their readers also, an image of the past or of some portion of the past, exactly as it was, and in their eagerness to do so will approach this task with a vision not merely purified, not merely unclouded by the vapour that the heat of party feeling is sure to raise, but made keener and more faithful by the only passion that an inquirer should allow to influence his modes of thought and action, disinterested love of truth. The main effort,' we are told, of criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is;' it must assuredly come to be the main effort of history to see the object as in itself it really was, if history is to take a foremost and permanent place in the literature of the future. The searcher after historical truth must start on his quest with a spirit enfranchised from every influence of the passing hour; no tenderness for an ephemeral interest, no breath of faction, no longing to support a theory, can be suffered to interpose between him and his work, whose chance of approximate perfection any one of these feelings would be sure to ruin. Whatever be the natural bent of his mind in the matter of present topics, whichever of the many so-called systems of political or religious thought his training, his reason, or his instincts may draw him towards, he must stoutly resist its perverting power in his devotion to his great task; to yield to any impulse of party spirit, however faint, to let his heart be tickled by the feeblest hankering after the forbidden fruit of the present, would be a betrayal of his trust, even a kind of treason. Such an historian will keep his gaze steadily fixed on the period to whose elucidation he has dedicated himself, will toil with drudge-like patience to remove every obstruction, internal and external, that would hide any part of it from him, will joy. fully submit to the many hardships

that must be his fate in striving to penetrate to the real character of the age he has chosen. And if he bring to his task the fine gifts of nature that success in such a task presupposes, and hold fast to his purpose of seeing the age as in itself it really was, gradually that past age will shape itself under his eye, it will live before him, its deepest feelings, its hopes, aspirations, joys, sorrows, heroisms, meannesses, achievements, and failures. He must never forget that it is his first duty to get the time recalled from the past and set before him with the utmost attainable clearness, to make himself a part of it, to try and look out on the world, as it were through the eyes of its foremost men, to feel as they felt, to share in their prejudices, almost to breathe the life-element in which they lived and worked. Thus he will come to understand that age, will come to know its secret thoughts, will become its voice, and so will be qualified to speak to us with authority about it, and will be likely to make us understand it. Nor will he allow himself to have any preferences; à priori every feature of the age will have an equal claim on his attention; in a certain sense his mind will be but a mirror reflecting faithfully the minutest characteristic detail of the object it contemplates. If we could fancy the photographer and his camera rolled into one, or rather an animated camera worked by itself, we should have some notion of what I believe to be the appointed function of the historian of the future. Yet he will be something more than the accurate delineator of past ages, he will be their voice as well.

This may seem to some a degradation of the historian's office, to make a mere mechanism of him, to take away from him the one faculty that gives dignity to man, his will. But it is not so; the historian of the new type will be quite equal

in point of dignity and nobility, to the grandest and noblest of the old. The pursuit will be one in which men of greatly varying capacities may take part, from mere sagacity and industry loyal to the truth to the most all-embracing genius loyal to the truth. The ideal writer of history will be a sort of blending of a Shakespeare and a Von Ranke, will have the plodding industry, the seriousness, the flawless candour of the one, together with the piercing insight, the universal sympathy, the exhaustless utterance of the other. Nature cannot be too bountiful to him, for a mighty burden is laid upon him. He must-to borrow the impressive apologue of Mr. Carlyle-ride, like Herinod, through gloomy winding valleys, full of howling winds and subterranean torrents down towards Hela's deathrealm, and see Balder. He must even do what Mr. Carlyle says has been denied to him in the case of his Balder, Cromwell, he must bring back Balder and gladden men's eyes with his presence. Surely this is no mean achievement, to re-create a past, perhaps an extinct, age, to place it before us in its habit as it lived, with speculation in its eyes, the glow of vigorous life in its cheeks. The work of such a laborious student and literary artist would surely equal, perhaps excel, in human interest, in passion and pathos, tragic force and fire, the grandest of our dramas; and it would all be true.

And there will be excellent work in the same field for the mere man of talent, provided he be honest and limit himself strictly to his function. But let him remember that it is no part of his function to plague us and irritate the thinnerskinned of us with his judgments about men and events. He will

have enough to do to see them and understand them; let them remain unjudged by him at least. Recent events have made us familiar

The

with men who direct imaginary campaigns and fight imaginary battles from their writing-desks in London, organisers of victory, Marlboroughs or Carnots, who confidently dictate the policies of contending generals, and grow indig nant at their disobedience. writing of history in modern times presents us with a similar phenomenon. Historians sit snug in their studies, and criticise, admiringly, patronisingly, severely, or savagely, the conduct of men and women in the thick of the strife, fighting with principalities and powers; they plan campaigns, prescribe policies, pass judgments, almost always unfavourable, and plainly intimate that if they had had the making, as they have had the writing, of history, not a blunder would have been committed, not a grievance been left unredressed, man's lot would now be one of ideal felicity, every country would be-I will not say a Utopia, for Utopia was a very unpleasant place and the Utopians a very indifferent kind of people, but

what Utopia is generally believed to have been. For an historian is not obliged to be a judge, but he is obliged to do his best to reproduce the life of the past. Above all he must hold himself sternly aloof from the multitudinous isms of the day, must take care that no single one of them sully the crystal purity of his spirit. That history is the politics of the past is true, though not the whole truth-history is the politics of the past and a good deal besides -but I draw from the fact just the opposite inference to that drawn from it by its accomplished enunciator; that history is the politics of the past I regard as an excellent reason why history should not be written by politicians, or by men whose feelings are greatly excited by current politics.

In addition to these rules of abstention, there are two truths of a more practical tendency that the

humbler historian cannot be too profoundly impressed with or too diligently bear in mind during his labours. The first is that one which some of us find so consoling in these days of reckless speculation and reckless assertion about invisible things, the indubitable truth that no man knows how stupid he is; the second-which Mr. Arnold reports from Joubert-that 'ignorance, which in matters of morals extenuates the crime, is itself in intellectual matters a crime of the first order.' Let him bear with him an ever-present sense of his own ungaugeable stupidity and of the criminality of ignorance in a man who takes upon himself to instruct others; and then his feet will have some chance of being kept from the many pitfalls that lie before the historical explorer.

Before parting with this topic I would ask leave to say something of an historical work which goes a good way towards illustrating what I have said. In this respect, as in many others, Germany leads the way; there, at any rate, you get men who love knowledge for no other reason than that it is know. ledge. The book I refer to is Von Ranke's History of England, which the Clarendon Press has lately given to Englishmen in their own tongue. Von Ranke's is far from being a perfect history; there is in it little or nothing of the animation, the resistless force, the vigorous stride, the play of various emotions, that readers of Carlyle, Macaulay, Froude, or Freeman expect in a history, but it has one grand characteristic excellence that well-nigh makes up for the absence of all these. 'It has been my wish,' says its writer, to suppress myself and only to let the events speak and the mighty forces be seen;' and any attentive reader of the book must admit that Von Ranke

has gained his wish; as Von Moltke has learned to keep silence in five languages, Von Ranke has suppressed himself in five volumes.' And these volumes have this additional value to us Englishmen, they enable us to follow the story of a most stirring stage of our career as that story is told by a foreigner of exceptional justness of spirit, and perfect frankness of speech. It is not that we are privileged to see ourselves as Frenchmen, or Germans, or Italians see us, but as an acute intellect, of vast knowledge, who, historically speaking, is of no nationality, has seen us. The impression of its author that one carries away from a study of this work is of an observer who has watched the course of events in England from some mid-Atlantic specula, contemplating the current of English politics, not from the outside merely, but detached from every possibility of unfriendly influence, and who has thus been able to show us England as a unit in the great commonwealth of European nations, and English history as a part of the general history of the Western world. Valuable from many other points of view, from this Von Ranke's History of England is little short of priceless.

The special connection of these remarks with the first twenty-five years of Stuart rule in England is not obvious at first sight, but a little reflection will show us that they are, perhaps, more applicable to the period of the early Stuarts than to any other of equal length in our annals. Strange as it may seem, it is undoubtedly true, that until lately no period of our history has been more carelessly studied; none has suffered more from the party zeal of successive generations, has been narrated with a stronger bias or in a more prejudiced spirit. This is in no way astonishing; out

of the first twenty-five years of Stuart rule, the political principles that still dominate have sprung. The ideas about public affairs that now sway most men's thoughts in England, and are indeed admitted by all but a barely perceptible minority to be political truisms, were then either actually born or rapidly coming to the birth. Of some of these principles men were then becoming dimly conscious; towards others they were feeling their way in a bewildered manner; the national march towards constitutionalism and the omnipotence in the State of the Commons House of Parliament was just about to begin; men were falling into their places, hardly knowing what they were doing, and there was much real and still more apparent confusion in consequence. Moreover, the animating events that attract and enchain attention in the times that immediately preceded and the times that soon followed are altogether wanting; there are no takings of Cadiz or routs of Dunbar, no thrilling scenes of royal executions, as at Fotheringhay and Whitehall, to waken and keep alive the interest of human-hearted readers. The men, too, that did the work of the time were, with one luridly splendid exception, mediocrities, though not all uninteresting; those of them whose movements the historian's eye follows with strong personal interest are either the scarred veterans of the past, or the destined constitution-builders or would-be constitution - destroyers of the coming, age. The figures that fascinate us are those of Raleigh, Pym, and Wentworth; yet not one of these was of much account in James's reign. For the second of these reasons historical inquirers have approached this period in a listless mood, prepared to see little worth seeing in it; for the first, they have looked at it with a prejudiced eye, prepared to find in it

only what suited their purpose. But a great injustice has been done to it; it is not uninteresting, it is not unimportant; indeed it is not possible to fully comprehend the great convulsions and the party struggles of the immediately succeeding generations without first comprehending it. And now we have no excuse for not understanding it; in Mr. Gardiner we have a pioneer through its intricacies in whom we may place almost unlimited trust-at least when he is content to write real, does not insist upon making imaginary, history.

From the secondary and purely dynastic point of view the reign of James I. has also great significance. The first of all the line to rule England, he struck the keynote of their policy as sovereigns. The one distinguishing feature of the history of the House of Stuart in Scotland and England is their ill-luck; unhappiness was the dower of each; six died violent deaths, two on the scaffold. Professor Stubbs even alleges that the momentum of inherited misfortune and misery had become (in their case) a conscious influence under which no knightly or kingly qualities could maintain hope.' Not least among their misfortunes was the fate that made James their fugleman in England. James was by no means the despicable person that most historians would have us believe he was; in intellectual wealth he was rather above than below the average of his contemporaries; in moral qualities he was quite equal to the public men of his day. He is one of those historical characters that with all their objectionable features one cannot altogether dislike: his shrewd sayings, his innocent craft, his simple artificiality win our interest, in any case amuse us. But he was not the man to guide the march of England at the somewhat critical time he lived in; to deal successfully with

the grave questions, many of them involving in their settlement the most momentous consequences, was not within his capacity. Had he been less intelligent, it might have been better for his descendants; had he been more intelligent, it might have been better for England. As it was he had just insight enough to be vaguely conscious that forces were gathering which, if allowed to work their will, might diminish his importance; he had not insight enough to see that those forces were irresistible by any counteracting force that he could send into the field to meet them. As a king he had but one fixed idea-to nurse his prerogative. He watched over that supposed heirloom of his family with more than maternal fondness; throughout his reign it was the one thing he made himself the champion of; any appearance of danger to it, come from what quarter it might-the Commons, the bench of judges, the Council, the printing press-he confronted with a promptitude and boldness that contrasted remarkably with his usual indecision and timidity. Now I take it that a King of England who in the beginning of the seventeenth century thought exclusively, or even mainly, of his prerogative, was not exactly the king for the age; it is usually supposed that the Time-Spirit had not then taken the royal prerogative under his care. And as James piped his sons and grandsons danced or tried to dance. If, then, the Stuarts were a failure in England and I think that even a partisan of that house will admit that they were, though he or she might lay the blame at other doors than theirs they had James largely

to thank for it.

Among the many external causes that conspired together to make the Stuarts a failure in England, three seem to me to have been especially powerful-they succeeded the Tudors, they came to England at a

most critical time, and they were strangers. The inheritance of authority that Elizabeth bequeathed to her successor required a more masculine nature than James's to wield; the hour was big with problems that no Stuart had the requisite combination of insight, tact, and firmness to solve; and they never understood the nation they were called to govern-aliens at the beginning, they were aliens to the end.

The theory of the Constitution transmitted to James by his predecessor was, I think, something like the following: The Crown and the Parliament were not two co-ordinate powers in the State, existing side by side as ruling forces, each possessed of a definite authority, each operating as a check on the other, each indispensable to the harmonious and healthy working of the State machinery. Elizabeth had no thought that any Minister of hers was responsible to Parliament, or that Parliament had any other function than to vote her money when she wanted it, pass such laws as she submitted to it or could be got to approve, and strengthen her hands generally when her hands wanted strengthening. The Sovereign was all in all, the central force, the pivot of the whole system; other national organisms might have privileges, he alone had authority. But Elizabeth was careful to distinguish between what she could do and what she might do. If a certain course seemed to be just and prudent, her prerogative gave her the power of. taking it if she thought fit. there was another potential force that Elizabeth thought it wise to take into account, the temper and feeling of her subjects, upon whose hearty support she knew that the success of her designs largely depended. The Constitution, however, provided her with no other means of getting at the thoughts and desires of her subjects than the

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