case of Trikoupes the language in which 
 it was written, helped to throw a certain illusion 
 over the whole thing. Gordon, Trikoupes, Finlay, 
 were all, not only contemporaries, but actors iu 
 the events which they describe. Finlay moreover 
 comes a step nearer to Procopius in another way. 
 In the scathing judgements on particular men 
 which he has mixed up with the general record of 
 the time, in the ever-lifted rod which comes down 
 with such force on most Greeks, most Enghshmen, 
 and all Bavarians, we might almost seem to be 
 reading the Gothic War and the Anecdotes entwined 
 together in a single narrative. 
 
 But of the writers of modern history, in the sense 
 of writers of contemporary history, I have to speak 
 to-day only so far as they may unavoidably depart 
 from that character of original authorities which, it is 
 to be supposed, will belong to them in ages to come. 
 I have to speak of them only so far as they may 
 approach to the character of the class of writers with 
 whom I am this day concerned. These are those 
 writers of modern times who are confessedly not 
 original authorities, but who write the history of 
 past ages from such materials, narrative or otherwise, 
 as there may be for the particular times of which 
 
HISTORIANS OF THE GREEK REVOLUTION. 265 
 
 they write. They are a class in which I have some- 
 what of a personal interest ; it may be well then if, 
 instead of only telling you how they look in my e3'es, I 
 tell you howthey looked in the eyes of a very discerning 
 man, a man who did indeed love learning for its own 
 sake, who has but lately passed away from among 
 ourselves. I have before me the Christian Remem- 
 hrancer for January, 1845. I had not looked at the 
 number for many years, but it contains three articles 
 which I well remembered when I came to glance at 
 them. The articles deal severally with Gregory of 
 Tours, Archbishop Laud, and the Vice-Chancellorship 
 of Dr. Wynter. All three, I imagine, come within 
 the lawful range of a Professor of Modern History ; but 
 just now I have nothing to say on the two specially 
 modern subjects. But the article on Gregory of 
 Tours I had remembered well during all these years, 
 and I read it again with both pleasure and profit 
 now that I have entered into a specially intimate 
 relation with the historian of the Franks. I did not 
 know who was the author, but I now find that it is 
 an early work of the late Rector of Lincoln College. In 
 1845 Mr. Pattison was still hardly more than a young 
 man ; but he had already made his way to a very firm 
 grasp of the position of Gregory and his age, and of 
 the contrast between Gregory and B^da. But it is 
 not to what he says of Gregory and Bseda that 
 I wish to draw your attention now, but to what 
 he says about the position and the destiny of modern 
 writers of past history. Here are the opening words 
 of his article ; 
 
266 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 " Whether or no there be any perfect ideal of historical compo- 
 sition, the one best form of writing history for all ages and countries, 
 if we look to experience, we find that in fact each age has ever had 
 a fashion of its own, differing from that which preceded and followed 
 it. We do not speak of writers contemporary with the events they 
 write of. Such, even though the most jejune of annalists, must 
 always have an interest independent of their form. But we speak 
 of regular history, complete accounts of nations or countries, com- 
 piled in later times from books and records. Such history is a 
 distinct species of composition, a work of art, having its own 
 principles of taste to be guided and judged by. 
 
 " Such history, almost more than any other branch of literature, 
 varies with the age that produces it. Contemporary history never 
 dies ; Thucydides and Clarendon are immortal ; but, on the other 
 hand, no reputation is so fleeting as that of the ' standard ' his- 
 torian of his day. A review of the historical literature of any 
 nation will discover an endless series of decay and reproduction. 
 The fate of the historian is like those of the dynasties he writes 
 of; they spring up and flourish, and bear rule and seem established 
 for ever ; but time goes on, their strength passes away, and at last 
 some young and vigorous usurper comes and pushes them from 
 their throne. It is not because new facts are continually accumu- 
 lating, because criticism is growing more rigid, or even because 
 style varies ; but because ideas change, the whole mode and manner 
 of looking at things alters with every age ; and so every generation 
 requires facts to be recast in its own mould, demands that the 
 history of its forefathers be rewritten from its own point of view. 
 When Hume superseded Echard, his admiring contemporaries 
 little thought that Hume himself would so rapidly become 
 obsolete. Hooke was considered to have exhausted the history 
 of the Eoman Eepublic, and his Roman History to be the final 
 book on the subject ; but great as is the distance between him 
 and Arnold, it is inevitable, in the course of things, that the next 
 century will have to compose its own ' History of Eome.' And 
 these mutations of popular favour involve the smaller satellites as 
 well as the great planets of the historical heaven ; Mrs. Trimmer 
 and Goldsmith pale before the rising light of Keightly and 
 Mrs. Markham, as the subs of office quit their desks when premiers 
 deliver up their portfolios." 
 
MB. PATTISON ON HISTORIANS. 267 
 
 Mr. Pattison has here pronounced the doom of 
 a great many. It may even be that among them he 
 has pronounced the doom of those who write about 
 Isaac Casaubon as well as the doom of those who 
 write about William Eufus. We are all creatures 
 of a day. I felt that truth keenly when I first 
 attended a debate in the Greek Assembly, where 
 the only word I could catch was anjfxepov, and when 
 some time after I attended a debate in the Italian 
 Senate, where the only word I could catch was oggi. 
 StUl in our little day we can do something. We 
 can at least make ready the way for those who are 
 to supplant us, and we may even do somewhat 
 towards the more pious work of prolonging for some 
 small space the posthumous lives of those who went 
 before us. One duty of the father is surely to keep 
 up the dignity of the grandfather in the eyes of the 
 grandchildren. If any one will listen to me, there is 
 no precept on which I must insist more strongly than 
 that he should listen to those to whom I once listened. 
 ThirlwaU, Arnold, Kemble, Palgrave, Guest, Willis — 
 these are names which shall not die, as long as a 
 voice from this chair can do anything to keep them 
 alive. And as the generations of historians pass 
 away like the generations of leaves, they do them- 
 selves become part of history. We should not forget 
 that the history of opinion about facts is really no 
 small part of the history of those facts. Doubtless 
 there is no position in the world so triumphant, while 
 it lasts, as the position of the author of the last 
 German book. He is the oracle ; all must bow down 
 
268 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 to him. He is like the dweller among the trees of 
 
 Aricia, 
 
 " Those trees in wliose dim shadow 
 The ghastly priest doth reign, 
 The priest that slew the slayer, 
 And shall himself be slain." 
 
 The author of the last German book, like the Rex 
 Nemorensis, has set aside all that were before him, 
 and reigns till some one comes to set aside him also. 
 But I doubt not that Aricia kept careful fasti of her 
 slaughtered kings, and the author of the last German 
 book is commonly careful to embalm the memories, 
 not only of those whom he has himself slain, but 
 of those whom they had slain in their day. It is 
 like the old Maori creed, in which the brightness of 
 the star into which the eye of the canonized chieftain 
 passed, was made up of the brightness of all the eyes 
 which he himself had eaten and of all the eyes which 
 those whose eyes he had eaten had themselves eaten 
 in their day. So we all have a chance ; like flies in 
 amber, we may hope to live in the records of our 
 conquerors and of our conquerors' conquerors. For 
 my own part, I stand before you as the mere mummy 
 of a professor, dead and buried already. Some time 
 back I read my own sentence, pronounced by one of 
 the infallible judges of such matters, that my work 
 was done, that I could now only repeat a thrice-told 
 tale. Be it so ; yet even the thrice-told tale may 
 have its use. Falsehood is hard to root out ; it has 
 more heads than even H^rakMs alone can crush. 
 Every fresh assertion, of the thing that is not is reason 
 
THE LAST GERMAN BOOK. 269 
 
 enough for a fresh assertion, even for the thousandth 
 time, of the thing that is. 
 
 In fact the extract from Mr. Pattison's article 
 which I read to you, full of truth as it is, hardly does 
 justice to this singular power of falsehood, to the 
 amazing life of a bad book. There is the memorable 
 fact that, when the School of Law and Modern History 
 was set up in Oxford, Hume's History of England 
 was recommended, not by the University, not by 
 the Examiners, but in a wonderful paper that went 
 about, without authoritj', without signature, but 
 which all undergraduates, many graduates, some 
 heads of colleges, mistook for a statute of the 
 University. That was the paper which, as I men- 
 tioned in an earlier lecture, recommended William of 
 Malmesbury, seemingly as the one original authority 
 that the writer of the paper had heard of. I know 
 not whether anybody in Oxford reads Hume now; 
 but I know that, not many years back, a real 
 scholar was, in the vain hope that something might 
 come of putting new wine into old bottles, set 
 to correct the Student's Hume. How well I re- 
 member when I first heard that Hume had been 
 chosen as the easiest book with which to begin the 
 easy study. I at once asked whether in the other 
 school they had burned Thucydides and taken to 
 Mitford. In that comparison I did injustice to 
 Mitford. Eor Mitford, with all his blunders, all 
 his unfairness, all his advocacy of the worse cause 
 against the better, had the great merit of being the 
 first to see that the old Greeks were not mere names 
 
270 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 in a book or statues in a gallery, not beings of 
 some other nature, above us or below us or in some 
 way apart from us, but real men like ourselves, 
 capable of calling forth the same feelings as the men 
 of our own day. If a man could not bring himself 
 to love Demosthenes, it was a great thing to be able 
 to hate him. Hume, to be sure, could slander Dunstan 
 yet more foully than Mitford slandered Demosthenes ; 
 but that was not because he had any such living 
 conception — living, however mistaken — as Mitford 
 certainly had of Demosthenes ; Hume slandered Dun- 
 stan out of simple blind hatred of a system which, in 
 his ignorance, he fancied that Dunstan represented. 
 I should not recommend anybody to go to Mitford 
 for the facts of Greek history; but in the more 
 curious study of opinion about the facts of Greek 
 history, Mitford holds a marked place, and one not 
 altogether discreditable. 
 
 Now, what is the real place of modern writers of 
 long-past history during that little day which is all 
 that Mr. Pattison's rule allows to them, at any rate 
 to the good ones among them 1 Their only true 
 position is that of commentators, illustrators, har- 
 monizers, of the original texts. Myself a somewhat 
 voluminous writer of narrative histories, I claim no 
 other place. I wish no one to read me instead of 
 my authorities ; I wish simply to send readers to 
 my authorities, and to help them in their study of 
 them. In theory the original authority should be 
 read first and the modern commentator afterwards. 
 In practice it is by no means easy always to do this. 
 
USE OF MODERN WRITERS. 271 
 
 The meagreness of our authorities for some periods 
 and the overwhelming mass of them for other periods 
 both join to hinder such a rule from being followed. 
 It is only here and there that it is possible. Where 
 it can be done, it is well to do it. A man would do 
 well to read the Peloponnesian War or the Gothic 
 War in his Thucydides or his Procoj^ius first of all, and 
 to turn to his Grote or his Gibbon afterwards. That, 
 if he wishes to bring his story to any kind of natural 
 finish, he must eke out the narratives of the great 
 masters by the narratives of Xenophon and Agathias 
 is no difficulty. Xenoph6n and Agathias, though 
 writers immeasurably below the level of Thucydides 
 and Procopius, are original authorities just as much 
 as they are. Between Herodotus, Thucydides, and 
 Xenoph6n, it is possible to read a large and very 
 important piece of Greek history consecutively in 
 original writers. And I should say to every one, 
 Eead the text first and the comment afterwards. 
 I do not say. Wait till you have finished the whole 
 text before you look at the comment ; but I do say. 
 Get your first notion of each main portion of the 
 story from the text before you look at the comment. 
 Yet even in these cases, it is hardly possible, it is 
 hardly desirable, that any student should get his very 
 first notions of Greek history from the original 
 writers. We should hardly condemn our sons and 
 daughters to remain utterly ignorant of Athens and 
 Sparta, and of anything that happened in them, till 
 they have reached the stage in which they can master 
 such a Greek text as that of Thucvdides and illus- 
 
272 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 trate it by such an Englisli comment as that of Grote, 
 And, as I have already said, there are large periods 
 of history for which we have no such consecutive 
 original guides, periods where the original authori- 
 ties are so meagre and so piecemeal, that the student, 
 the learner as distinguished from the finished his- 
 torical critic, cannot be reasonably expected to get 
 his first impressions of the time from such authorities 
 as we have. In such cases we cannot help turning 
 things about ; some modern narrative unavoidably 
 becomes the text, and the original sources are un- 
 avoidably treated as the comment. And considering 
 that, as we ruled long ago, no man can read all 
 history in original authorities, it follows that, what- 
 ever periods he chooses, the periods between and 
 around those which form his own special subjects, 
 must be mainly read in modern writers. In truth 
 the rule of reading the original writers first, a rule 
 to be followed wherever we can, can be carried out 
 only within very narrow limits. We must, oftener 
 than not, get our first impressions of any period of 
 historv from modern writers and not from original 
 sources. 
 
 The modern then, properly a commentator, will 
 often find himself turned, by the necessity of the 
 case, into the opposite of a commentator. He is 
 driven in many cases to step into the place of his 
 authorities and himself to do what they ought to do. 
 But one of his functions, one part of his duty to his 
 lord, he need never lay aside. If he cannot always 
 act as a commentator, he can always act as a guide. 
 
THE MODERN WRITER 4 COMMENTATOR. 2Ti 
 
 He can always show the way to his authorities, and 
 exhort every one to follow that way for himself. If 
 he does not do this, he fails in his duty. He fails in 
 his duty if he ever lets it be forgotten that he is 
 simply the prophet of somebody else, the guide to 
 somebody else. And it is by no means needless to 
 proclaim that fact. I spoke some weeks back of the 
 great difficulty that there is in making many people 
 understand the nature of an original authority, in 
 making them understand that there are any original 
 authorities for large parts of history. The modern 
 writer must protest against every attempt to treat 
 himself as an authority. He must thrust back all 
 idolatrous worshippers. He must never allow him- 
 self to be looked on as a mysterious source of know- 
 ledge, having private revelations which are all his 
 own and which are not equally open to everybody 
 else. He must make his hearers and readers tinder- 
 stand that what they are he once was, and that what 
 he is they may by due pains become. The means by 
 which he has gained his knowledge are as free to the 
 rest of the world as they are to himself ; he invites 
 all who will to join him in working at them, more 
 fully if so be, more accurately, than he has worked 
 at them himself He will let every reader see, if the 
 reader chooses to take the trouble to look, the process 
 by which he reached his conclusions, and he will 
 thereby give the reader the power of coming to other 
 conclusions, if he thinks good. For himself he will 
 claim no advantage over any other man, beyond those 
 advantages which are the natural result of experience. 
 
274 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 He may perhaps venture to think that experience 
 may have given him a certain tact, perhaps a certain 
 instinct, at any rate a certain power of dealing with 
 his authorities, which may entitle his conclusions 
 to some measure of respect. He may go so far as 
 to think that, after long years of teaching himself, 
 there is a certain prescription in favour of his con- 
 clusions, such as hardly belongs to the conclusions of 
 those who begin to teach others at a time when he 
 was humbly learning, and who rush off at a speed 
 which he cannot follow to the very latest pages of 
 the story. But he claims for himself nothing more 
 than this ; nay, he claims nothing more than this for 
 the elders at whose feet he himself has sat. While 
 yielding them all due respect, he never surrendered 
 his right of judgement; and while venturing to claim 
 some respect as due to himself, he asks no man to 
 surrender his right of judgment to him. 
 
 yrjp6.(TK£i 6* act TroXXa bihaiTKO^ievos, 
 
 He will have learned enough to grasp the great 
 truth of all, how much he has still to learn, and 
 he will never scorn to learn even from those whom 
 he is set to teach. 
 
 Such is my view, perhaps a lowly one, of the posi- 
 tion of the modern writer of history. He refuses to 
 be made an idol of himself, and he refuses to make 
 an idol of anything else, even of the latest German 
 book. But I cannot help telling a story which seems 
 to show the somewhat different view which some 
 people seem to take of his position. You will not 
 be surprised to hear that I have in my time received 
 
THE HISTORIAN NO ORACLE. 275 
 
 many strange letters, asking me many strange ques- 
 tions. One of the very strangest came from a painter, 
 whose name I have forgotten, but who, I conceive, 
 was minded to paint a picture of the fight on Senlac. 
 I know not whether he ever did paint it ; if he did, 
 I hope he made it more like the facts than the painter 
 of a picture which I have seen, in which Harold is 
 shown falling from a horse, — more like them than a 
 whole series of pictures in which Edith Swanneshals, 
 who, according to a sum that I once did, must have 
 been full forty years old in 1066, is painted as quite a 
 young girl, — more like them than one picture specially, 
 in which she is represented as finding the King's body 
 under a great rock, seemingly close by the sea-shore. 
 I can only conceive that this last picture was painted 
 by an ingenious writer in the Edinburgh Eeview, who 
 fancied that the exploit of Taillefer, and so, I sup- 
 piose, the whole ebb and flow of the great battle, 
 happened at the very moment of William's landing 
 — it could hardly be his landing on the shore of 
 Pevensey. But to come back to my painter, who 
 I fancy had read my third volume, which the Edin- 
 burgh Eeviewer could hardly have done. He wanted 
 to know what kind of looking man the Conqueror 
 was, and what kind of weather it was on the day of 
 Saint Calixtus. On the former head I referred him 
 to the Bayeux Tapestry and to William's coins, 
 perhaps also to the personal description of him given 
 by William of Malmesbury, though that belongs to a 
 later time of his life. But it was the question about 
 the weather which specially struck me. In some 
 
 T 2 
 
276 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 battles the weather did great things, say at Trebia, 
 at Trasimenus — who does not remember Arnold's 
 picture of it 1 — and at Cr6cy. But as to the weather 
 on the day of Senlac, our own Chroniclers could 
 hardly be expected to dwell upon it, and even Wil- 
 liam of Poitiers and Gruy of Amiens hold their peace. 
 Had the day been either remarkably bright or re- 
 markably stormy, the chances are that they would 
 have found something to say about it ; so we may 
 perhaps guess that the elements were in that neutral 
 state which I have heard described as no weather at 
 all. But my painter clearly thought that I knew all 
 about the matter, only that, for some unexplained 
 reason, I kept my knowledge to myself. So Boswell 
 clearly thought that Johnson knew all about the 
 other world, only he did not choose to tell him. Now 
 I am not one of those who can carpet the earth with 
 daisies which are not recorded in any book, nor can I 
 light up the sky with stars when haply the heaven was 
 clouded over. But I should certainly have been well 
 pleased either to light up my picture of the great battle 
 with the rays of a blazing sun, or to shroud it in clouds 
 and darkness, if only those who were there to see 
 had handed down any witness either way. Surely 
 the state of mind attributed to me by the painter 
 was as odd an one as any man can lightly fancy. I 
 was thought to have got hold of a piece of knowledge 
 of no small value for the effect of the very central 
 point of my whole story. But it was further thought 
 that — why I will not presume to guess — I had wilfully 
 kept back that piece of knowledge from the mass of my 
 
LENGTH OF REPUTATIONS. 277 
 
 readers, but that I might perhaps be ready to reveal 
 it in a private letter to an unknown correspondent. 
 
 I would therefore have all who hear me fully grasp 
 the fact that we who have written large volumes of 
 history are no oracles, but simply fellow-workers with 
 themselves, companions who at most have got a little 
 ahead of them on a road on which it is perfectly open 
 to them to follow. It may be their luck to catch us 
 up, and, according to Mr. Pattison's rule, to supplant 
 us, alive or dead, in any position that we may have 
 won. Yet I would venture to hint that, in the minds 
 of impetuous searchers after novelty, in the minds of 
 those who somehow seem not to find time to think 
 before they speak, to read before they criticize, as in 
 times past we were taught to do, and as we tried to 
 do, — in such minds as these this process of sup- 
 planting and " superseding " seems to go on rather 
 faster than Mr. Pattison would have approved. Mr. 
 Pattison's words read as if he allowed a century as a 
 possible life for a modern historian's reputation. The 
 term of power of a French ministry, the life of 
 a new system of Oxford examinations, might seem 
 to be nearer the mark. I am sure that my dear 
 friend John Eichard Green never wished his ad- 
 mirers in the newspapers to say that he was the 
 first man who did anything for early English 
 history, at any rate that he was the first man who 
 threw any life into early English history, its events 
 or its characters ; before him, we were told, all was 
 " fossil." I felt somewhat humbled, as believing 
 that I had myself thrown some little life into some 
 
278 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 of the characters and events of early English history ; 
 and I felt somewhat amazed, as being yet more cer- 
 tain that Sir Francis Palgrave had done a good deal 
 in that way before me. I could only guess that the 
 smart writers had never read a word of Sir Francis 
 Palgrave ; I think they would have found him any- 
 thing but " fossil " if they had tried him. I could 
 prove too by very distinct evidence that there are 
 men who think themselves qualified to talk about 
 early English history, perhaps even to teach early 
 English history, who have never looked at a page of 
 Kemble or Lappenberg. Yet Lappenberg, Kemble, 
 Palgrave, Guest, those are the men who built the 
 house, the men without whose help we should be a 
 long way indeed from any clear notion of the history 
 and the ways of our forefathers. I have the Bishop 
 of Chester with me here ; he used always to speak 
 of John Mitchell Kemble as his " model scholar." 
 And the Bishop of Chester himself, a portrait-painter 
 at once so truthful and so brilliant, is not altogether 
 a " fossil " either. But then fancy a writer who has 
 to enlighten all mankind in the columns of the news- 
 papers stopping to enlighten himself by a readmg of 
 the great prefaces. But believe me, you who have 
 still your line of study to choose, you will be well 
 employed, you will be gaining real knowledge, you 
 will be giving your minds a true and sound discipline, 
 if, as soon as you have well mastered the facts of 
 early English history, you take Kemble's Saxons in 
 England and Palgrave's History of the English Com- 
 monwealth, not as oracles, not as idols, but as writings 
 
WffAT TO READ AND NOT TO READ. 279 
 
 from which you will learn not a little, if you use 
 them as they should be used, comparing and weigh- 
 ing them with one another, and above all, verifying 
 their references to original authorities at every step. 
 So to do will be something like making a lodgement 
 in the fortress of sound learning. And then, as a 
 lighter exercise, you may go on and read Palgrave's 
 History of Normandy and England, which you will 
 not be able to test by verifying the references to 
 original authorities, forwhy there are no references 
 to verify. But read the book all the same ; only 
 use on it those powers of judgement which by 
 this time you wUl surely have gained. Mark, as 
 I have often done, some perplexing and provoking 
 passage, where you are inclined to curse the writer 
 for not giving you. a reference. Keep it in your 
 mind; search for it in places likely and unlikely; 
 you will find it sooner or later, for Sir Francis Pal- 
 grave, at that stage of his life, never wrote a word 
 for which he could not have given a reason ; the 
 search will be useful to you in many ways, and, when 
 you have found the reference, judge how far it proves 
 the writer's point. 
 
 But you will some of you say that I am bidding 
 you to read too much, that I am bidding you to 
 read everything. I am not bidding you to read 
 everything. I would wai'n every one, save the most 
 advanced students, to forbear from reading Augustine 
 Thierry's History of the Norman Conquest ; and, 
 if you can so steel yourselves, forbear from reading 
 Ivanhoe, When you reach the stage of studying, 
 
280 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 not early Englisli history, but the history of opinion 
 about early English history, then read Thierry and 
 even Ivanhoe, but not till then. The literary 
 fascination of two such masters of tale-telling is 
 too great ; the early reading of such books simply 
 gives a great deal to unlearn. But let me do 
 justice even to Thierry. To say nothing of his base- 
 less theory, few writers oftener go utterly wrong in 
 points of detail. Yet Thierry was not a careless 
 writer ; least of all was he negligent of authorities. 
 I do not believe that he ever wrote anything for 
 which he did not believe that he had the witness of 
 something which he looked on as an authority. Only 
 he was utterly uncritical ; to him one book older than 
 the invention of printing was as good as another ; he 
 would gravely put forth statements from the latest 
 and most worthless writers — that is, of course, if they 
 helped to patch up his theories — as if they were of 
 equal value with contemporary narratives and docu- 
 ments. He would kill a man by one name in one 
 page and bring him to life by another name in a later 
 page, each time with a perfectly good reference ; 
 he simply had not learned the art of probing and 
 'weighing his references, and finding out either what 
 they meant or what they were worth. Now Pal- 
 grave, though I think he sometimes gives the reins 
 too freely to his imagination, though he does not 
 always distinguish the different value of different 
 authorities, though he sometimes makes his authori- 
 ties prove too much, still, at least in his mature writ- 
 ings, never blunders like Thierry. We may accept 
 
KEMBLE AND PALGBAVE. 281 
 
 bis conclusions or not ; we have seldom anything to 
 say against his statement. Kemble has no narrative 
 work to compare with that of Palgrave ; biit the 
 Saxons in England may fairly be compared with the 
 History of the English Commonwealth. They are 
 two great works, works of two great scholars, who 
 assuredly are not yet superseded. They will give 
 you two sides of the same general story. Eead them, 
 weigh them ; most likely you will come to think with 
 me that the union of the views which they severally 
 maintain comes nearer to the truth than either view 
 by itself But Kemble is, if not purely English, at 
 least purely Teutonic; Palgrave is oecumenical. It 
 is from him, directly or indirectly, that all we who 
 have learned it at all, have learned the great central 
 truth of history. He knew, as all do not know yet, 
 how it is to Rome that all paths lead, how it is from 
 Eome that all paths start again. Do not, I would 
 pray you, believe that Sir Francis Palgrave is as yet 
 supplanted or superseded. Pro reverentia imperii, 
 he is still the father and teacher of us all. 
 
 Before Palgrave wrote Hallam. There is some- 
 thing, to my mind at least, thoroughly touching in 
 the way in which the elder man, in his Supplemental 
 Volume to the Middle Ages, acknowledges his obli- 
 gations to the younger. Hallam shows that mark of 
 true greatness, that he could allow himself to have 
 been wrong. In the strictly mediaeval part of 
 HaUam's writings he belongs to a distinct school 
 from Palgrave ; he represents another way of looking 
 at things. Hallam, as he himself once says, was 
 
282 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 brought up in the teaching of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. He shows that teaching in its very best 
 shape, accompanied by singular discretion, and by no 
 small reading within his range. But Palgrave is the 
 beginner of the fuller enlightenment of which I hope 
 we are all partakers. Hallam was not strong on the 
 side of imagination, and imagination, if kept under 
 proper restraint by more sober companions, is one of 
 the most essential elements of historical research. He 
 never thoroughly took in either the Imperial or the 
 ecclesiastical element in history; if I say that he did 
 not thoroughly take in the Teutonic element either, 
 it might seem that I leave him no standing-ground 
 at all. And whither shall he seem to vanish, if I add 
 that he never shows that same kind of thorough 
 knowledge of original authorities, that mastery of 
 them, that delight in them, which stands out in 
 every line of Kemble and Palgrave'? Hallam had 
 nothing of the spirit of the antiquary; he had not, I 
 should say, very much of the spirit of the historian 
 proper. Yet Hallam was a memorable writer, whose 
 name ought to be deeply honoured, and a large 
 part of whose writings are as valuable now as when 
 they were first written. I distinguished in an earlier 
 lecture two classes of lawyers, one class who are 
 among the worst foes of historical learning, and 
 another class who are among its best friends. We 
 may safely put Hallam as the patriarch of the second 
 class. He did not attain to the world-wide grasp of 
 some of our modern masters af the study of institu- 
 tions ; but he showed, perhaps first after Selden» 
 
HALL AM. 283 
 
 what an English lawyer, a lawyer who did not take 
 away the key of knowledge, might do for English 
 history. Bringing to his work all the advantage of 
 the lawyer's professional training and professional 
 knowledge, without any trace of the lawyer's pro- 
 fessional narrowness and prejudice, bringing too a 
 judgement, not of so wide a I'ange as that of some 
 others, but admirably clear, sound, and impartial, 
 within its range, Hallam did indeed a great work. In 
 that part of English history in which such qualities as 
 these are preeminently needed, say from the reign of 
 Edward the First onwards, I know no writer who so 
 fully discharges a certain very valuable function. 
 If I wish at a pinch, when there is no time to turn 
 over many books, to find a clear and trustworthy 
 account of a matter, I can commonly find what I want 
 in Hallam. And I know no one who more commonly 
 utters some sentence of quiet wisdom, which we 
 carry off and dwell upon. We better understand the 
 solid strength of Hallam when we turn to the feeble 
 talk of his continuator. 
 
 Of some of the greatest modern writers of past 
 history I spoke incidentally in an earlier lecture. As 
 I have fallen into the critical vein to-day, I will 
 speak of one or two more. I know few books more 
 delightful and more instructive to read than Mil- 
 man's History of Latin Christianity. And none 
 better discharges the work of a guide, both to the 
 original authorities, and, what we cannot neglect, to 
 modern German writers. Mil man is emphatically 
 ^ strong writer, a writer with a wide grasp of many 
 
284 MODERN WIUTERS. 
 
 suLjects, many lands, many ages. The strange tiling 
 is that among those subjects, lands, and ages we 
 cannot place any age of English history. It is 
 strange how his mind seems wholly to dwell on the 
 continent, how his strength fails him whenever he 
 touches his own island. In England he seems never 
 either to grasp the general position of a time or to 
 master its details. But in mere detail Milman is 
 nowhere strong. His matter and his style are singu- 
 larly alike. Few compositions are more effective, 
 as few are more vigorous, than the massive and 
 emphatic sentences in which he brings before us the 
 great features of some character or some event. 
 Dissect those sentences according to the rules of 
 grammar, and in a great number of cases they cannot 
 be parsed. So, irrespective of mere style, Milman's 
 way of putting the general aspect of anything is 
 invariably vigorous, thoughtful, instructive. Yet 
 every page is crowded with mistakes in detail, petty 
 errors as to names, titles, dates, family relations, 
 small points of every kind. They are mere errors on 
 the surface, errors which a moment's thought would 
 have set right, errors which one might go through the 
 book with a pen and correct. They are quite unlike 
 some other kinds of errors, which go through the 
 whole work from top to bottom, where no amount 
 of correction in detail could turn a record of falsehood 
 into a record of truth. Yet it is strange indeed that 
 such errors should be found in such a book. It is 
 hardly possible that the book went forth to the 
 world without the writer ever reading over what he 
 
MILMAN AND FINLAY. 285 
 
 had written, either in print or in manuscript. It 
 hardly can be so; yet Milman's mistakes are just of 
 the kind which might be found in the first rough 
 draught of the most accurate writer. Only such a 
 writer would commonly set them right before they 
 met any eye but his own. For please to remember 
 that the accurate writer is not he who makes no 
 mistakes, for there is none such ; it is he who finds 
 out his own mistakes for himself on his own manu- 
 script, and does not leave them for other people to 
 find out in print. 
 
 Among Milman's many merits we cannot reckon a 
 thorough grasp of the position of the Roman Empire 
 in the history of the world. And this is the more 
 strange, as he is thoroughly at home in so many 
 particular aspects of the endless questions between 
 Popes and Emperors. But from the oecumenical 
 point of view, Milman is a decided falling back from 
 Palgrave. It fell to the lot of another writer, the 
 faultiest of all of whom I have spoken, but one who 
 has none the less wrought as great a work as any, 
 to do, in a kind of incidental way, for Eastern Europe 
 much the same as Palgrave did for Western Europe. 
 George Einlay, more perhaps than any other modern 
 writer, belongs to the same class as those earlier histo- 
 rians who began a story of remote ages and carried it 
 on into times and scenes in which they were themselves 
 spectators and actors. Living in Greece, reposing after 
 the great struggle in which he had taken a part, not 
 hitherto a strictly historical student, a student rather 
 of law and political oeconomy, a practical man too, 
 
286 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 a soldier and a tiller of the ground, Finlay looked at 
 the state of things which he saw at his own door ; 
 he felt a call to trace its causes, and he found that 
 the tracing of those causes led him back at least to 
 the days of the Macedonian Alexander. The result 
 was that great series of volumes on Greece under 
 Foreign Domination, which form the sad counterpart 
 and contrast to Grote's great series of volumes on 
 Greece in the days of her independence. And the 
 contrast in subject was not the only contrast. While 
 Grote put forth volume after volume amid the 
 general applause of scholars, Finlay toiled on at his 
 thankless task, amid every form of neglect and 
 discouragement, till he made a few here and there 
 understand that there was a Eoman Empire of the 
 Bast. Full of faults his book is, in form, in matter, 
 in temper ; but it is a great work all the same. 
 Some little way he must have made even where it is 
 hardest to make way. I have seen Leo the Isaurian 
 made the subject of a flourish in a leading article. 
 
 I have compared Finlay and Grote. I believe 
 I had the latter great writer in my eye when I 
 spoke a little time about the hasty way in which 
 the jaunty critics of our time fancy that a great 
 scholar is "superseded," because forsooth they have 
 not mastered his writings. I have already men- 
 tioned in print, but I cannot help mentioning it 
 again — it is so beautifully illustrative — the calm 
 saying of the smart writer who told the world that 
 Thirlwall had been " superseded " by Grote. Bishop 
 ThirlwaU himself, in his modesty, once said some- 
 
THIRLWALL. 287 
 
 thing of the kind ; but he was the only man who 
 had a right to say so. The judgement is specially 
 instructive, because it shows how little the judge 
 knew of the two great scholars on whom he presumed 
 to sit in judgement. Somebody has perhaps gone 
 on to say that Grote is "superseded" by Curtius. 
 Such a saying would be as silly as to say that 
 Thirlwall is superseded by Grote. For of these 
 three great writers each is so manifestly the best 
 of the three in particidar parts and ia particular 
 aspects, that none of the three can supersede any 
 other ; we must have all of them. But it rises 
 almost to the dignity of a joke to say that either 
 Grote or Curtius has superseded Thirlwall. The 
 part cannot supersede the whole. The man who 
 wrote the whole tale of independent Greece cannot 
 be superseded by men who wrote only parts of it. 
 The critic of course had not the faintest notion 
 what Bishop Thirlwall had written about, or what 
 there was for him to write about. The strength 
 of Thirlwall as clearly lies in the history of Alex- 
 ander and his successors as the strength of Grote 
 lies in the political history of Athenian and Syra- 
 cusan democracy, as the strength of Curtius lies in 
 the geography, in the artistic side of things, in the 
 general picture of that age which was the glory of 
 Athens, but which, as the disciples of Finlay know, was 
 an age of decline for Hellas in the wider sense. Curtius, 
 perfect master of his own lore, but a babe when 
 he ventures to meddle with the lore of Grote, does 
 not even touch that part of Greek history in which 
 
288 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 Thirlwall was strongest. Grote, historian of demo- 
 cracy, "was unfair alike to the earliest and to the 
 latest parts of Thirlwall's story, to old Achaians at 
 one end, to Macedonians and new Achaians at the 
 other end. The • successors of Alexander he barely 
 touched ; Alexander himself he woiild have done 
 well to leave alone. Yet he is said to have " super- 
 seded" Thirlwall, because a careless writer had not 
 taken the trouble to read Thirlwall, or even to find 
 out what he wrote. He might indeed have said 
 that the early parts both of Thirlwall and Grote 
 were superseded by the growth of Comparative 
 Mythology ; but that might have been too obvious 
 a truth to reach the regions of infalhble criticism. 
 Indeed I am told that the early parts of Curtius, 
 which seemed so novel not many years back, are 
 already superseded by sciences beside which Com- 
 parative Mythology seems ancient. 
 
 Let then no student of history scorn the guidance 
 of the great Bishop of Saint David's, any more than 
 he wiU scorn the guidance of the living Bishop of 
 Chester. I know not whether Thirlwall is good 
 for the schools ; I know that he is good for sound 
 learning, when read alongside of Arrian, Diodoros, 
 Plutarch, and Polybios. But in speaking of him 
 I have indeed run into the jaws of the Hon ; I have 
 dared to speak freely of one of the great masters 
 of German learning. I spoke some time back of 
 the fashionable idolatry of the last German book. 
 One has sometimes heard of the question " Have 
 you read the last German book ? " being put under 
 
GERMAN SCHOLARS. 289 
 
 circiimstances wliicli might suggest as a reply the 
 more searching question, "Have you read the 
 first English book 1 " Now it is a fact, a fact 
 that we may perhaps set down among "things 
 not generally known," but still a fact, that the 
 last German book is sometimes not equal to the 
 German book that went before it, sometimes — may 
 I dare to say it 1 — not equal to some English book 
 that went before either. Yet we cannot afford to 
 cast aside eithei- the last German book or the 
 German book last before that. Each, whUe going 
 about to show some other writer to be wrong, is 
 sure to bring out some point or other which one is 
 glad to see brought out ; the only grievance is that 
 one has to read from one end to the other to find 
 out what the points are. We must read the German 
 books ; if Stubbs is the Waitz of England, Waitz 
 is the Stubbs of Germany. I only demand the 
 right to keep our independence, and to believe 
 that on many matters of historical learning an 
 Englishman — an Englishman on either side of Ocean 
 — 'is better fitted to judge than a German. A Swiss 
 or a Norwegian may judge of the workings of free 
 constitutions in old Greece, in Italy, in any other 
 land, because he, like the Englishman, has daily 
 experience of their working in his own land. But 
 these things are mysteries to German professors, 
 because they are mysteries to German statesmen 
 also. The German scholar simply reads in a book 
 of things which we are always looking at and acting 
 in. He therefore utterly fails to understand many 
 
290 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 things at Athens or Kome or anywhere else which 
 come to us like our ABO. Look at Curtius, so 
 great in his own line, so helpless in face of the 
 great political truths which were Grote's daily bread. 
 Sometimes he writes as if he had never read Grote, 
 sometimes as if he had read him but had failed to 
 grasp the simplest points in his meaning. Because 
 Grote used his critical independence in the matter 
 of the generals at Arginousai, Curtius fancied that 
 he was defending the conduct of the Assembly, 
 whereas he condemned it in the strongest terms. 
 As Eanke can make so little of English institutions 
 when he directly grapples with them, so Curtius and 
 a crowd of other German scholars show in every 
 page the lack of that practical understanding of free 
 institutions which can be gained only by living among 
 them. 
 
 And now that we have dared so far as this, let 
 us fly at the highest game of all. I have spoken 
 my mind about Mommsen, matter and manner, in 
 other shapes. I have lately had need to read a 
 great deal of him over again, with greater attention 
 than I had ever before given to him. And let me 
 pay all becoming homage to the greatest scholar 
 of our times, well nigh the greatest scholar of all 
 times. In all learning that comes under the head 
 of scholarship in the widest sense, we may surely 
 all be glad to sit at his feet. Surely no man of 
 our times has ever taken in so wide . a range of 
 subjects, all brought with the happiest efi'ect to bear 
 upon and to support one another. Language, law, 
 
CUBTIUS AND MOMMSEN. 291 
 
 mythology, customs, antiquities, coins, inscriptions, 
 every source of knowledge of every kind — he is master 
 of them all. Nor does he shut up his researches 
 within any narrow bounds ; he is as much at home 
 with Cassiodorus and Jordanis as he is with an 
 lapygian inscription or with the fragments of Appius 
 the Blind. And to all this he adds some of the 
 highest qualities of the historian proper. Few can 
 surpass him in wide and sure grasp of historic 
 sequence ; and, when he chooses, he can put forth 
 deep and far-reaching thoughts with the fuU power 
 of the noble tongue of his birth. I know no piece 
 of historical painting that outdoes the wonderful 
 passage near the beginning of the second volume 
 of the Eoman History, which sets forth how, through 
 the weakening of the Macedonian kingdoms, the 
 barbarian powers of the East again came to the 
 front, how " the world had again two lords," when 
 Rome had to gird herself for the strife with Parthia. 
 What then is lacking in one endowed with such 
 mighty gifts, and who for many purposes makes 
 such a splendid use of them % What is lacking is 
 political and moral insight, the moral insight which 
 is born with a man, the political insight which is 
 gained only by living in communities of freemen. 
 One mourns to see in such a scholar's historic judge- 
 ments only the morals of Macaulay's Avaux ; one 
 mourns to see in him the politics of an oecumenical 
 Jingo, falling down and worshipping brute force 
 wherever he can find it. The chosen object of 
 Mommsen's scorn is the honest man, the patriot 
 
 U 2 
 
292 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 of a small state, who finding his native land plotted 
 against by a foe whose irresistible power does not 
 make him ashamed of the lowest tricks and false- 
 hoods, strives, even against hope, to preserve the free- 
 dom and the dignity of his people, to hinder their 
 fall if he can, at any rate to delay it or to make 
 it less bitter. That the weak can have any rights 
 against the strong never enters the mind of one 
 who has had in his own person some experience 
 of the rule of blood and iron. The wrath of Momm- 
 sen against a righteous man of old is equalled only 
 by his wrath against any man of our own times who 
 ventures to admire those who refused to bow to 
 the Baal or Moloch of brute force. And the whole 
 thing is as shallow as it is immoral ; it all goes 
 on the principle that a man of the second century 
 B. c. was bound to see as clearly that things were 
 coming as a man in the nineteenth century a.d. can 
 see that they did come. But, in some strange and 
 happy way, the true Teutonic tongue refuses to be 
 the means for putting forth thoughts of this kind. 
 When a righteous man has to be reviled, it can, 
 it seems, be done only in a half-French jargon which 
 makes us more than ever disposed to echo the words 
 of the old Swabian, " Lond us tlitsch blyben ; die 
 walsch Zung ist untrii." Against boisterous dog- 
 matism clothed in epigrams it is easy to make 
 epigrams back again. When we are told that those 
 who do not see that Gains Gracchus aimed at king- 
 ship must have no eyes at all to see with, it needs 
 no effort to say in turn that those who see any- 
 
MOMMSEN AND NIEBUHR. 293 
 
 thing of the kind must be looking through the 
 coloured spectacles of their own arbitrary fancies. 
 When Mommsen gets puzzled over the union be- 
 tween Appius Claudius and Gnseus Flavins, between 
 the high aristocrat and the innovating freedman. 
 I have often wished that I could have had him 
 with me at the Northampton election of 1841, and 
 could have shown him the Tories and the Chartists 
 — may I say Appius Claudius and Gnseus Flavius \ — 
 marching friendly in one procession to the strife 
 against the friends of free trade and moderate reform 
 — may I say, against Quintus Fabius and Publius 
 Decius 1 From Mommsen let me go back to Nie- 
 buhr, who perhaps is now "superseded." Well, I 
 do not ask any one to accept all his divinations ; 
 but I do ask all to remember what they owe to 
 an illustrious scholar who knew all the learning of 
 his generation, and who added to his learning a 
 good share of that real political insight in which 
 his illustrious successor is so grievously lacking. 
 Niebuhr had not lived in a free country ; but he 
 had seen many men and many lands ; he lived in 
 a stirring time, and if not exactly an actor in its 
 events, he was able to see them nearer than most 
 men. And now in many things the axe is being 
 put to the root of Mommsen' s argtiment by a coun- 
 tryman of his own who is also almost a countryman 
 of ours. I will not claim for Ihne the power or the 
 genius of Mommsen ; I do not share his excessive 
 tendency to doubt, or his somewhat needless eager- 
 ness to prove Mommsen in the wrong. But he is 
 
294 MODERN WRITERS. 
 
 a scholar of no mean mark, a wary and prudent 
 scholar, and he has gained an insight into many 
 political matters which to Mommsen are the black- 
 ness of darkness. But how did he gain that insight 1 
 By long dwelling in a land of free institutions and 
 carefully marking the institutions of the land in 
 which he dwelled. Ihne's long sojourn at Liverpool 
 has taught him a thing or two which Mommsen has 
 never been able to understand. Had the sojourn 
 been at Manchester or Birmingham instead of at 
 Liverpool, it might have taught him a thing or 
 two more. 
 
 I had meant to end what I had to say about 
 modern writers with a word or two about one class 
 of them, namely the makers of translations, what 
 in my day were called cribs. The subject is an 
 interesting and instructive one ; but we have no 
 time for it to-day. After dealing such heavy blows 
 at the great fishes, we may let the small fry go. 
 We must keep to those among modern vmters who 
 at least profess to put forth their own thoughts in 
 their own tongue. And these surely have their 
 use iu historical study, if only their use is rightly 
 understood, their use, not as themselves authorities, 
 but as guides to the real authorities, as commen- 
 tators on them. If a man wishes to begin the 
 study of any particular period of history, the advice 
 that I should give him would, in most cases, be some- 
 thing like this. Get hold of the best English writer 
 on the subject that you can find. If he really 
 deserves that name, his references wiU send you 
 
HOW TO BEAD. 295 
 
 both to the original writers and to those German 
 commentators whom, I repeat, we cannot do with- 
 out. The names that at first seem strange to you 
 will gradually become familiar ; the books them- 
 selves will gradually become cherished companions. 
 One book will lead to another ; you will gradually 
 find how vast and how fascinating a field is opened 
 to you by almost Siuy period of history that you 
 may choose. Only once again, whatever period you 
 choose, do not isolate it ; bind it, if only by a 
 narrow thread of general knowledge, to other periods. 
 For this last work you will often have to use modern 
 writers, not only as guides, but as substitutes. And 
 it may sometimes happen that a guide of a genera- 
 tion or two back may not be wholly useless. Bear 
 with me in that hard saying. Speaking myself as 
 a superseded fossil, I cannot altogether keep down 
 my fellow-feelings for the superseded fossils that 
 were before me. If we are good for nothing else, 
 we are at least good for the history of opinion. I 
 venture to hold that many of those who went before 
 me were good for something more. When I call 
 on you, as T did at the beginning, to " praise famous 
 men and our fathers that begat us," natural piety 
 bids me claim a place among them for the teachers 
 of my own youth. 
 
LECTTJEE VIII. 
 
 GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
 
 I NOW come to the last stage of the course which 
 I have chalked out for the present term. I wish 
 last of aU to speak of certain means towards the 
 acquisition of sound historical knowledge which 
 yield to none in importance, as they certainly yield 
 to none in the inherent charm of their study. I 
 have headed this lecture Geography and Travel. 
 Now geography, in its bearings on history, has 
 two meanings, or rather two aspects, which, though 
 they often run into one another, are clearly distinct 
 in idea. Geography, in one of its aspects, is simply 
 a branch of history; in the other it is a precious 
 help to history. In one aspect, it is a form of 
 knowledge which may be mastered in the study 
 by books and maps ; in the other, it is a matter 
 of travel, a matter of seeing things with our own 
 eyes. The former aspect is that of which I have 
 myself treated in a special work, a thick volume 
 of Historical Geography, with a thin companion 
 volume of maps. This side of geographical know- 
 ledge amounts to the knowledge of the political 
 divisions of the earth at different times. It comes 
 very largely to be a matter of nomenclature ; what 
 
HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY. 297 
 
 was the meaning of such and such a geographical 
 name at such and such a time ? Did it mean the 
 same extent of the surface of the earth which it 
 means now 1 Did it reach further than it does 
 now or not so far 1 Or did it, as sometimes happens, 
 mean some other part of the earth from what it 
 means now, some part which may not have an inch 
 of ground in common with the land to which the 
 name is now commonly given 1 That knowledge of 
 this kind forms part of the very ABC of historical 
 study hardly needs to be proved. The thing seems 
 almost childish to insist on ; it is obvious, as the 
 phrase goes, to the meanest capacity. So it is in 
 theory ; in practice the case is somewhat different. 
 There is no part of our study in which there is more 
 to learn and to unlearn, and in which both learn- 
 ing and unlearning are harder tasks, than in the 
 right employment of geographical terms, according 
 to the usage of successive times. There is no sub- 
 ject about which we have so often to say the same 
 thing over and over again, and about which we 
 must so little shrink from saying it over again, 
 even, if need be, till seventy times seven. For 
 there is no subject on which error crops up again 
 so constantly, because so unconsciously; there is 
 no subject on which accuracy of expression, and 
 that accuracy of thought which cannot be without 
 accuracy of expression, calls for more constant and 
 more painful efforts. For it is needful to unlearn 
 at every step ; every time we open our mouths, 
 we have to watch our words and our thoughts ; for 
 
298 GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
 
 the temptation constantly besets us to use some 
 word or other in the manner which comes most 
 naturally to our lips, but a manner which would 
 at once lead others astray. Bear with me, if I 
 counsel you here, as I have counselled some beyond 
 Ocean, not to be discouraged if your striving after 
 truth is rewarded with the name of pedant. The 
 pedant, as the word is commonly used, is the man 
 who does his best to make his words agree with his 
 thoughts and to make his thoughts agree with facts. 
 Without pedantry, that is, without accuracy, we can 
 make no way in any matter, least of all can we 
 make any way in this matter of Historical Geo- 
 graphy. For its very first lesson is that we must 
 not be startled at the use of a word in some sense 
 other than that to which we are most accustomed, 
 that we must not be startled at being told to use 
 one word when it comes far more naturally to us 
 to use another. At such teaching the natural man 
 revolts ; he asks what mere names matter ; if he 
 knows his facts, is not one name as good as another 
 to express them 1 Now there is in truth no such 
 thing as. a mere question of names; every question 
 of names is a question of facts ; for names are facts. 
 In one sense indeed it is perfectly true that one 
 name is as good as another; that is to say, at the 
 very beginning of language, if we can conceive a 
 beginning of language, it did not the least matter 
 by what sound an idea came to be expressed. But 
 when the sound and the idea have become connected 
 by long usage, when the sound at once suggests the 
 
ACCURACY OF NOMENCLATURE. 299 
 
 idea, when the two have become practically insepar- 
 able, an inaccurate use of a name implies an inac- 
 curate impression as to facts. When a certain name 
 as applied to a country conveys the idea of a certain 
 state of things in that country, to apply that name to 
 it at a time when that state of things did not exist, 
 at once conveys a false impression ; it suggests that 
 the state of things which the name implies existed 
 at a time when it did not exist. The inaccurate 
 use of the name does not necessarily imply abiding 
 ignorance on the part of the man who misuses it ; but 
 it does imply at least momentary forgetfulness on his 
 part, and it may lead to abiding misconception on 
 the part of those who hear him. The simplest in- 
 stance of all is the best ; to say, as we often hear, 
 that Ctesar landed in England does not necessarily 
 imply abiding ignorance of the great facts of the 
 history of our island on the part of him who says 
 it. But it does imply at least momentary forget- 
 fulness of them. He who says that Ceesar landed 
 in England cannot have present to his eye at that 
 moment all that is implied in the word England. 
 He cannot be conscious at that moment that, though 
 the land in which Caesar landed was the same land 
 as that in which Cnut and William landed, yet the 
 people who defended the land against C^sar were 
 not the same people as those who defended the land 
 against Cnut and William. He may himself be 
 perfectly able to correct his own slip in his next 
 moment of accurate thought ; but he may mean- 
 while have given an abiding false impression to 
 
300 GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
 
 some hearer who may not be able in the same way 
 to correct it. He may himself need only to unlearn 
 a careless habit; he may lay on others the duty 
 of unlearning an utterly confused view as to the 
 history of their country. Here the remedy is the 
 easiest in the world; there is nothing needed but 
 to use another word, not quite so usual, but quite 
 as intelligible. We have only to say Britain in- 
 stead of England. That is to say, we have only to 
 use the abiding geographical name that applies to 
 every part of the island at every time, instead of the 
 shifting political name which has at different times 
 applied to different parts of the island, but which 
 did not apply to any part of it at the time when 
 Csesar landed. Here then nothing is needed but a 
 little thought; but even that little thought implies 
 some slight effort, and that slight effort might be re- 
 warded with the name of pedant at the hands of some 
 one for whom even that slight effort is too much. 
 
 But in many cases of the kind far more effort is 
 needed than this. It is really a hard task to use some 
 geographical names, those of France, Burgundy, 
 Austria, pre-eminently among them, so as at once accu- 
 rately to set forth the state of things at the time of 
 which we are speaking, and at the same time to have a 
 chance of conveying the meaning that we wish, or any 
 meaning at all, to the mind of an ordinary hearer. 
 The only thing is to educate the ordinary hearer, to 
 make him unlearn what is false and learn what is 
 true, till the accurate use of words conveys to him a 
 meaning, and that the right meaning. For we cannot 
 
PRACTICAL EFFECT OF NAMES. 301 
 
 alter the names to please him. In altering the names 
 we should be sinning against the facts ; we should be 
 giving him not bread but a stone ; we should be 
 telling him the thing that is not, because he is not yet 
 ready fully to take in the thing that is. In other 
 words, if history, past or present, is to be understood, 
 nothing must be more carefully studied than Historical 
 Geography. Now we might almost define Historical 
 Geography to be the knowledge of the names which 
 different parts of the earth's surface bore at different 
 times. If imder knowledge of the names we may 
 reckon knowledge of the ways in which the names 
 came to be borne, the definition will do thoroughly 
 well. Than the neglect of Historical Geography, than 
 the lax and inaccurate use of the names of countries 
 and nations, there has been no more fertile source of 
 historical error. Nor is this all ; the lax and careless 
 use of names constantly leads to the most mischievous 
 misunderstandings of the most important questions of 
 the present; the misuse of a name has even helped to 
 prolong the bondage of nations. No one can doubt 
 that the use, careless or designed, of the word TurTcey 
 to express the lands under bondage to the Turk has 
 done much to blind men's eyes and to deaden their 
 natural feelings in the great strife for the deliverance 
 of South-eastern Europe from its oppressors. As long 
 as that name is used, so long will men unconsciously 
 think that the Turks are to Turkey as the English 
 are to England or the French to France. Learn to 
 speak, as history and fact require us to speak, not of 
 a Turkey which has no being, but of enslaved Greece, 
 
302 GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
 
 enslaved Bulgaria, enslaved Servia, and we have 
 taken one step, a step by no means to be scorned, 
 towards the reunion of the enslaved lands to free 
 Greece, free Bulgaria, free Servia. Those who are 
 more nearly concerned know the force of a name. On 
 Greek lips Epeiros and the other enslaved Greek 
 lands are never called TovpKia ; they are ^ SovX)] 
 
 'EXXay. 
 
 Perhaps no geographical names are more likely to 
 lead astray than such familiar names as France and 
 Austria. Francia in Latin is a very old name, much 
 older than Anglia; but it is a speaking fact that it 
 has never settled down as the received name of the 
 land so thoroughly as Anglia has. I fancy that no 
 classical purist would be so precise as to refuse to 
 speak of Anglia, while any one writing in Latin 
 would prefer Gallia to Francia, unless he had to 
 bring in the King's style, or in some pointed way to 
 distinguish Francia from some other land. This vague 
 feeling is an instructive expression of the real differ- 
 ence between the history of Gaul and the history of 
 Britain. A large part of Gaul never became Francia, 
 except in a sense in which Francia takes in a great 
 deal besides Gaul. No part of Gaul ever became 
 Francia in the same sense in which a great part of 
 Britain became Anglia. For there is no part of Gaul 
 in which a Frankish people, keeping the Frankish 
 tongue, really became the folk of the land. We 
 may translate Anglia by England from the first 
 moment that the word Anglia is used ; it would be 
 very dangerous to translate Francia by France, at 
 
FRANCE AND A USTRIA. 303 
 
 any time before the end of the ninth century. We 
 should make strange havoc of our meaning if we used 
 the word France to translate either the Francia of 
 Claudian, the Francia of Einhard, or the ^payyla of 
 Constantine PorphyrogennStos. But when France in 
 the modern sense, the duchy and kingdom of Paris, 
 sets out on her career of aggrandisement, it is the 
 right thing to extend the use of the name with every 
 extension of the power. As to the name of Austria, 
 besides other uses of the name which have nothing to 
 do with the Eastern Mark of Germany against the 
 Magyar, the name, as applied to that stiU existing 
 archduchy, has an use exactly opposite to the use of 
 the name France. As it is needful to extend the use of 
 the name France with every extension of the French 
 power, it is equally needful not to extend the name 
 Austria with every extension of the present Austrian 
 power. For every land that came under the dominion 
 of the French king was formally incorporated with the 
 French kingdom, and every such land sooner or later 
 became French really as well as formally. But every 
 land that came under the dominion of the Austrian 
 archduke was not formally incorporated with the Aus- 
 trian archduchy, nor have the mass of such lands ever 
 become Austrian in any practical sense. Lyons, not 
 French before Philip the Fair, has been French ever 
 since. We must shape our language so as to express 
 both facts. But Venice and Eagusa have never been 
 Austrian, though Venice once formed, and Eagusa still 
 forms, part of the dominions of the sovereign of Austria. 
 We must shape our language so as to express those 
 
304 GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
 
 facts also. Of two advancing powers, each of which 
 has annexed a crowd of other lands, one has really- 
 made its annexed lands part of itself ; the other has 
 failed to do so. Look at the map ; there is now no 
 special local France; France is the aggregate of all 
 the departments from the North to the Low Pyrenees ; 
 the word has no other meaning, either formal or 
 popular. But Austria is still a word of doubtful 
 meaning. There is still an archduchy of Austria with 
 ascertained boundaries, which forms but a small part 
 of the dominions of the archduke to whom it still 
 gives a title. There is also a so-called Empire of 
 Austria, greater, we may suppose, than the arch- 
 duchy, but which at any rate does not take in all the 
 dominions of the so-called Emperor. For assuredly it 
 does not take in the kingdom of Hungary and its 
 'partes annexx. When, speaking of the present day, 
 we apply the name France to aU the European terri- 
 tories of the sovereign or the commonwealth of 
 France, we are expressing a pohtical and historical 
 truth. It is as essential to accuracy so to apply the 
 name now as it is to apply it otherwise in speaking 
 of times three or four hundred years back. But if, as 
 people often carelessly do, we apply the name Austria 
 to all the possessions of the sovereign of Austria, we 
 are expressing a political and historical falsehood. It 
 is as essential to accuracy in speaking of present times 
 as it is in speaking of times three or four hundred 
 years back, so to shape our language as to express 
 the very important political fact that, while all lands 
 over which French rule has been spread have become 
 
OLD AND NEW MAPS. 305 
 
 boih formally and practically French, all lands over 
 which Austrian rule has been spread have not either 
 formally or practically become Austrian. 
 
 Thus far we have been dealing with cases of 
 bondage to the modern map. Nowadays there is no 
 excuse for bondage to the modern map. It was 
 otherwise when I was young. We used then to 
 have the "Ancient" and the "Modern Atlas," and 
 nothing between them. The "Ancient" atlas was 
 to do for all " classical " times ; the divisions of the 
 world in the days of Xerxes, of Alexander, and of 
 Trajan — but I am not quite sure whether Trajan is 
 "classical"- — were thought to have been exactly the 
 same. The "modern" Atlas was to show the state 
 of things as it was at that moment, a state of things 
 which has happily changed a good deal since that 
 moment. There was indeed a map of "France in 
 provinces" as well as of "France in departments," and 
 I know one atlas which went so far as to show both 
 the divisions of Europe as they stood at the beginning 
 of the French Eevolution and the divisions of Europe 
 as they stood in 1815. But with me at least the com- 
 parison of these maps led only to the most helpless 
 puzzledom. Any one who has ever tried to make 
 historical maps knows the problem of problems, the 
 problem from which, as far as our own day is con- 
 cerned, we were relieved bv the events of 1866. 
 How shall I draw a map which shall clearly show 
 the extent of the Roman Empire or of the German 
 Confederation, and at the same time clearly show 
 the extent of the dominions of the sovereigns of 
 
306 GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
 
 Austria and Prassia, both witHn the Empire or 
 Confederation and without it 1 It is excessively hard 
 to mark both without confusion. Now among the 
 maps of my youth, those which professed to show 
 the older state of things marked the extent of the 
 Roman Empire, perhaps rather of the Kingdom of 
 Germany, plainly enough. But will it be believed 
 that in those maps there was no Austria marked at 
 all, while there was a very visible kingdom of 
 Hungary, and that no Prussia was marked save a 
 little one bordering on the Frisches Haff and Kurisches 
 Saff'^. There was not a hint that the Kings of 
 Hungary and Prussia held any territories within the 
 bounds of Germany. Why or how should it be hinted 1 
 That the Kings of Hungary and Prussia, as well as 
 the Kings of Great Britain, Denmark, and Sweden, 
 were also princes of the Empire, holding German 
 lands, was a fact of politics, not a fact of geography. 
 The accident that the King of Prussia was also 
 Elector of Brandenburg no more made Brandenburg 
 part of Prussia than the accident that the King of 
 Great Britain was also Elector of Hannover made 
 Hannover part of Great Britain. In a map of Europe 
 which showed Germany as a whole, and did not profess 
 to go into its internal divisions, there was no need to 
 show a separate Austria any more than to show a 
 separate Eeuss-Schleiz. Only, when I tried a httle 
 eighteenth century history, my map puzzled me a 
 good deal. I could make nothing of a King of Prussia 
 whose kingdom lay quite away from Germany, but 
 who seemed to have so much to do in the middle 
 
CHANGES OF 1815. 307 
 
 of Germany and to be so very much at home there. 
 I am bound to say that with my map I had no 
 difficulty as to Maria Theresa being Queen of Hun- 
 gary; my difficulty was to understand about the 
 Queen of Hungary being so many things besides. 
 But remember that the maps that led me thus 
 astray were, as regarded Germany, formally quite 
 accurate ; it was otherwise when they represented 
 Italy as all one thing. For Germany was a political 
 whole, though the connexion of its parts might be 
 very loose ; Italy was a mere geographical expression, 
 laxly used to express several kingdoms, duchies, 
 and commonwealths which did not form any political 
 whole. Nor, when I turned to the map of 1815, 
 did I get any more help towards understanding the 
 newer state of things. The great Germany of the 
 former map had vanished. A great part of it seemed 
 to have been joined to an enlarged Prussia, which 
 now lay in two great pieces, one of which touched 
 France. The impression conveyed was that Prussia 
 had, besides any doings in Poland, conquered a large 
 piece of Germany. On the other hand, Hungary 
 was gone; it seemed to have changed its name to 
 Austria, and to have added great pieces of Poland, 
 Germany, and Italy, to say nothing of its running 
 in a wonderful way down the east coast of the 
 Hadriatic. Nobody then knew much of these last 
 lands, and it might be hard to find a map of the 
 exact year 1813, which should show that dream 
 of oppressed right which for that moment was a 
 fact, a free Slavonic Cattaro, haven and capital of 
 
 X 2 
 
308 GEOGBAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
 
 Tzemagora. As for Germany, the new map some- 
 times confined the name to those parts of Germany 
 which had not been moved within the Prussian or 
 Hungarian border ; sometimes the name Germany 
 ran across the lands which were also marked Prussia 
 and Austria, in a way that was not a little puzzling. 
 As for times before 1789 we were left to shift as we 
 could. I once indeed saw a map marked " Europe 
 in a period intermediate between Ancient and 
 Modern." As far as I remember, it did not repre- 
 sent any period exactly, but it perhaps came nearer 
 to the days of Charles the Great than to any other. 
 In those days we were left to find out what we 
 could about the territories of Burgundian dukes and 
 Angevin kings. As for the lands between the 
 Hadriatic and the Euxine, let me tell you of a little 
 book which I was happily set to read in the year 
 1836. This was "The History of the Overthrow of 
 the Roman Empire, and the Foundation of the prin- 
 cipal European States," by William Cooke Taylor, 
 LL.D. of Dublin. The overthrow of the Eoman 
 Empire there spoken of was that which was finished, 
 not in 476 but in 1453. By this time Dr. Taylor 
 has most likely gone the way of historians great and 
 small, as described by Mr. Pattison. But it may be 
 that some of you are not the worse for the fact that, 
 eight-and-forty years ago, some years before Mr. 
 Finlay had written anything, I learned from him 
 that there was a Roman Empire of the East. 
 
 In these times no one need go through these 
 difficulties of an elder day. The facts of his- 
 
DR. W. G. TAYLOR. 309 
 
 torical geography are now open to all ; they may be 
 learned by the same processes of study as other 
 facts ; and, if the study has some difficulties special 
 to itself, the same may be said of any other branch 
 of study. I wish only to insist on its pursuit as 
 one of the most essential parts of our general work. 
 It ought to be taught from the beginning, so that there 
 need be no painful unlearning of the modern map. 
 Yet sometimes there is a painful unlearning needed 
 the other way. We have lately heard a good deal 
 of a land called Soudan — the Soudan; why it has 
 the article I know no more than why the newspapers 
 always talk of the Tyrol, or why, when a land that 
 I knew very well as Grim or Crim Tartary suddenly 
 became famous thirty years ago, the newspapers 
 always spoke of it as " the Crimea ^." When I heard 
 of Soudan as being somewhere near the Eed Sea, 
 I was as puzzled as if I had heard of Germany being 
 somewhere on the Euxine. In the maps of my youth 
 " Soudan or Nigritia " lay a long way to the west, 
 nearer certainly to the Atlantic than to the Red Sea. 
 Soudan to be sure does not, as Crim does, lie within 
 my immediate range of work, and I have found no 
 one to tell me how the name shifted in this sort. 
 But I envied those who had no difficulties about the 
 matter, those who had nothing to unlearn. To say 
 the least, it saved trouble never to have heard of 
 Soudan before 1884, as it certainly saved many 
 people a great deal of trouble never to have heard 
 of the Tauric Cherson^sos before 1854. 
 
 ^ In Gibbon it is " Crimea " without the article. 
 
310 GEOaRAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
 
 I have spoken of bondage to the modern map ; 
 but that is not the lowest form of bondage. There 
 are some parts of the world, some parts of our own 
 island, in which mastery of the modem map is all 
 that is needed to get rid of error. The history of 
 Strathclyde, Cumberland, all that part of Britain, by 
 whatever name we call it, is at all times puzzling 
 enough, and it might have better fallen in with any 
 notion of natural boundaries, if Lancashire — ^that 
 modern shire of which Domesday knows nothing — 
 had not reached beyond the sandy estuary of More- 
 cambe Bay. But, as a matter of fact, it does so 
 reach ; yet it is hard to convince men's minds of 
 the fact; it is hard to convince them that a large 
 part of the coast of Winandermere is in the same 
 county as Manchester. It is more puzzling to guess 
 why a large part of West Somerset is commonly 
 conceived to be Devonshire ; against that danger 
 the English Chronicler long ago put forth an ex- 
 press warning. He marks Porlock, the scene of 
 Harold's landing, as lying on the borders of Devon- 
 shire and Somerset. Yet I have before now read in 
 a book that the Barle is the best trout-stream in 
 Devonshire, though assuredly every inch of the 
 course of the Barle lies in Somerset. But these are 
 lesser difficulties compared with the crowning 
 difficulty of persuading mankind that Mont Blanc 
 is not in Switzerland. It is hard to see the origin 
 of this superstition, except on the doctrine which 
 I believe some seriously hold, that, wherever Alps 
 are, there is Switzerland. But the land of the Old 
 
SWITZERLAND. 311 
 
 League of High Germany, and of those allies 
 and subjects, German, Burgundian, and Italian, who 
 have in later times been admitted to share in their 
 Confederation, is the chosen stronghold of error in 
 this whole matter. The real history of the land, its 
 folk and its name, is singular enough. That parts of 
 the three Imperial kingdoms should detach themselves 
 from the general mass of each, to form for all political 
 purposes a real artificial nation, but without any one 
 of the three dropping its natural tongue — that the 
 body thus gradually formed should remain for ages 
 without any formal collective name — that the name 
 of one member, and by no means the greatest 
 member, should become the popular name of the 
 whole body, but that it should not be taken into 
 formal use till the present century — all this is 
 strange enough in itself But the story, if strange, 
 is simple ; it is easy to be understood, if only people 
 win remember that the old German lands and towns, 
 first three, then eight, then thirteen, are the kernel 
 of the League, and that its Eomance members are 
 allies and subjects who have been raised to Confe- 
 derate rank. The name of the one land of Schwyz 
 had, even in Philip of Comines' time, come to be 
 applied in popular use to the whole League ; but it 
 never found a place in the formal style of the Con- 
 federation till 1803. Yet no errors are harder to 
 get rid of than the notions that there has been from 
 the beginning of things a Swiss people, occupying 
 seemingly the present extent of the Swiss Confedera- 
 tion — that the German people of the Three Lands had 
 
312 GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
 
 something to do with the Helvetii of C^sar — that 
 the straggle against the dukes of Austria was in all its 
 stages a struggle against the Empire. Alas for those 
 warriors of Morgarten whom King Lewis so warmly- 
 thanked for the blow dealt against the Austrian 
 rebel. I spoke in an earlier lecture of Mr. James 
 Fergusson's wonderful discourse on " Swiss architec- 
 ture," and some may remember Dean Stanley's idea 
 that the legendary Lucius, by becoming Bishop of 
 Curia Esetorum, Chur of the Grey League, in the 
 second century a.d., thereby became a "Swiss 
 bishop." In that borderland of the Imperial king- 
 doms, that schoolroom of Europe which some 
 strangely call its playground, I believe geography 
 is formally forbidden. At least I have heard of an 
 Oxford man on a Swiss journey accompanied by 
 other Oxford men, who at some stage put the 
 very natural question what canton he was in. His 
 companions jeered at the question. What had 
 Switzerland to do with cantons "? In Switzerland he 
 should not have been thinking about cantons ; he 
 should have been thinking only about cols and horns, 
 and the best way of breaking his neck among them. 
 
 I started from the map, from the study of geo- 
 graphy on the map, and from that I have wandered 
 to the more living study of geography on the very 
 soil of the lands aud cities whose history we are 
 studying. This is that second aspect of geography 
 as applied to history of which I spoke at the begin- 
 ning. For my own part, it has never seemed to me 
 to be strange, I have never travelled with com- 
 
VIEW FROM A PYRE NEE. 313 
 
 panions to whom it seemed to be strange, to make it 
 my first business to know where I was, in what 
 canton or other division, and to make out all that 
 one could make out as to the physical look of that 
 canton or other division, and the light which that 
 physical look throws on its history. I am not 
 sure that going to the top of an Alp is the best 
 way to find out. I once tried a Pyrenee — Orosius 
 will justify the singular number ; I went up in 
 the same state of mind as the last Philip when 
 he climbed H^mus — Livy seems to look on Hasmus 
 as a single peak — in the hope of seeing the Euxine 
 and the Hadriatic at once, and thereby of doing 
 great things in the way of planning campaigns. 
 So I went up my Pyrenee, not with any purpose 
 of planning campaigns, but in the hope of seeing 
 Aquitaine, and perhaps Septimania, spread like a 
 map at my feet, of seeing Garonne wandering 
 hither and thither, perhaps — as Mr. Green saw 
 Runnymede from Ch^teau-Gaillard — of looking at 
 Toulouse and Bordeaux at a single glance. King 
 Philip came down disappointed from his Haemus, 
 and I came down disappointed from my Pyrenee. 
 I had seen nothing and learned nothing; I came 
 down with no more knowledge of the geography of 
 Southern Gaul than I took up. But that was 
 because I had gone too high. From a moderate 
 height, from the top of Cotswold or Mendip, from 
 the castle-hUl of Carlisle, the castle-hUl of Stirling, 
 and the castle-hill of Domfront, from the more famous 
 heights of Athens and of Corinth, there you may 
 
314 GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
 
 indeed learn history. I would almost say that, with- 
 out such climbings as these, you cannot fully learn 
 history. Beyond doubt the finished historian must 
 be a traveller; he must see with his own eyes the 
 true look of a wide land ; he must see too with his 
 eyes the very spots where great events happened ; 
 he must mark the lie of a city, and take in, as 
 far as a non-technical eye can, all that is special 
 about a battle-field. Yet I have been asked within 
 the last few years at Exeter, at Norwich, and at 
 Lincoln, whether I had ever seen those cities be- 
 fore. I wondered a little that I was not asked 
 the last time I was at Battle whether I had ever 
 been there before ; and I do remember a reviewer 
 who gave me credit for unusual energy in having 
 ever taken the trouble to go thither. And I 
 have read a very learned German discourse on 
 the topography of Kavenna, accompanied by many 
 maps and fully discussing many points, written by 
 a professor who had never set his eyes on the 
 mosaics of Saint ApoUinaris or on the cupola under 
 which Theodoric once lay. But anyhow in holding 
 that, thoroughly to understand a land or a place, 
 you must see it with your own eyes, I have good 
 companions. Had not Lord Macaulay seen Deny'? 
 did not Asser ages before him walk along the height 
 of Ashdown the better to tell of Alfred's day of 
 victory 1 And I may add that only this last summer 
 the last new made fellow of All Souls rode away 
 from my house on his three wheels to get up the 
 battle of Lansdown on the spot. You cannot, so 
 
PALERMO. 315 
 
 I at least have found it, fully take in the history 
 of the world, its lands and its cities, except by 
 working at each historic spot on the spot itself. 
 
 Among those spots there are some whose interest 
 is oecumenical. In them the whole world, at least 
 the whole world of Aryan Europe, lies before 
 you as in a figure. The history of creeds and 
 tongues and races rises more clearly before our 
 sight, as we tread the Marble Way of Palermo, 
 as we think how tall ships once rode at anchor 
 on either side of us, as we pass from the haven 
 where the men of Canaan first made their home, 
 by the palace of the Emirs to the palace of the 
 Kings, to the church which holds the dust of the 
 Wonder of the World, to the arch which records 
 the victories of the last Augustus who planted the 
 cross of Christendom and the eagle of Eome on the 
 shores which had seen the conquests of AgathoklSs, 
 of Eegulus, and of Roger. From the tomb of Fred- 
 erick and the trophies of Charles we may go back 
 to the noblest centre that any city of man can 
 show ; under the shelter of the four guardian virgins, 
 we look up to the mountains on three sides of us, 
 to the mid sea of Europe on the fourth ; we look 
 up to the height on which the Thunderbolt of Car- 
 thage, Hamilkar Barak himself, kept his camp where 
 men now go to do homage to Saint Rosalia ; we 
 look up to the western height, to the Royal Mount 
 which William the Good crowned with his wondrous 
 minster; we cast our eyes over the plain where 
 Metellus won his spoil of Punic elephants, to the 
 
316 GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
 
 hill down whose slopes marched Garibaldi and his 
 Thousand. The pages of the whole world's history- 
 are opened to us within the walls of the city thrice 
 won for Europe, once won for Christendom, by the 
 Epeirot, the Eoman, and the Norman ; the rival na- 
 tions of the earth seem gathered in their meeting- 
 place within the Happy City of the Threefold 
 Tongue. There we see the great cycles of man's 
 history alive before us ; we see the Byzantine Greek, 
 the African Saracen, carrying on the memory and 
 the work of the colonists of old HeUas and old 
 Phoenicia, till they could rest for a while from the 
 eternal strife of Aryan and Semitic man, till each 
 could flourish unharmed after his own fashion beneath 
 the equal sceptre of kings of Teutonic blood and 
 Boman speech. 
 
 Or again, would we see a spot where the whole 
 artistic history of the world — and, first and fore- 
 most, the art of the great days of transition — is 
 stamped for ever on the stones of a single building 1 
 We shall find it in a land to which, when our Pro- 
 fessor of" Classical" Archaeology comes, I would send 
 him as his first errand, that he may there learn a 
 yearning to cast away the ungracious adjective which 
 may go far to mar his usefulness. Let him seek the 
 eastern shore of Hadria, let him stand in the ever- 
 lasting court of Jovius, and there let him ask him- 
 self whether he has not come by an easy path from 
 Segesta to Psestum, from Psestum to Athens, from 
 Athens to Rome, from Eome to Spalato. And let 
 him ask himself again whether he can withstand the 
 
SPALATO. 317 
 
 call which bids him go yet further on his journey 
 — the call which bids him again, not to the Eome 
 of Trajan but to the Eome of Constantine, and 
 which calls him on from Rome by Eavenna, Lucca, 
 Pisa, by Schaffhausen and Toulouse and Durham and 
 Oakham, till he is held firm in the gentle grasp of 
 the saint of Witham and Lincoln, tiU he finds himself 
 hurried along the path which will leave him only 
 under the vault of our own Divinity School, or 
 beside that tall pillar by the staircase at Christ 
 Church on which the latest times of all have laid 
 so strange a burthen. On that spot, between those 
 ranges of arches, the most epoch-making of the 
 works of the builder's art, our thoughts go back 
 from the house that became a city to the city that 
 became a house ; they go back from the home of 
 Diocletian by the shore to the home of Eomulus 
 by the river's bank ; they pass back to the days 
 when the lUyrian coast became Eome's pathway 
 to Eastern influence and Eastern dominion, till she 
 herself moved from the seven hills by the Tiber 
 to the seven hills by the Bosporos. We see the 
 fleets of the Eastern Eome sail from the haven of 
 Long Salona to win back the elder Eome to the 
 obedience of her own Augustus. We pass on to 
 the days of invasion when Salona became heaps 
 and the house of Jovius became a city of refuge ; 
 we pass on by Servian kings and Venetian doges, 
 till, sad ending in such a line of memories, last 
 link of base metal in a golden chain, we turn away 
 with shame and sorrow from the tablet which pro- 
 
318 GEOGBAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
 
 claims the rule of the stranger, the oppressor, the 
 impostor — the tablet which tells how a man who 
 had held the foremost place on earth, Teutonic king 
 and Roman Caesar, he who had been the last to 
 don the purple of Augustus and to wear the diadem 
 of Jovius, could sink to be described in the very- 
 land and home of so great a predecessor as Austrim 
 Imperator et Dalmatise Bex. 
 
 Or do we seek for earlier memories '? Pass down 
 the shore of Hadria, thread the channels between 
 its islands and peninsulas, pass by a thousand spots 
 each of which has its tale which I may find other 
 days for telling ; pass on into the seas of Greece her- 
 self, land by the new Corinth, make your way by the 
 seven columns of the old, columns already ancient 
 in the days of Timoleon, not wholly new perhaps 
 in the days of Periandros — cHmb the " cloud-capped 
 akropolis," with all its memories, all its rehcs, from 
 the primaeval wall to the Turkish mosque ; there 
 indeed we may learn history as before we never 
 learned it ; look eastward over the gulf where lie 
 Aigina and Salamis ; it is feeble reading in a book 
 how the elder naval power grudged the rising great- 
 ness of the younger. To the men who climbed the 
 hill of Corinth the growth of the rival city was 
 not a tale of books, of letters, of telegrams ; from 
 the hill of Corinth they could on a bright day see 
 the very hiU of Athens ; they knew the presence, 
 the nearness, of their rival, not only by the hearing 
 of the ear, but by the sight of their own eyes. 
 Do we then wonder that when the day of vengeance 
 
ATHENS AND CORINTH. 319 
 
 came, Corintli was fiercer against a foe whose enmity 
 was thus ever present, than Sparta who had felt 
 the might of Athens on the waves, who knew well 
 the prick of her sting and scourge at Pylos, but 
 who did not on the banks of Eurotas see daily 
 with her bodily sight that danger was making ready 
 for her by the banks of K^phisos 1 Or climb the 
 hUl of Athens itself; there I must indeed put rein 
 on ten thousand memories, on ten thousand points 
 of deathless history, every one of which becomes 
 ten thousand times more living as we see them 
 written for ever on the everlasting page of the 
 soil, the hills, the sea which men reckoned as having 
 itself become a part of the Attic soU. But there we 
 may learn one lesson above all, a lesson which Ave 
 may learn in a manner on the map or on the printed 
 page, but which can never come home to us on the 
 map or the printed page as it comes home to us 
 when we look out from the rock of Athen6 upon 
 the loftier hills which gird it round. We there 
 learn how great and wonderful, how contrary to 
 all Greek instincts, was that revolution of early 
 days which made Attica a single whole, which 
 made Athens the political home of a greater number 
 of free and equal citizens than any other Greek 
 commonwealth, the pohtical home of a number of 
 free and equal citizens as great as could discharge 
 the duties of free and equal citizenship in their 
 own persons. We look out, and we see, hemmed 
 in with hiQs, the land which, according to Greek 
 ideas, would be the natural territory for the one 
 
320 GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
 
 city of Athens. We see not tlie land of Maratli6n 
 and the land of Eleusis ; they are cut off from 
 US ; we feel that a day must have been when they 
 ■were as distinct from Athens as Plataia and Orcho- 
 menos were from Thebes ; and we the more wonder 
 at the wisdom of the primitive lawgiver who ruled 
 that Marath6n and Eleusis should not be to Athens 
 as Plataia and Orchomenos were to Thebes, the 
 wisdom which gave the world, not a loosely-boimd 
 confederation of Attica, but the one commonwealth 
 of Athens. 
 
 Let us again flit back to the mid peninsula 
 of Europe ; climb the hill of Brescia, that outlying 
 spur of the vast Alpine wall which seems specially 
 placed there as the historian's gazing-place. Look out 
 on the plain of Lombardy ; see the tall slender 
 towers rising on every side, towers each of them 
 marking the whereabouts of a city which once was 
 a commonwealth as free as any commonwealth of 
 the elder land of freedom. Why was their fame 
 only for a moment 1 Why was not Milan as Athens 'I 
 Why was the rule of Visconti more abiding and 
 more wide-spread than the rule of Peisistratos 1 
 The reasons are many, but one above all is borne 
 in upon us by the outlook from the Brescian height. 
 The cities of Greece stand each on its hiU, in its 
 valley, on its peninsula or island, with the separate 
 territory of each marked by the hand of nature. The 
 cities of Lombardy seem dotted here and there by 
 the hand of chance ; the territory of each might 
 seem to end as naturally at one point as at another. 
 
GREECE AXD ITALY. 321 
 
 Doubtless there were reasons for the site of each 
 city, for the extent of its territory, but they are 
 not such obvious and abiding reasons as those which 
 placed Athens on a lowlier hill and Corinth on a 
 loftier, and which bade Aigina float on the waves of 
 the gulf that lay between them. And then, to crown 
 pur stvidy of the world's history, go to the arx of 
 Tusculum; from that primseval height look down 
 on the younger city that supplanted the ancient 
 head of Latium. There indeed we grasp the truth, 
 the central truth of all history, the truth that the 
 whole fate of the world of which we are a part was 
 ruled by the physical fact that certain of the hills 
 of Latium were nearer together, lower in height, 
 and nearer to the river's brink, than their fellows. 
 Tusculum on her one lofty hill could never become 
 the head of the world ; Eome, on her seven lowly 
 hills, could and did. The men on the height of 
 Tusculum might have confederates ; they might 
 have enemies ; they had not neighbours with whom 
 the only choice was union closer than confederation 
 or warfare more deadly and more unceasing than 
 ordinary enmity. The Latin of the Palatine, the 
 Sabine of the Capitol, learned to change the meeting- 
 place of fight into the meeting-place of council; 
 they became one city, one power ; the work of union 
 went on ; hill after hill, land after land, was called 
 into equal fellowship ; Latium, Italy, the whole 
 Mediterranean world, were merged in one state, we 
 might say, in one city, a city whose walls sprang 
 lightly over mountains and seas, and kept one 
 
 y 
 
322 OEOORAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
 
 bastion at Nisibis and another at Lugubalium. What 
 Tusculum conld not be, what Athens could not be, 
 Eome was ; it was so because the very shape of 
 the earth's surface ruled that so it should be. 
 
 It is hard to stop ; but the time would fail to teU 
 of all the lands, of all the cities, in Greece and Italy, 
 in Burgundy and Aquitaine and France and Germany, 
 in the island that is our own, in the Norman land that 
 feels all but our own, each of which has its tale to tell, 
 a tale which can be heard in its fulness only on the spot 
 which is its home. Names and memories press on me ; 
 but I must bid them stand aside. But there is one 
 land, a land of which I have spoken earlier in this 
 lecture, where yearly i-n the spring-tide, in the last 
 days of April or the first days of May, a sight may be 
 seen such as can be looked on nowhere else on earth. 
 I must be the only man here who from the Athenian 
 akropolis has looked on the Athenian D^mos in his 
 own person, and heard the voice of a nation calling for 
 its headship to be entrusted to the worthiest of its sons. 
 That I saw and heard on the day when Hellas ruled 
 that Constantine Kanar^s should grasp the helm of 
 Hellas. Demos was indeed there with his old voice 
 and his old power, but he was not in his old seat ; he 
 was not marshalled in his old order, and the voice 
 that he uttered had to wait for an answer from the 
 lips of a foreign king. But go, on the fitting spring- 
 tide morning, to the meeting-place of Glarus or 
 Unterwalden, to the market place of Trogen on its hill, 
 to the plain of Altdorf between its mountains. There 
 you may see something nearer to us than the D^mos 
 
THE LANDESGEMEINDEN. 323 
 
 of Athens ; you may see the Germans of Tacitus face 
 to face. On the shore of the lake of the Four 
 Cantons, with the view shut in by the mighty mass 
 of Saint Gotthard, we learn geography and history 
 past and present at one stroke. As we see the free- 
 men of Uri gathered to exercise in their own persons 
 the powers that greater commonwealths and king- 
 doms have to place in the hands of a chosen few, we 
 learn many things, and, not least, we learn the place 
 of the powers of nature in the political world. The 
 lowly heights by the Tiber ruled that universal 
 dominion should fall to the lot of Eome ; the heaven- 
 reaching heights by the Eeuss ruled that abiding 
 freedom should fall to the lot of Uri. To the 
 geologist, to the Alpine climber, the final cause of 
 Alps will doubtless seem different. One who has twice 
 seen the Landesgemeinde of Uri may be pardoned 
 if he deems that the final cause of the everlasting 
 mountains is that they may stand as the guardian 
 walls of an everlasting commonwealth. 
 
 And now I have done for a season. I have 
 gone through my platform for this first term, 
 fairly thoroughly I hope, as far at least as my 
 own will and my own efforts have been concerned. 
 And I have heartily to thank the faithful ones, the 
 three hundred who lapped and did not draw back, 
 who have had the strength to abide with me, week 
 by week, through a somewhat lengthy course. And 
 in the summer term of next year, I trust, if we 
 live and prosper, that some at least of you will 
 
 Y 2 
 
324 GEOOEAPUY AND TRAY EL. 
 
 be found active enovigh, even in that busy and 
 sportive season, to follow me through another 
 course, somewhat more solid, it may be, than this, 
 on the main periods of European history. Mean- 
 while in Hilary term — the name calls up pleasant 
 memories of Poitiers on its peninsula — I trust to go 
 on with more solid work still, with my reading of 
 Gregory of Tours. Stieh is the will, and T think it a 
 wise one, of the select few who have followed me 
 steadily through three books of his History of the 
 Franks. They ask for more; they think it well to go 
 on further with his great story rather than as yet to 
 make any fresh adventures into other fields. To 
 those select few I must pay all honour and all 
 thanks ; but I could wish that the number of the 
 gathering had been largei". It is not for my own 
 sake that I wish it, for our little meetings have been 
 very pleasant, and I hope not unprofitable, to the 
 professor himself certainly not so. I have had in my 
 class men to whom it is an honour to lecture, men 
 before whom one feels it somewhat dangerous to 
 lecture, men who are already masters of history or 
 of language, men therefore who know so much 
 that they are fully aware that they have still 
 something to learn. And I have had also younger 
 men in whom is the right spirit and the true zeal, 
 men who have come within the fold themselves and 
 who are eager to bring others with them. But I 
 should like to enlarge both classes. To the masters 
 of history I should be glad to add some of its oflScial 
 teachers. Times pass so fast, modern progress is so 
 
HCUEME OF LECTURES. 325 
 
 supernatural, that it may be that forty years' work 
 in iny generation may come to less fruit than half-a- 
 dozen years' work in the present ; only on the other 
 hand, there are some of the paeseut generation, and 
 those not the meanest of its children, who certainly 
 think otherwise. And to my younger hearers — I think 
 I have some — I would offer a repeated, even a ten 
 thousandth, voice of warning. Once more then, be not 
 led astray; follow not after shadows; do not attempt 
 the building without the foundation. If any man, 
 whoever he may be, tempts you to build after that 
 fashion, if he bids you rush off to the study of the 
 later times before yovi have mastered the earlier ones, 
 you have your answer. A choice is not denied you ; 
 you are not compelled to fly off at once to some 
 fourth period, some fifth period, some seventy-seventh 
 period, which may perhaps contain the exact boun- 
 daries of the borough of Mile-End Old Town. Believe 
 me that your study of the Palaipolis of Mile-End 
 will not unfitly begin with the aVru of Athens and its 
 surrounding ^nfi.oi. It may go on through Gaulish 
 civitates, Old-English marks, Burgundian cominunes, 
 South-Swabian gemeinden. The cite and ville of 
 Limoges, the borough and foreign of Walsall, the 
 Englishry, "Welshry, and foreignry of Kidwelly, may 
 haply help towards mastering the last problem 
 in municipal and parliamentary life. I have seen 
 some bits of very modern history, at home and 
 abroad, in the very working ; I have always found 
 that I understood them the better, by tracing 
 them, like Finlay, back to the very beginning. If 
 
326 GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL. 
 
 then you wish really to know anything of the 
 later times themselves, begin at the beginning. 
 And, as a sure way of beginning as near the be- 
 ginning as circumstances will let you, come and 
 hearken to the Bishop of Tours, the Senator of 
 Auvergne. Hearken to no voice that would bid 
 you do otherwise. If the voice comes in any shape 
 that you may not like to contradict in your own 
 name, contradict it in mine. I venture to think 
 that my experience may possibly be the longer and 
 deeper of the two. And I do not stand alone. I 
 am strengthened by the advice and encouragement of 
 men who have a right to speak, men who, having 
 reaUy climbed the heights of learning, have no in- 
 terest in shallowness, no lingering love for easy 
 studies, men whose work has lain in later periods 
 than mine, who assuredly do not undervalue the 
 work of their own lives, but who feel that that 
 work is something distinct from ordinary academic 
 study, who feel with me that, for laying the founda- 
 tions, for disciplining the mind, their own later 
 periods are not so well suited as the earlier times. 
 Men like these bid me to go on as I have begun, to 
 do all that one man can do to stop the torrent, and 
 to strive to win back even a few to a path that may 
 more surely lead to the end that is sought. Believe 
 me then ; believe no man who says otherwise. Begin 
 at the beginning ; lay the foundation ; ear the ground ; 
 the rest will follow. Take the proffered help of one 
 who believes that he can guide you, because he has 
 walked the path himself ; one whose official duty it 
 
BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING. 327 
 
 is to guide yoTi along it, if only you will walk with 
 him. A professor is not a teacher for Examinations; 
 he has nothing directly to do with Examinations ; 
 but his teaching will at least not hinder you for 
 Examinations. You can, if you will, choose the first 
 period rather than the hundredth. Choose it, and 
 accept my help in mastering it. I cannot promise 
 you classes and fellowships ; but I do not think that 
 my teaching will stand in the way of them. And at 
 any rate, I can promise you something better ; I can 
 promise to show you a path which, if you do not wil- 
 fully stray from it, may lead you to the house of 
 sound learning. And I can show you means which 
 on the way may help you to something better than 
 learning itself, to the discipline of your own minds. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Acliaia, liglit thrown on its his- 
 tory by coins, 241-243. 
 
 Addison, his notion of Pharamond, 
 68. 
 
 JElfred, Oxford fictions about, 
 131 ; his historic instinct, 178 ; 
 parallel to Cato the Censor, 
 
 195- 
 Agathias, read after Procopios, 
 
 202. 
 Acjri2)pa, Marcus, his description 
 
 of himself, 245. 
 Aitolia, its submission to Rome, 
 
 257- 
 
 Ambassadors, value of their re- 
 ports, 174. 
 
 Ammianus, his position, 1 64 ; 
 his value, 179, 180; writes in 
 a foreign tongue, 198. 
 
 Ancient History, its practical 
 value, 26, 27 ; no harder than 
 modern, 81. 
 
 Anecdotes, 175, 176. 
 
 Angles, thought to speak Celtic, 
 90. 
 
 Anglia, use of the name, 302. 
 
 Anglo-Israel, 109. 
 
 AnJcyra, monument of compjared 
 with Caesar's commentaries, 
 227; 252,^253. 
 
 Anna IComnene, renaissance in 
 her age, 201. 
 
 Architecture, its relation to his- 
 tory, 50; 235 ; study of, 233- 
 237 ; its chronology and nomen- 
 clature, 234; confusions about, 
 236, 237. 
 
 Aristotle, value of his Ethics and 
 
 Politics, 113. 
 Arnold, Thomas, teacher of the 
 
 unity of history, 5-7 ; his 
 
 style, 104. 
 Asser, examined Ashdown per- 
 sonally, 314.^ 
 Assisi, inscription at, 247. 
 Asiy2)alaia, its treaty with Rome, 
 
 256, 257. 
 Ataidf, his work, 116. 
 Athens, teaching of the view from 
 
 its Ala-opolis, 319, 320. 
 Augustus, his record of his own 
 
 acts, 227 ; 252, 253. 
 Austria, use of the name, 303-305. 
 Authorities, how to treat, 220. 
 Autun, schools of, 199. 
 Auvergne, its historic position, 
 
 205-207. 
 Avitus, Alcimus, predecessor of 
 
 Ceedmon, 195 ; his history and 
 
 writings, 211. 
 
 B. 
 
 Baeda, whether printed, 84. 
 Bahtria, numismatic history of, 
 
 241. 
 Barnstaple, imaginary ehai'ter of 
 
 TEthelstan to, 130, 131. 
 Bihle Earth, 90. 
 Blackstone, Sir William, 74-76. 
 Boetius, whether a Christian, 203. 
 'Books,' use of, 36, 171, 185. 
 Brescia, teaching of the viev/ 
 
 from, 320. 
 Buildings, study of compared 
 
 with that of language, 60 ; evi'- 
 
 dence of, 232. 
 
330 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Byzantine Greek, continues Attic, 
 
 20I, 202. 
 Byzantine writers, largely laymen, 
 
 203, 204. 
 
 C. 
 
 Ccedmon, his poems, 195. 
 
 Caernarvon, birth of Edward the 
 Second at, 133. 
 
 Caesar, his Commentaries com- 
 pared with the monument of 
 Ankyra, 227; 252, 253. 
 
 Cambridge, delusions as to its 
 history, 91. 
 
 Cassiodorus, 203. 
 
 Cato the Censor, parallel to JElf- 
 red, 195. 
 
 Chalkis, its treaty with Athens, 
 
 Charles the Great, his language, 
 68 ; revival of letters under, 
 212. 
 
 Chronicles, English, our special 
 possession, 185 ; use of as a 
 'Book,' 188; their position in 
 the history of language, 195. 
 
 Chronology, its relation to history, 
 
 51- 
 ' Classical' the word to be got 
 
 rid of, 66. 
 ' Classical ' learning, the old form 
 
 of, 65-67 ; its students, appeal 
 
 to, 189. 
 ' Classical ' and ' Mediaeval,' how 
 
 far a line can be drawn between, 
 
 193 ; no break between in the 
 
 East, 204 ; time and place of 
 
 change in the West, 204-211. 
 Claudian, writes in a foreign 
 
 tongue, 198. 
 Clavdius, Emperor, his speech, 
 
 252. 
 Clerk, use of the word, 203. 
 Clermont in Auvergne, its historic 
 
 associations, 206, 207. 
 Coins, their nature and value, 
 
 30, 239-244. 
 
 Commission, last University, need- 
 less minuteness of their ordi- 
 nances, 18-20. 
 
 Constantinople, Turks at in the 
 ninth century, no, irr. 
 
 Contemporary History, position of 
 modern writers of, 261-264. 
 
 Cora, inscriptions at, 247. 
 
 Corinth, teaching of the view from 
 its Akropolis, 318, 319. 
 
 ' Credo quia impossibile est,' 128. 
 
 Crim, Crim Tartary, Crimea, 
 
 309- 
 Cv/rtius, Ernst, compared with 
 Thirlwall and Grote, 287, 288 ; 
 290. 
 
 D. 
 
 Dante, his place as an historic 
 
 authority, 197. 
 Dawkins, Mr. W. B., quoted, 45. 
 Decii, story of their devotion, 
 
 135-138. 
 Dioddros, character of his writ- 
 ings, 218, 219. 
 Dion Cassius, 201 ; character of 
 
 his writings, 218, 219. 
 Documents, what they prove, 169 ; 
 
 their relation to narratives, 
 
 170. 
 Domesday, our special possession, 
 
 185. 
 Dudo of St. Queniin, his style. 
 
 E. 
 
 Eadmer, his value, 1 74. 
 Elis, its coinage, 243. 
 
 'EXXdr, r\ hovKr\, 302. 
 
 Empire, the, its witness to the 
 unity of history, 22, 23 ; early 
 teaching of its nature, 107. 
 
 England, misuse of the name, 
 299, 300 ; compared with 
 France, 302. 
 
 English, first written poems in, 
 194 ; first prose writings, 195. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 331 
 
 Errors, popular, nature of, 93. 
 
 Evidence, different degrees of, 
 144-148. 
 
 Examinations, constant changes 
 in, 12 ; no part of the pro- 
 fessor's duty, 13. 
 
 Federations, 241. 
 
 Ferentinum, inscription at, 247. 
 
 Fergusson, James, on Swiss and 
 
 Scotcli architecture, 237 ; 312. 
 Finlay, George, his history of 
 
 enslaved Greece, 264 ; 285, 
 
 286. 
 Florence of Worcester, his later 
 
 copyists, 222. 
 FoUot, Gilbert, his knowledge of 
 
 languages, 54. 
 Force, meaning of the term, 146. 
 France, its coinage, 242; the 
 
 name compared with Austria, 
 
 302-305. 
 Francia, use of the name, 302, 
 
 303- 
 
 Francis the Second, last emperor, 
 
 224, 22g. 
 French, its relation to Latin, 55- 
 
 57- 
 
 G. 
 
 Gardiner, Mr., his examination of 
 
 battlefields, 314. 
 Gaul, history of language in, 
 
 196. 
 Geography, its relation to history, 
 
 51 ; 296 et seqq. 
 Geology, its relation to history, 
 
 45-47- 
 Geometry, nature of its evidence, 
 
 145- 
 German Book, the last, 268. 
 German scholars, use of their 
 
 writings, 289 ; their weak 
 
 point, ib. 
 Germany, maps of, 305-308. 
 
 Gibbon, his treatment of Koman 
 law, 76 ; his style, 104, 
 
 Gothic Language, remains of, 194. 
 
 Greek Language, history of, 197- 
 204 ; use of its different dia- 
 lects, 201 ; artificial use of 
 Attic, ib., 202 ; periods of 
 renaissance in, ib. ; its modern 
 foi'm, ib. ; its unbroken con- 
 tinuity, 202. 
 
 Greek War of Independence, its 
 historians, 264. 
 
 Green, John Richard, 277. 
 
 Gregory of Tours, 38 ; his posi- 
 tion, 164 ; compared with Sido- 
 nius, 208-211 ; his names, 
 208 ; character of his writings, 
 209, 210; Mr. Pattison on, 
 265. 
 
 Grote, Mr., his critics, 242 ; com- 
 pared with Tliirlwall and Cur- 
 tius, 286-288 ; 290. 
 
 Guest, Edwin, his work, 234; 
 278. 
 
 H. 
 
 Haemus, Philip's journey up, 313. 
 Hallam, Henry, value of his 
 
 writings, 281-283. 
 Harold Hardrada, saga of, 178. 
 Henry the First, his alleged birth 
 
 at Selby, 132, 133. 
 Henry tlie First and Seco7id, points 
 
 of likeness in their reigns, 138, 
 
 139- 
 
 Herbert of BosJiam, his style, 200. 
 
 Herodotus, his position, 162. 
 
 History, difficulty of defining, 43 ; 
 50-52; 117; its connexion 
 with other studies, 44, 45 ; 
 with geology and natural his- 
 tory, 45-48; natural and civil, 
 47 ; its satellites, 49 ; its rela- 
 tion to law and language, 52, 
 53; to language, 59-65; 67- 
 70 ; to law, 70, 71 ; in what 
 sense easy, 93 ; its lack of 
 technical terms, 95-98 ; its 
 
332 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 connexion witli literature, 98- 
 100; our earliest notions of, 
 107, 108; knowledge of com- 
 pared with astronomj^, 108, 
 109; difficulties of its study, 
 112 ; its scientific aspect, 119- 
 -121; uncertainty of its evi- 
 dence, 1 21-125; its depend- 
 ence on the human will, 148 ; 
 151; 154; reaches moral cer- 
 tainty, 151-154 ; modern 
 writers of, 264 et seqq.; their 
 position and use, 270; not 
 oracles, 275-277; length of 
 their reputation, 277. 
 
 Historians, the false and true, 
 100-103. 
 
 Historical Geography, its nature, 
 296-301. 
 
 Somer, his historic value, 177, 178. 
 
 Hugo Falcandus, 199. 
 
 Hume, David, his history recom- 
 mended at Oxford, 269. 
 
 Jline, Wilhelm, character of his 
 history, 293, 294. 
 
 Ingulf, forged history attributed 
 to, 129. 
 
 Inscrijitions, on buildings, 238 ; 
 witness of that on the Pantheon, 
 238-245; various inltaly, 24 7- 
 249 ; compared with auto- 
 graphs, 249-251 ; essentially 
 documentary, 251 ; their style, 
 253,254 ; special cases of, 255- 
 
 257- . 
 Institutions, witness of their 
 
 names, 58. 
 Invention, cases of, 129. 
 Italy, history of language in, 197. 
 Ivanhoe, when to read and when 
 
 not, 279, 280. 
 
 K. 
 
 Kanares, Constantine, 322. 
 Kemhle, John Mitchell, value of 
 his writings, 278-281. 
 
 Knowledge, English for saence, 
 
 117, 118. 
 Korkyra and Black Korhjra, 92 ; 
 
 its coinage, 242. 
 
 L. 
 
 Lambert of Her zf eld, his position, 
 164, 165. 
 
 Lancashire, confusion as to its 
 geography, 310. 
 
 Lands, redemption of, under 
 William, 186, 187. 
 
 Language, its relation to history 
 and law, 52, 53; its relation to 
 history, 59-65 ; 67-70; study 
 of compared with that of build- 
 ings, 61 ; its relation to physical 
 science, ib. 
 
 Languages, ancient and modern, 
 no real distinction between, 24— 
 27 ; several in one country, 
 54; 'modern,' no substitute 
 for ' ancient,' 55, 56. 
 
 Lap2>enherg, J. M., his value, 278. 
 
 Latin Language, its relation to 
 French, 55-57 ; history of, 
 197-200; renaissance of in 
 the fourth century, 198; its 
 seat in Gaul, 199; style of its 
 later writers, 199, 200 ; its re- 
 naissance in the fifteenth cen- 
 tury, 200 ; no halting place 
 between them, ib. ; language of 
 mediseval clergy, 203. 
 
 Law, its relation to history and 
 language, 52, 53 ; its relations 
 to history, 70, 71. 
 
 Lawyers, worst enemies of history, 
 72-76 ; its best friends, 77. 
 
 Lectures, proposed scheme of, 37- 
 40; 324. 
 
 Legends, early Eoman, 135 ; de- 
 stroyed by history, 139-142. 
 
 Lingua Latina and Eomana, 
 196. 
 
 Literm Humaniores, merits of 
 the old school of, 34; 113-116; 
 180. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 333 
 
 Jjiterature, its bearing on history, 
 
 98-100. 
 Livy, his position, 160-163 ; his 
 
 materials, 167. 
 Local nomenclature, 84, 85. 
 Local study, its need and danger, 
 
 87, 88. 
 London, Cliarter of, 234. 
 Lucian, renaissance in his age, 
 
 201. 
 Lysias, his rehxtion to Thucj'dides, 
 
 215-217. 
 
 M. 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, liis style, 105 ; 
 at Derry, 314. 
 
 Maine, SirH. S., 77. 
 
 Maldon, song of, 178. 
 
 Maps, old and new, 305—308. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, his Greek writ- 
 ings, 197. 
 
 Matilda, Queen, her mark, 250. 
 
 Matter and Manner, 103. 
 
 Matthev) Paris, his relation to 
 Roger of Wendover, 221. 
 
 ' Mediaival ' and ' Classical,' how 
 far a line can be drawn be- 
 tween, 193. 
 
 Milman, H. H., his History of 
 Latin Christianity, 283-285. 
 
 Milton, successor of Cfedmon, 
 
 Mitford, William, character of his 
 history, 269, 270. 
 
 Modern History, various defini- 
 tions of, 20-22 ; legislation on 
 at Cambridge, 22; its one 
 possible definition, 2 7-30 ; its 
 relations to other studies, 29, 
 30 ; provisional limit for in the 
 fifth century, 31 ; its pro- 
 visional definition as Teutonic 
 and Slavonic history, 32, 33; 
 brought in as an ' easy ' study, 
 80-83; effects of the belief, 
 83-92; its causes, 92-112. 
 
 Mommsen, Theodor, estimate of 
 his history, 290-293. 
 
 Mon,~a, alleged coronations at, 
 
 i3i> 132. 
 Moral certainty, 1 51-154; cases 
 
 of, 153- 
 Mountains, geographical use of, 
 
 313- 
 Munici2>al history, comparative 
 study of, 325. 
 
 N. 
 
 Natural Science, use of technical 
 terms in, 94 ; nature of its evi- 
 dence, 145-147 ; 150. 
 
 Neiv Grange, compared with 
 MykeiiS, 233. 
 
 Niebuhr, B. G., estimate of his 
 writings, 293. 
 
 Nomenclature, its importance, 109; 
 arguments from, 125-129. 
 
 Norman Conqiiest, theory of, 187. 
 
 0. 
 
 Old-French, writers of, 196. 
 
 Original authorities, their neces- 
 sity, 156; limits to their study, 
 157, 158 ; their nature, 159 ; 
 168 ; different classes of, 160- 
 169; quasi original writers, 
 166 ; not original for their 
 whole story, 161; choice among, 
 172; habits acquired by their 
 use, 181, 182; not infallible, 
 183; to be read first if possible, 
 270; not always possible, 272. 
 
 Oxford, delusions as to its history, 
 91. 
 
 P. 
 
 Palermo, historic teaching of, 314, 
 
 Palgrave, Sir Francis, his value, 
 
 278-281. 
 Pantheon, its inscription, 245. 
 Parable and Parliament, 65. 
 Passages, underground, 134. 
 Patiison, Mark, on the length of 
 
 historic reputations, 265-270; 
 
 277. 
 
334 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Pedantry, need of, 298. 
 
 Periods, advantages of the earlier, 
 35; 223-225; periods and 
 books, 36; choice of, 180, 
 181; 294, 295; 325-327- 
 
 ' Plei; 69. 
 
 Plutarch, his position, 166-168. 
 
 Poems, national, their historic 
 value, 177. 
 
 Polyhios, his historic position, 33 ; 
 163,164; 172; his judgement 
 of Kleomengs, 184. 
 
 Pontiffs, their annals, 179. 
 
 Primceval Antiquities, 229; build- 
 ings, 230-233. 
 
 Princes of the Empire, 85, 86. 
 
 Priscus, value of his history, 201. 
 
 Proclamations, evidence of, 258, 
 
 259-. 
 Procopius, his Secret History, 176. 
 Professors, their position and 
 
 duties, 13-17. 
 Proof, negative, its value, 141, 
 
 142. 
 
 E. 
 
 Pavenna, unvisited, 314. 
 
 Rayleigh, Lord, 55. 
 
 Pepetition of events, real and sup- 
 posed, 135-139. 
 
 Robert, son of Godwine, 249. 
 
 Romance Languages, origin of, 
 196. 
 
 Romanesque, early buildings in 
 England, 237. 
 
 Rome, its foundation legend, 142- 
 144 ; its greatest conquest, 
 193; its new birth under the 
 Illyrian Emperors, 198 ; view 
 of from Tusculum, 321; the 
 history of the world fixed by 
 its topography, ib. 
 
 Royal Visits, description of, 91. 
 
 S. 
 Saints, lives of, their value, 174, 
 
 175- 
 Salic Law, 89. 
 
 Salisbury, Gemot of in 1086, 74. 
 
 Science, Latin for knowledge, 117, 
 118; 152. 
 
 Scipios, inscriptions on their 
 tombs, 246. 
 
 Secondary writers, classical and 
 mediseval compared, 217-223. 
 
 Selden, 76. 
 
 Sicily, its historic position, 23. 
 
 Sidonius A2>ollinaris, 38; com- 
 pared with Gregory of Tours, 
 207-211; his names, 208; 
 character of his writings, 209 ; 
 their value, 213 ; remarkable 
 case of ignorance of tliem, 213, 
 214. 
 
 Sixteenth century, its work com- 
 pared with the nineteenth, 23, 
 24. 
 
 Skulls, their evidence, 227-229. 
 
 Small states, importance of their 
 history, 26, 27. 
 
 Smith, Goldwin, his work as 
 professor and otherwise, 8, 9. 
 
 Somerset, West, confusions as to 
 its geography, 310. 
 
 Soudan, name of, 309. 
 
 SjMlato, historic teaching of, 316-5 
 318. 
 
 Stanley, A. P., on St. Lucius, 
 312. 
 
 Statute Book, use of for English 
 history, 169. 
 
 Stubbs, Bishop, his last lecture, 
 4 ; his character as Iiistorian, 
 10, II ; his prefaces, 278. 
 
 Style, its danger, 106. 
 
 Switzerland, confusions as to its 
 geography and history, 310- 
 312 ; first formal use of the 
 name, 311. 
 
 T. 
 
 Tacitus, his position, 162. 
 Taylor, William Cooke, his history 
 
 of the overthrow of the Roman 
 
 Empire, 308. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 333 
 
 Technical Terms, none in history, 
 93-98 ; use of in natural 
 science, 94. 
 
 Teutonic Languages, first writings 
 in, 194. 
 
 Thierry, Augustine, his dealing 
 with authorities, 220; when 
 to read and when not, 279- 
 281. 
 
 Thirlwall, Bishop, his oliaracter as 
 historian, 10, 11 ; not super- 
 seded, 287 ; compared with 
 Grote and Curtius, ib., 288. 
 
 Thucydides, his supreme value, 
 171 ; his judgment of Kleon, 
 183; his relation to Lysias, 
 215-217 ; his materials, 263. 
 
 Tiryns, age of its walls, 233. 
 
 Travel, need of, 312-323. 
 
 Treaties, witness of, 257. 
 
 Trikoupes, Chai-ilaos, 255. 
 
 Trihowpes, Spyridon, his history, 
 264. 
 
 Turkey, misleading nature of the 
 name, 301, 302. 
 
 Turkish Ambassador, danger of 
 believing, 259. 
 
 Tusculum, view of Kome from, 
 321. 
 
 U. 
 
 TJlfilas, his Bible, 194. 
 
 Unity of history, how far accepted, 
 
 191 ; how to be enforced, 192. 
 Uri, Landesgemeinde of, 322, 
 
 323- 
 
 V. 
 
 Venantius Fortunatus, character 
 of his writings, 211, 212. 
 
 Volumnii, evidence of their tomb, 
 247-249. 
 
 W. 
 
 Warren, Hon. J. L., 241. 
 
 Waverley Annals, their relation 
 to the Peterborough Chronicle, 
 221. 
 
 William FitzSteplien, his value, 
 174. 
 
 WilliaTn of Malmssbury, his po- 
 sition, 165, 166. 
 
 William the Conqueror, versions 
 of his burial, 223 ; his mark, 
 250. 
 
 Willis, Eobert, his work, 234.