original research. They are not based on a critical appreciation of
the authorities which had to be consulted. They are not well
arranged, systematic or complete. All this the suddenly elected
professor of history at Cambridge would have been the first to grant.
'I am not here,' he says, 'to teach you history. I am here to teach
you how to teach yourselves history.' I must say even more. It
seems to me that these lectures were not always written in a
perfectly impartial and judicial spirit, and that occasionally they
are unjust to the historians who, from no other motive but a sincere
regard for truth, thought it their duty to withhold their assent from
many of the commonly received statements of mediaeval chroniclers.

But for all that, let us see what these Lectures are, and whether
there is not room for them by the side of other works. First of all,
according to the unanimous testimony of those who heard them
delivered at Cambridge, they stirred up the interest of young men,
and made them ask for books which Undergraduates had never asked for
before at the University libraries. They made many people who read
them afterwards, take a new interest in old and half-forgotten kings
and battles, and they extorted even from unfriendly critics the
admission that certain chapters, such as, for instance, 'The Monk as
a Civiliser,' displayed in an unexpected way his power of
appreciating the good points in characters, otherwise most antipathic
to the apostle of Manly Christianity. They contain, in fact, the
thoughts of a poet, a moralist, a politician, a theologian, and,
before all, of a friend and counsellor of young men, while reading
for them and with them one of the most awful periods in the history
of mankind, the agonies of a dying Empire and the birth of new
nationalities. History was but his text, his chief aim was that of
the teacher and preacher, and as an eloquent interpreter of the