2t8 C. F. Adams compare, he cumbers the shelves of our libraries with an accumula- tion of volumes which are not literature. Of Henry Thomas Buckle and of John Richard Green I will speak together, and with respectful admiration. Both were prema- turely cut off, almost in what with historical writers is the period of promise ; for, while Green at the time of his death was forty-seven, Buckle was not yet forty-one. What they did, therefore, — and they both did much, — was indicative only of what they might have done. Judged by that, — ex pede Herculeni, — I hold that they come nearer to the ideal of what a twentieth-century historian should be than any other writers in our modern English tongue. That Buckle was crude, impulsive, hasty in generalization and paradoxical in judgment is not to be gainsaid ; but he wrote before Darwin ; and, when he published his history, he was but thirty-six. What might he not have become had he been favored with health, and lived to sixty ! Very different in organization, he and Green alike possessed in high degree the spirit of investigation and the historical insight, combined with a well-developed literarj^ sense. Men of untiring research, they had the faculty of expression. Artists as well as scholars, they inspired. Their early death was in my judgment an irreparable loss to English historical lore and the best historical treatment. I come now to Macaulay, Carlyle and Froude, the three literary masters of the century who have dealt with history in the English tongue ; and I shall treat of them briefly, and in the inverse order. Froude is redeemed by a sense of literary form ; as an historian he was learned, but inaccurate, and his judgment was fatally defective. He was essentially an artist. Carlyle was a poet rather than an his- torian. A student, with the insight of a seer and a prophet's voice, his judgment was fatally biassed. A wonderful rhaster of form, his writings will endure ; but rather as epics in prose than as historical monuments. Macaulay came, in my judgment, nearer than any other English writer of the century to the great historical stature ; but he failed to attain it. The cause of his failure is an instructive as well as an interesting study. Thomas Babington Macaulay is unquestionably the most popu- lar historian that ever wrote. His history, when it appeared, was the literary sensation of the day, and its circulation increased with each succeeding volume. Among historical works, it alone has in its vogue thrown into the shade the most successful novels of the century, — those of Scott, Thackeray and Dickens, Jane Eyre, Robert Elsuiere, and even Richard Cari'd, the last ephemeral sen- sation ; but, of the three great attributes of the historian, Macaulay was endowed with only one. He was a man of vast erudition ; and,
