published in 1837. In 1845 he issued an edition of Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches. The History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, commonly called Frederick the Great, appeared between 1858 and 1865. He also published a number of historical essays, such as those on "Mirabeau" and "The Early Kings of Norway," which

are collected among his miscellaneous works.

As an historian Carlyle had no detachment, and persisted in reading the past in the light of the present, seeking always for a moral. But his strong imagination and immense pictorial power made him constantly forget his propagandist purpose, and he describes the past with all the fury and fire of one who had himself lived through its crises. In his way he was a laborious investigator, but erratic and disorganized; he earnestly desired to be honest, but his emotion often led him to brighten or darken the colours overmuch. His uncanny psychological insight frequently revealed to him the truth, but it comes rather as a revelation than as an argument. He can with difficulty keep his temper, and condemns or praises with the vehemence of an advocate, and he is apt to overlook the duller aspects of constitutional and legal history. Often, too, he becomes tired and petulant. His passion for the grotesque, and even the melodramatic, gives a perpetual twist to his vision. He was also cumbered with a perverted principle of interpretation. He detested masses of men and worshipped the hero, and was inclined to seek the key to a movement. too much in the single great man. Moreover, he had something of the modern German belief that might and right are identical-not only in the

Thomas Carlyle.

(From the painting by Sir John Millais, R...)

last resort, but always-and his test of truth and greatness was apt to be only

success.

His supreme merit is that he gives to the men and women of the past a fierce reality, and makes their doings live for us with the vividness of a witnessed scene. The history of the French Revolution has been often more justly and wisely written, but no other man has given Carlyle's picture of its fury and futility, its heroism and its squalor. His Calvinism gave him a temperamental affinity to Cromwell, and it was he who first plucked the Lord Protector from the fog of misunderstandings and set him among the great men of the English race. His Frederick the Great, which at one time was a textbook of the German Staff, is ill planned and ill proportioned; but it is a gallery of marvellous portraits, and Carlyle alone of his contemporaries grasped the spiritual force behind modern Germany. His style is not well suited for elaborate history. There is little balance and poise in it; it is perpetually superheated, and often in the highest degree obscure and ungainly. But for all that it is a great style, capable of rising to a memorable eloquence, and of concreting into phrases which are more illuminating than other men's chapters. Carlyle excelled in historical portraiture. Take this of Alexander Leighton :

A monstrous pyramidal head, evidently full of confused harsh logic, toil, sorrow, and much other confusion, wrinkly brows arched up partly in wonder, partly in private triumph over many things, most extensive cheeks, fat, yet flaccid, puckered, corrugated, flowing down like a flood of corrugation, wherein the mouth is a mere corrugated eddy, frowned over by an amorphous bulwark of nose; the whole you would say supported by the neckdress, by the doubletcollar and front resting on it, surmounted by deluges of tangled tattered hair.

There are thousands of such pictures, and, whether they are historically just or unjust, they are unforgettable. Moreover, his tempestuous spirit gives to his historical writing a kind of epic swing, so that the narrative is always moving, and the past is presented not as still life, as in so many histories, but with all the swirl and gusto of reality. Carlyle as an historian stands alone. He can never be imitated, and should not be followed. His style and his habits of thought are not conducive to the discovery or exposition of historical truth, but beyond doubt his was one of the greatest minds that ever applied itself to history.

Macaulay. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay (1800-59), was preeminently an historian, and practically all his work, except The Lays of Ancient Rome, may be classed in this category. The son of Zachary Macaulay, one of the leaders of the Abolitionist movement, his mind early accepted the Whig creed, and he rose to be one of the most distinguished of Whig politicians. His experience in Parliament and in India admirably fitted him for the study of history. The two first volumes of his History of England appeared in 1848; the third and fourth in 1855; and the fifth and sixth after his death. His essays were contributed mainly to the Edinburgh Review and the Encyclopædia Britannica. The man has been revealed to the world by one of the most charming biographies in the language, written by his nephew, Sir George Otto Trevelyan.

Macaulay, without attaining to the most exact kind of scholarship in any one subject, early made himself a master of the best literature, ancient and modern. His retentive memory enabled him to go on amassing learning throughout his life, but he bore it easily and passed it all through the alembic of a quick and virile mind. His political faith was Liberalism in the largest sense, a genuine passion for humanity, freedom and toleration. He had little subtlety, and what could not be expressed in clear ringing English he did not see at all. His intellectual texture was commonplace, but in the most exalted sense of that word, for he shared all the feelings and prejudices of the ordinary man, and could express them in a style which the simplest

could appreciate and admire. He desired popularity, and he achieved it, for he has told us that his aim in his history was " to produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies." He wrote history as Sir Walter Scott wrote novels, with immense zest for every picturesque detail, and at the same time with a keen interest in those movements of thought which find practical expression in churches and parliaments. His Whiggism has been overstated. He held the view that "it was the Revolution of 1688 which brought the Crown into harmony with the Parliament, and the First Reform Bill which brought the Parliament into harmony with the Nation"-doctrines for which there is much to be said. In his history he can be very severe with Whig leaders, and on the whole he is just to their opponents. His weakness rather lies in the fact that while he could understand Whiggism, which was above all things lucid, sensible, and practical, he had little appreciation for any creed which approximated to mysticism. He held that if a doctrine were incapable of a good sound prosaic defence it was probably untrue.

Lord Macaulay.

He was fortunate in the period he chose for his history, for it gave him a subject in which his preferences and dislikes had the fullest scope. He is a master in the art of construction. Battles, debates in Parliament, court intrigues, social movements, all fall most aptly into their proper place. His narrative never halts, and his power of constructing a background is unrivalled. So austere a critic as Lord Acton said In description and in narrative I think he is the first of all writers of history. He builds up his scenes by a multitude of small details, like an historical novelist. He is very frequently inaccurate in such details, and it may be argued with some justice that he is often essentially shallow in his verdicts upon this or that

character. But in his statement of the broad movements of history he is invariably just and true. Of political bias there is very little. He makes a god of William and a fiend of James and a fallen angel of Marlborough, not because of his politics, but because of his moral antipathies. His style has obvious faults. There is a perpetual clang of hammers in it, and his habit of building up by neat antitheses often leads him to create a false impression. But for the purposes for which he used it, it was a nearly perfect tool. Its untiring vigour gives the same atmosphere of reality as Carlyle's very different manner. It is a perfect medium, too, for good advocacy, and few things are better in his work than his statements of the arguments for or against a policy or a conclusion. Its worst defect is its metallic hardness; but when he is deeply moved this fault is forgotten. Such a passage as the account of Monmouth's burial in St. Peter's Chapel in the Tower shows him at his best. He himself has made the most just criticism of his style: "My manner is, I think, and the world thinks, on the whole a good one; but it is very near a bad manner indeed, and those characteristics of my style which are most easily copied are the most questionable."

Macaulay's reputation suffered some eclipse after his death; he had been overpraised, and consequently there was a reaction under which he was undervalued. The critics complained that he lacked qualities which he never claimed to possess. But his work remains one of the great possessions of the British people-an introduction to historical study for the ordinary reader, and also one of the most brilliantly coloured and artistically composed reconstructions of the past in any literature.

Froude. James Anthony Froude (1818-94) was a mind more akin to Carlyle than to Macaulay. He had an interest in metaphysics alien to the latter, and was altogether of a rarer and subtler temperament. He was educated at Oxford during the Tractarian movement, and was much influenced by Newman till Carlyle claimed his allegiance. He relinquished his idea of becoming a priest and devoted his life to historical work. His miscellaneous papers, partly historical and partly philosophical, are contained in Short Studies on Great Subjects (1867-83); his History of England was issued between the years 1856 and 1870, and covered roughly the period of the English Reformation. He also published various volumes of lectures, and a brilliant sketch of Julius Cæsar.

Froude as an historian is less inaccurate than Macaulay, but more essentially unfair. He did not believe that history could be a science, and in all his writing he has a strong ethical interest and a definite artistic purpose. He wished to make it a drama, and a moral drama. The reaction from his early training gave him a strong bias against ecclesiasticism, and he has written of the defeat of Catholicism in England with a passion almost lyrical in its fervour. Macaulay attempted to be just even to people whom he disliked, but Froude in his attacks had the unhesitating vigour of an ancient Israelitish prophet. On the other hand, it should be said that the charges of inaccuracy with which it was at one time the fashion to assail him, are

mostly unfounded; he is less inaccurate than Freeman. To counterbalance his dislikes he possessed great enthusiasms-an intense admiration for the makers of the British Empire, and for British seamen at all stages of their history, so that he writes of the Devon adventurers of Elizabeth's reign as if he had shared in their adventures. This enthusiasm made him excel in presenting the pageantry of history, and no English writer, not even Macaulay, has a greater pictorial gift. Many of his pas

James Anthony Froude.

sages are unmatched even in the best romantic fiction. But in addition to this gift he has a habit which he learned from Carlyle of interspersing passages of argument, done with extraordinary lucidity and grace. His mind always sought for dogma and never attained it, and, since his creed was thus held in suspension, he was enabled to indulge himself in dialectical subtleties as if for their own sake. It is not possible to extract from him a definite ethical code, as can be done in the case of Macaulay. His prejudices and prepossessions we know, but his faith remains a series of questions. It has been said truly that he had an anima naturaliter Catholica, and would have been happy to accept the authority of a Church if the accidents of his training had not made such a solution impossible.

The greatest merit of Froude is his style. It has much of Newman's art and general cadence, but it has a more living movement. Of all historical styles of our time it is the most perfectly suited to the composition of a great work. It is never rhetorical, but by imperceptible stages it quickens and colours till sometimes it reaches the highest level of eloquence. It is in the true canonical tradition of English prose.

MILITARY HISTORY

Military history which is more than a mere Staff College text-book and is also literature, is well represented in 19th-century England.