Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/632

 62 2 Reviews of Books of the activity of the late Lord Acton as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. The first lecture is Lord Acton's inaugural address "On the Study of History", delivered June ii, 1895, and pub- lished the following year. Then follow nineteen brief lectures on mod- ern history from " The Beginning of the Modern State " and " The New World " to the ten pages on " The American Revolution " (from 1763 to 1787 j. These lectures give a brief survey of the leading movements and personalities between 1300 and 1787. Two appendixes give Lord Acton's directions to the contributors to the Cambridge Modern History and the notes and references on which he based his inaugural lecture. With the exception of the chapters on " Calvin and Henry VHL", " The Rise of the Whigs ", and " The Hanoverian Settlement ", the chapter- titles are those used in all general histories. Indeed it is in some ways the best text-book for a college class in general European history to 1789 yet published. Two productions in the book are well worth including: the inaugural lecture with the citations and quotations with which Lord Acton fortified his views, and the directions to the editors of the Cambridge Modern History. The inaugural " On the Study of History ", which is already familiar to historical students, is many things in one. It is a plea for the study of history as a search for truth, a quest for the permanent and abiding, for a mastery of the past that we may know the present, yes, even the future as Pitt and Mirabeau and Mallet du Pan knew it. It is a plea for history that makes us wiser without our producing books, for the cultivation of historical-mindedness. It puts religion as the first of human concerns and the mother of freedom and toleration — a condition which through the delayed but unarrested development of the Reforma- tion has put Protestant countries in the van of progress. The address is rich in things not here mentioned and is worth re- reading. Indeed it demands it, for Lord Acton's method of presenting a thought is like that of a great mathematician whose mind leaps from major equation to major equation and leaves you to toil through the in- termediate operations that to him were self-evident. Occasionally his subtlety approaches downright obscurity. The notes and citations show the Lord Acton of whose appalling breadth of reading one hears. In the fortification of twenty-eight pages of the text easily over two hun- dred writers are cited, several of them a half-dozen times from almost as many different productions. The regrettable part is the picture all this calls up of Lord Acton gathering these excerpts to fortify a sug- gestion which he had already transmuted into the better metal of his own thought. The instructions to contributors to the Cambridge Modern History form a worthy memorial of Lord Acton's ideals as a historian. He wanted a " Universal History — which is distinct from the combined his- tory of all countries, which is not a rope of sand, but a continuous de- velopment, and is not a burden on the memory, but an illumination of