CHAPTER VII

OF THE LATER HISTORIANS, BIOGRAPHERS, ESSAYISTS, ETC., AND OF THE PRESENT CONDITION OF LITERATURE

IT is by no means so easy a task to deal with writers who are either living, or, at any rate, have only lately gone from among us, as with those whose work belongs to a past generation. The immense increase in the number of the writers of the present day is alone sufficient to render the work more difficult, and we do not pretend to include all the books on any of the subjects we are dealing with. At the same time, it would be a most invidious duty were we called upon to measure out applause or censure to even the most eminent of living authors as we are able to do with those whose career is already closed and whose works can be reviewed as a whole. It will therefore be found that we have spoken at length only of dead writers, giving to the living

such notice as is necessary to give a general idea of the scope and purpose of their work.

The most eminent historical writers of our own time are for the most part still among us. Yet there are gaps, where some have been taken from the world in the fulness of years, and others while yet in the prime of life. It is not many years since we had to lament the early death of one of the most brilliant historical writers of the time. John Richard Green was born in the year of Her Majesty's accession, and educated at Magdalen College School and Jesus College, Oxford. From his earliest youth he had delighted chiefly in historical studies, and showed his characteristic spirit of critical independence in an essay upon Charles I., whom the young writer, in spite of careful training in the straitest sect of middle-class Toryism, felt himself bound to pronounce against. Fortunately for himself, however, Green was no infant prodigy, and the only marked characteristic of his university life was his devotion to the works of the early chroniclers. After taking his degree in 1859 he was ordained and became a curate in a poor district of London. He afterwards held two livings in succession under similar conditions, and did much hard and conscientious work as a parish priest, but his health finally broke down under the strain of his clerical duties, increased by intense application to historical studies. Archbishop Tait,

who had long had his eye upon Green, appointed him to the pleasant and suitable post of librarian at Lambeth, and he gave up his more onerous clerical work to devote himself entirely to literature. As yet he had written little; some sketches of Oxford in the Eighteenth Century, published in his youth in an Oxford paper, had pleased a limited public, and at a later period some pungent essays of social criticism in the Saturday Review gave to the initiated a suggestion of much satirical power; but his name was yet almost unknown when the Short History of the English People, published in 1874, took the world by storm. The animated and poetical style, the independent and original judgments, as well as the novel conception of the whole, at once attracted the admiration of the great majority of its readers. It is not perhaps a work of faultless accuracy, but that is hardly to be expected from a book which is written up to a theory; for facts, as looked upon by the spectator whose mind is already made up on the subject, show the most obliging readiness to assume any form he chooses. The literary power of Green is undeniable; in some passages, as in his account of the last uprising of Wales before its conquest by Edward I., his naturally picturesque style develops into genuine poetry, while his narrative is usually spirited and his delineation of character striking,

if perhaps a little too imaginative.

Yet we think that those have formed too high an estimate of his qualities who would rank him with Macaulay. His narrative power is confined to occasional episodes, between which we find intervals where the interest languishes, if it does not die altogether; if we are tempted to go on beyond a period which has pleased us, it is not because the enchantment of the narrative carries us on, but because we hope to find in a new chapter another unconnected passage as spirited as that we have been reading; and this expectation is often disappointed. Having once gained the attention of his audience by a masterly summary of English history, Green hoped to retain it for the larger work into which the Short History was expanded. This attempt, however, was not so successful. The larger history may have gained in value as a class-book by its more elaborate form; as a literary effort it lost in terseness and force more than it gained by higher elaboration. After the four-volume History, the author apparently gave up his mission of instructing the people, and took to the comparatively unimportant amusement of writing for the few whose learning was equal to his own. The Making of England, published in 1881, and the Conquest of England, which only appeared after his death in 1883, belonged to the latter class.

A very different type of historian was that represented by John Sherren Brewer. Green was essentially a writer of that class whose goods are all exhibited in the shop window, while it is probably due to his extreme absence of ostentation that the world at large is not sufficiently acquainted with the solid, quiet merit of Brewer. Born in 1810, the son of a Baptist schoolmaster at Norwich, Brewer joined at an early age the Church of England, went to Oxford, and after taking a brilliant degree was ordained and appointed chaplain to a London workhouse. After some years of zealous work in this capacity, he resigned his appointment in consequence of differences with the Vicar of St. Giles', and for some time found no work to do in his sacred profession. He was already noted for his extraordinarily wide reading, had edited the Ethics of Aristotle at an early period of his life, and had done some work for the Record Commission. He now devoted himself to increasing his knowledge by reading at the British Museum and got a small appointment as classical lecturer at King's College, afterwards succeeding his friend, Frederick Denison Maurice, as Professor of English Literature and Modern History. Brewer also did a good deal of journalistic work for the Standard, Morning Post, and other papers. In 1856 he was entrusted by the authorities of the Record Office with the preparation of a