# Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects/A Last Statutory Public Lecture

XVII.
A LAST STATUTORY PUBLIC LECTURE.
(May 8, 1884.)
A LAST statutory public lecture ought, I suppose, to combine the characteristics of an Apologia and a Symposium; or perhaps, in more modern fashion, as befits a Professor of Modern History, the qualities of an after-dinner speech, of the defence and confession of a penitent, of the last will and testament of one who has something to leave. I do not know that, in what I am going to say, I shall strike exactly on any one of such notes; but there are some things that I ought to say, some that I wish to say, and some that I can say to fill up the prescribed three-quarters of an hour. I will ask for your tolerance and sympathy for what I have to say, whether in jest or in earnest; for you will believe me when I say that even the last statutory public lecture is a matter which mingles pleasure with pain, in no slight measure of both.
Seventeen years ago, in the address which I delivered in this room by way of inaugural lecture, and eight years ago, when I was approaching the end of my first decade of office, I ventured to make the statutory public lecture an opportunity of stating what seemed to me to be points of interest touching the study of History, in relation to persons, subjects and methods of teaching. The inaugural lecture contained, as was very natural, some crude and carelessly treated material; I said some things which were misunderstood, and some which I had better not have said at all; probably both are forgotten by this time. But, as to the main object of the lecture, the stating of the proper part which the teaching of History has in mental education, I have not changed my ​mind, nor am I inclined to do so now. I still think that the aim of Historical teaching is the training of the judgment to be exercised in the moral, social and political work of life; and that, as an instrument of education, such teaching will seek its fittest material in those portions of History which have enough of living interest to stimulate research, but have not enough of immediate practical importance to rouse political partisanship; that accordingly we do best when we begin at the beginning of the history of the forces and materials out of which modern life has grown, and that, in so doing, we have a distinct advantage over those who start to work backward from the immediate interests of to-day. I do not now wish to enter on controversy about this; I know that it is not uncontroverted; I state it, however, as a principle on which I have taught, and have believed myself justified by results. As I stated it in my first, I stand by it in my last lecture.
The lectures of 1876 were given after several years of experience, during which I had learned my own weakness, and begun to find the way in which I trusted that I might be really helpful: years during which the study of History had greatly developed here, and in which we had tried to frame, and I think had succeeded in organising a method of combined teaching, which brought into play the ability of a considerable number of enthusiastic and laborious tutors, and which resulted not only in enlarged and improved schemes of reading, and enlarged and more highly valued distinctions in the way of class and prize, but also in very valuable and important work done for History in the way of research and in the production of books. At that time too, the University was engaged in taking stock of its means and requirements, in preparation for meeting the Commission which was understood to be impending, and which has since worked changes in our constitution, collegiate and academic, which are now only beginning to develope results. I attempted, in the two lectures which I delivered then, to take a comprehensive survey of the condition of Historical Study, so far as it affected our own material and method, both within and outside of our ​own borders, and to express certain views which I hoped might find favour in the expected reforms.
Without following the same plan, I propose now to take up, and, in the desultory way which is almost necessary under the circumstances, to remark upon some of the more important points which have varied our own history, as academic and historic workers, since that time. If I speak too much of myself, I will ask you to believe that it is not because I set an especially high value on my own services, for none knows or feels better than I do how much more I ought to have done, or how little my share has been in what has been done; still less because I undervalue the labours of my fellow-workers, who have had far more personal anxiety and more direct and more measurable responsibilities than I have had; it is mainly because the retrospect of my own work is forced upon me by the circumstances of my departure from Oxford; also because, not only as Professor, but in several other capacities, as Delegate of the Press, Curator of the Bodleian, a Member of Council, and as having a share too of the representation of our Oxford School of History before the outside world, I have had work to do and a place to fill which it would be very mock humility on my part to leave out of sight now that I am parting from such a home as this. You will pardon me, I hope and trust, because it is the last time.
A word first on our losses and our gains: and our losses and gains are so intimately bound together that I must take them in the order in which they most naturally occur to me, balancing one another by a law of compensation inseparable from all progress: it is surely a matter of congratulation that since 1876 we have so much enlarged the number of our students that our class lists contain nearly double the tale of names, and that, as a road to an honourable degree in arts, our study is now followed by nearly, if not quite, as large a body of pilgrims as any of the other honour schools. This is the result of no lowering of the standard of the History Examination, but of the greater educational vivacity of the University, of the increased interest felt in the country at ​large in historical work, of the efforts of some of the Public Schools to make a beginning of such work a part of elementary education, but chiefly I think to the zeal, and self-denial, and labour, and personal sympathy of the History tutors. The work is, so far as it is the bringing to bear of historical influences, interests, and inducements on the individual students, entirely their work; and their work also mainly in the other bearings of our common design, in which professorial teaching or other professorial working could be at all utilised. I wish to say this distinctly, and shall say it again before I close; all the more distinctly, because I, for my part, am well aware that, in many details of organisation and division of labour, my opinions have differed from theirs, and I would like them to remember that, where we have differed, it has not been for want of sympathy on my part, or for any wish to spare myself
Since 1876 in the body of tutors we have had some few losses; our dear friend the Dean of Winchester has left us for a place of more dignity, and more freedom for the working of his unrivalled and peculiar gifts: we are sure that he will never be idle, and whatever he does will be done well. Mr. Jayne has left us, also for a place of honour and responsibility, where his presence will be to us the earnest of sound work in our own as well as in the other departments of clerical education, and where he has already enlisted the help of one of the most successful and zealous of the younger men who have followed our line here. Of our dear friend Laing, whose absence we feel more and more every term, what can I say, but that we trust and hope that one day he may be restored to us and to the studies that he was so wonderfully qualified to develope and adorn? Well, with these home losses we have counterbalancing gains in the enlisting of new men. The continued vigour of our veterans is hardly to be called a gain, but it is a matter of profound congratulation: I rejoice to think that the Chichele Professor, Mr. Owen, and Mr. Boase are as young, and zealous, and kind, and sympathetic as they ever were, and that is as much as the best and kindest of men can be; seventeen ​years of a very trying Regius Professor have not worn out their goodwill.
Another point I will mention, though I need not tell too much of the secrets of the Seminar: there is a great gain to us in the spontaneous working of the little clubs of Historical debate which have sprung up within the last few years, collegiate and inter-collegiate. I will not talk of comparing great things with small, but I rejoice to see in these a continuity, with differentiation, of the old circles which I remember when I was an undergraduate and a bachelor: I was always proud of having been for a little time secretary of the Hermes, which Archdeacon Palmer, and, alas! how few besides, must recollect as a very small and earnest and affectionate literary brotherhood, well to be remembered as a seed-bed in the sowing time, not only of germinating ideas that spring and die with or without fruit-bearing, but of high sympathies and dear friendships that grow stronger and immortal by age. I would augur for our little History clubs as fair a future.
Another gain, which is still perhaps a matter for augury, is the formation of the Oxford Historical Society; if the choice of subject, singularly and universally attractive, rich in materials and full of varied interest, if the zeal, ability and perseverance of the promoters, and the sympathy of all historical students, can secure success, the Society has a most happy future in prospect.
But the mention of it suggests irrepressibly the memory of the man whose genius inspired the idea, and of whom the Society is in this place the fittest possible monument. John Richard Green, the dear friend of many amongst us, has left behind him a name which cannot soon be forgotten. His books are by themselves the warrant of the fame which he so widely gained; the extent of his reading, the power of his grasp, the clearness of his insight, the picturesque reality of his narration, are patent to all who are capable of judging. We, who knew him better than the world of his readers, know too of his unwearied industry, his zeal for truth, and the inspiring force of his conversation. For twenty years he ​and I were close friends; with countless differences of opinion, we never quarreled; with opposite views of the line of history and of the value of character, we never went into controversy; his letters were a delight and honour to me; I believe that my visits were a pleasure and in some way a comfort to him. In the joint dedication of his book I confess that I received a compliment which I place on a level with the highest honours I have ever received.
I am tempted to modify the excessive dryness, as the Edinburgh Reviewer puts it, of my discourse, by telling the story of our first introduction to one another, chiefly because it has been made the subject of a myth which has made us both a little, or not a little ridiculous. Some of you I dare say remember a paragraph that went the round of the September papers years ago; and told how two persons, a stout and pompous professor and a bright ascetic young divine, met in a railway carriage; how the burly professor aired his erudition by a little history lecture (an anticipation of the informal instruction of the Commissioners) on every object of interest that was passed on the road, and how each of his assumptions and assertions was capped by an answer from the ascetic divine which showed that he knew it all and knew it better. The professor at last, exasperated by the rejoinders, broke into a parody of the famous address of Erasmus, 'aut Morus aut diabolus,' substituting for Morus 'Johnny Green.' Could this be true? It was in 1863 that we met; I was not yet a professor, he had not begun to wear the air of an ascetic. We were invited to Wells, to a meeting of the Somerset Archaeological Society, to stay with a common friend whom you will have no difficulty in identifying. I was told, 'if you leave the station at two you will meet Green, and possibly Dimock,' the biographer of S. Hugh whom I knew already. I knew by description the sort of man I was to meet; I recognised him as he got into the Wells carriage, holding in his hand a volume of Renan. I said to myself, 'if I can hinder, he shall not read that book.' We sat opposite and fell immediately into conversation. I dare say that I aired my erudition so far as to tell him that ​I was going to the Archæological meeting and to stay at Somerleaze. 'Oh then,' he said, 'you must be either Stubbs or Dimock.' I replied, 'I am not Dimock.' He came to me at Navestock afterwards, and that volume of Renan found its way uncut into my waste-paper basket. That is all; a matter of confusion and inversion; and so, they say, history is written. Well, perhaps a friendship between two historical workers may be called a historic friendship and, to be historical, should gather some of the mist of fable about its beginning: anyhow it was a friendship that lasted for his life, and the loss of which I shall never cease regretting.
Mr. Green's death is one of our greatest losses, but not the only one. In Sir Thomas Hardy the whole world of historical students lost a leader, a counsellor, and a friend; whose services it is impossible to overrate. Practically the founder of the series of national Chroniclers to which I at all events, and our school here, owe so much; a man full of carefully stored and readily imparted knowledge; full of business and as full of kindliness, to every Oxford student, of record or of chronicle, he was a most willing and ready helper. Soon after him we lost Mr. Brewer, who shared with him some of the most important sections of his work, and who added to his labours as a collector and arranger of record, those of an indefatigable writer and faithful, energetic, and stimulating teacher. Then we lost Dr. Pauli, the man who made English History a living study on the continent; the most faithful and fair-minded of investigators, bound to me by peculiar bonds of friendship, and to Oxford by a number of ties; an honourable recognition on our part, and a grateful affection on his. In Dr. Guest we have lost not indeed an Oxford man, but an Oxfordshire scholar, whose devotion to our studies, and whose only half completed labours, are well deserving to be had in remembrance. If I were able now to go beyond our immediate limits, I should say a word about Mr. Carlyle, but it would take me too far afield, and it is perhaps even a presumption in me to name him at all, or to claim for History a champion whose exploits are in all the regions of literary life.
​But, although we grieve over personal and special losses, the work in which we are engaged goes on without flagging. The accumulation of historical literature since 1876, within and without our own particular, range, has been remarkable for extent and interest. I cannot attempt to enumerate even the more conspicuous additions to our store, and it would be invidious to make a selection except in reference to our own share in the work. The Government publications, however, I may say, continue to maintain and even increase their value and interest: Mr. Gairdner, who has succeeded to Mr. Brewer's position, is giving us annual instalments of the history of Henry VIII, full of extraordinary revelations: before the year 1900 it may be possible that some one of us, gifted with strength, sight and perseverance, may write a complete history of the most critical of all reigns. Mr. Rawson Gardiner, a man who should be claimed and must be reclaimed for Oxford, is working, like a great constructive historian as he is, at the next most critical epoch. Mr. Creighton, even more entirely our own, has given us a splendid instalment of a great work which places him at once in the forefront of our phalanx. Mr. Freeman has completed his History of the Norman Conquest by the addition of the History of William Rufus. Mr. Fyffe has begun what will be a standard book on later history. I myself have finished my contributions, in a third volume, to Constitutional History; have edited six stout volumes of Chronicles in the Rolls series; and in the Appendices to the Report of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission have put together a mass of matter, which, whether or no it is worth the paper on which it is printed, is both true history and the result of hard work: of other designs, the accomplishment of which my removal from Oxford will probably prevent, I can scarcely speak: but I hope that I may find time to complete two or three things on which I have made considerable progress, a fourth volume of Councils, an edition of William of Malmesbury, a second series of Select Charters, and possibly a sketch of the Constitutional History of the Reformation. I am, as I warned you, running off into my own concerns. Mr. Tozer's beautiful edition of ​Finlay's Greece, Mr. Hodgkin's Italy and her Invaders, Professor Rogers' Extracts from Gascoigne, and two new volumes of the History of Agriculture, the collections and comments of Dr. Vigfusson and Mr. York Powell, Mr. Kitchin's third volume of French History, Mr. Sidney Owen's Selection of Wellesley and Wellington Dispatches, not to speak of the works in which History claims an equal share with Language or Law, testify to the zeal which the Delegates of the Press have encouraged in the same direction. Outside of our lines, time would fail me to tell of Mr. Skene's completed labours on Early Scotland, of the interesting aud suggestive work of Mr. Seebohm, of Mr. Elton's searching and comprehensive examination into the history of Primitive Britain; or going further ahead, of the immensely valuable editions and republications of the Laws and Chronicles of Germany, now proceeding under the management of Dr. Waitz, and full of illustration of the history of the common institutions of the German races.
It is most gratifying to a student of the institutions of England to find that in the literature of more distant nations the study of our constitution is taking an important place. I cannot refrain from expressing the great pleasure which it gives me to receive, from time to time, heavy volumes and light pamphlets of dissertations on the subjects at which we have been at work here, from scholars in Germany, Russia, Denmark, France, Italy and America, who read and criticise and utilise our books. From Berlin we hear of Dr. Gneist, reissuing and rewriting on his old subject; from Munich, of Dr. Liebermann re-editing the Anglo-Saxon Laws for the Bavarian Academy; from Vienna we have Dr. Budinger's lectures on the Englische Verfassungs-Geschichte; from Parma Signer Cardon's Svolgimento Storico; from Wiirzburg Dr. Schanz's Handelspolitik; Sickel doing the same work at Gottingen; Bronner at Berlin; Kovalefski and Vinogradojff in Russia; Steenstrup in Denmark; and in America, where our study has taken root with remarkable and most promising vigour, the clusters of searchers, such as the men of the Johns Hopkins University, and to specify particularly, Mr. Bigelow, the author of the work ​on Anglo-Norman Procedure, and the collector of the Placita Anglo-Normannica. Well, and let me confess—I hope that I have not been guilty of dishonestly receiving honours meant for other people—let me confess, that it has been exceedingly pleasant to me to receive from the Academies of Germany their recognition that the labours of the Oxford school have not been thrown away. I am very proud to be the recipient of diplomas signed by Döllinger and Giesebrecht, by Curtius, Pauli, Ritschl, and Dove, and to be numbered among the members of the American Academy.
But it is time that I should go on to another point. Since 1876 we have gone through the throes of a Commission and begun the struggles of a reorganisation. There is no reason why I should either speak or be silent about the general conduct of the Commission or the probable working of its results, except in relation to our own study and to the character of Professorial work as likely to be affected by the changes that are coming or come. I could have wished that the Commission had had more sympathy with literary and historical studies, that it had shown more appreciation of the true character of Professorial teaching, that it had seen, more distinctly than the new statutes seem to show that it did see, the imprudence of arranging the duties of Professors, the number and character of their lectures, not according to the nature of the subject but according to the amount of stipend forthcoming in the several cases. It surely was not necessary to treat the idle Professor as the typical Professor; it surely might have been enough to take the best means to secure a good Professor and have left him to work, not nominally but really, in the way in which he knew he could do the most good. Surely the idle professor, the chimaera bombinans in vacuo comedens secundas intentiones, should have been caught before he was tortured. No man has a greater capacity for idleness than I have, nor a greater desire of rest; sometimes I think the love of idleness is the greatest spur to exertion: anyhow I have been made to work, even without the Visitatorial Board. But what I want to say is this: it is possible in certain subjects to carry on research and elementary ​visiting together; it must be so in logic and grammar; in mathematics, possibly, although there it must be more difficult; in language, if the pupils are forward, it must be feasible: but in abstruse philosophy and in minute historical research it is not possible to do both things easily and at once. An arrangement of occasional epideictic lectures, ordinary elementary teaching in class, and informal instruction out of class, is symmetrical enough and useful enough where it can be applied, but it is not of universal application, or suited to Professors of all calibres. Restricting my remark to my own study, I will say, if an Oxford Professor of History is to be a man to be trusted to maintain the reputation of his University, to keep abreast with foreign scholars, and to conduct research on his own account, he ought to have been left with some discretion as to the management of his teaching. I have often felt, when I was busy with some matter that required concentration of thought and continuity of investigation, that I would rather have broken into my line of work by going and giving a lecture in Euclid or Algebra, than by coming down to an elementary discourse, in which, from the very affinity of the subjects, I should be constantly tempted to revert to the minute point on which my special labours in my study were fixed, to the confusion of the class and to the damage of the subject that I had to treat before them. It was in order to avoid this that for some years I wrote out my lectures before term began; a plan which has obvious drawbacks, chiefly in what is called losing touch with the class. Afterwards I lectured on texts rather more freely; latterly, as my classes regularly diminished, I took up more out-of-the-way subjects, and very nearly succeeded in getting rid of my classes altogether; in the end I have reverted to my first plan. Well, perhaps I never was fit for the place; anyhow, on the now stereotyped plan of the Professoriate, it is as well that I should go. I am told that the great historical works of the great foreign professors have been accomplished by men who have done much elementary lecturing and much informal instruction. That is true, but it is to be remembered that the great German professors have the power and the right to ​direct the studies of their pupils, classes and individuals, to the specialised and differentiated details of their own subject, not merely to general class examinations in which all the candidates are expected to show the same sort of knowledge derived from the same sort of books. What I wanted from the Commission was not less work but more liberty; what I succeeded in getting was a little more elasticity of tether. But I will not grumble any more: it is over; both the evidence, voluminous and appreciative^ the formal audience, so redolent of sympathy and profound attention on the part of the Commissioners, the lively meetings of council and committee, and the truly charming debates of the professors and tutors: let them have the light that never was on sea or land, in the sweetness of memory,—a consecration, a professor's dream; at all events we have a system of faculties, informal instruction, and a visitatorial board.
But let us go on to more serious things than these. I have spent nearly eighteen very happy years in Oxford: holding the office for a longer period than any of my predecessors except Spence, who was professor for twenty-six years. Dr. Nowell, who was professor for thirty years, and Dr. Nares, who occupied the chair for twenty-eight years. The principal event that touches the constitutional position of the Professorship during my occupation is its final and complete connexion with Oriel College. Of the professors before me, three. Dr. Beeke, who was in office during the early years of this century, and two better known men. Dr. Arnold and Mr. Halford Vaughan, had been fellows of Oriel. The Ordinance of 1857, passed nearly at the end of Mr. Vaughan's tenure of office, allowed Oriel College to undertake the payment of a considerable sum in augmentation of the annual income provided by King George II, which augmentation might be exchanged for a fellowship of the College: and by a University Statute of 1859 a new body of regulations was provided for the conduct of the professor. Under these Mr. Goldwin Smith and I have held office; he being, as fellow of University, ineligible for the Oriel Fellowship, became by election after his resignation an honorary fellow, and I was in 1868 elected to the fellowship ​which I still hold: henceforth the Regius Professor will, under the Commissioners' Statutes, be a Professor Fellow. Whilst I look back with pride and gratitude on the honour which the College conferred on me so early in my career as professor, and with a lifelong pleasure on the friendships that my connexion with Oriel enabled me to form, I fear that I have been a very unprofitable member of governing body and educational staff: I console myself with the reflexion that there are some minds, which, in some situations, acquit themselves of their responsibilities most satisfactorily by never getting in the way. Non-obstructiveness is not the highest degree of efficiency, but there are worse faults. Anyhow my successor will have a chance in this line of work of approving his superiority to what has gone before.
The fact that two of my predecessors are alive and well is a matter of congratulation: Mr. Halford Vaughan and Mr. Goldwin Smith have both conferred on the Professorship an honour which I am glad to recognise. Both, eminent as scholars and political thinkers, lectured during the sixteen years of my absence from Oxford; there are some, however, left who remember Mr. Vaughan's lectures under the old system, the soundness and learning displayed in them and the stimulus which they supplied to the study of Modern History at the moment that it was taking its place among the recognised subjects of the Schools. It was whilst Mr. Vaughan was Professor that the School of Law and History was organised; Mr. Goldwin Smith, as I said, lectured under the new arrangements of 1859 and was examiner in 1862. I rejoice to know that on neither of these gentlemen has the study of the subject, that I have lived and worked for, produced any exhausting or debilitating effects; and, when I consider the case of my successor designate, 'the Regius Professor elect,' and think how many books he has written, and in how many fields he has shown his prowess, and how now, some few years my senior in standing, he is preparing to take my work on his shoulders, to go on writing, to give public statutory lectures, ordinary lectures, informal instruction, and to face the Board of Faculty and the Visitatorial Board, I ​flatter myself that the energy with which he will go to work will not be damped with the reflexion that his predecessors ever broke down. I am very glad to welcome him back to Oxford, to the home and the studies that he has loved so well, as the great champion and representative of that branch of historic literature on which I believe the success of the study here to depend. Not that he is eminent in this alone. But I am now flattering myself and not him.
And so I come to my parting words. I am going to leave Oxford, not for a place of rest, but for a post of work. I frankly confess that I have always worked towards an ideal of rest; my own anticipations have been, after a few years more here, during which I might see some of my boys started in the world, I might have retired, we will say to the Parks, and have given no more lectures. But I have always believed, in the case of other people, that the reward of good work is to have more work given you; and I do trust that it may be so with myself. If the gifts that I have done my best to make useful here are such as can for a little time be made useful elsewhere, I am grateful and hopeful in the change, although it is so very different from anything that I thought I was working for.
I am going to leave with Oxford many, very many friends; to leave but not I trust to lose them. I hope that I have made no enemies, I have more dread of making enemies than is at all consistent with a properly constituted moral courage. I hope that I have succeeded. At all events I have never reviewed the books of ally or opponent, or any one else, I have never given pain or incurred hostility in that way. I have abstained from controversy, religious, political or historical, for I have tried to live up to my own ideal of a strong position, that it consists far more in proved confidence in your own cause, in the vigilant maintenance of your own defences, in the thorough realisation of your sources of strength and weakness, than in the most adroit use of weapons or the most energetic tactics of aggression. I have never scrupled to correct my own mistakes, and I have never made a captious use of the mistakes of other men. I trust ​that I have never plucked a candidate in the Schools without giving him every opportunity of setting himself right. I hope that I have never intrigued or bullied: I do not say this with any wish to imply that such things are ever done here; although the popular idea of the professorial character might suggest the need of a disclaimer; but, if there was temptation to do so, I claim to have resisted it. So much I trust that you will let me take credit for. I know that I have great faults; I have a good deal of sympathy but too little zeal: sometimes I have feared that, in my lack of zeal, my fellow- workers have detected or suspected a lack of sympathy: somehow the adage 'melior est conditio prohibentis' does come to be confused with or to be interpreted into the policy of 'How not to do it': perhaps I have tried to work too much in my own way and too little in theirs. Then too, I have never been able to reconcile myself with smoking, late hours, dinner parties, Sunday breakfasts, or University sermons: nor is Joe Pullen's tree such a land-mark in my life as it might very well be to the benefit of my constitution. I will say no more about informal instruction; I think that need not be remembered against me; if I am not mistaken, I have read over many proof-sheets and my name appears as the name of a helper in many prefaces.
Well so much for my apologia and confession! for want of zeal, for weakness of temper, for occasional absence of discretion, I do ask pardon of all whom I may have offended, or disappointed or misunderstood. I do not mind under the circumstances being called sentimental; I feel sentimental. I confess that I do hope that you will remember me kindly; and I wish to be judged, as I have tried to judge other historical personages, according as I have acted or have not acted up to my lights. I know that I have not been much of an organiser; I dislike to organise for other people, I still more dislike other people to organise for me; I have a great dislike of hard and fast rules, I would not so rule other people, I should still more dislike to have such rules made for me. If there is any virtue in this love of freedom, do not think that I am blind to the drawbacks which beset it. Only ​all men have not the same gifts, and happily all men are not set to the same tasks, even Professors under schedules. Please to think of me as of one who, very conscious of his own shortcomings, and wanting, consciously wanting, in many of the instincts of the successful Academic administrator, still tried to do his duty; tried to maintain for History its proper place among the studies of Oxford, and to maintain the reputation of Oxford as a nursery of historical study among the Academies of Europe; tried and worked hard to do honour to the University, to Christ Church, and to the Colleges, to which he owes, humanly speaking, all that he has and is, and his capacity for doing better.