Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/659

 Elton : Frederick J Wk Pcnvcll 649 noted; his fugitive work has been tastefully brought together; and all the friends of York Powell — and he had a genius for friendship — will be grateful to Mr. Elton for placing this memorial of their departed friend in their hands. A review article is not the place in which to summarize the facts of York Powell's life; these are to be found in his biography. But a review article is the only place in which the importance of his work as a professor of history can be criticized and estimated, and it is upon this subject that the present reviewer believes he has something worth the saying. Mr. Elton, as I have said, has excellently put together the facts of York Powell's life, and has brought out with particular skill the latter years of that life, after his appointment to the Regius Professor- ship of Modern History at Oxford, in succession to Froude, in 1894. My intimacy with Powell began in 1882 and continued until 1894 when I came to America. I well remember the beginning of his acquaintance with Mr. Elton, and can therefore state that I have some qualifications to discuss the development of York Powell's ideas as to history in the years before he made Mr. Elton's acquaintance. Others, like his friend and successor in the chair of history, Mr. C. H. Firth, might have contributed something along this line to Mr. Elton's biography of York Powell, but I believe that I am right in saying that he discussed history at greater length with me than with aiiy one else during those forma- tive years. I can remember many long sessions, when I was his guest at Christ Church, in which we discussed the new developments in the trade of a historian, and I witnessed his gradual conversion from a somewhat romantic ' idealism and even from a tampering with the so- called philosophy of history into the strenuous assertion of the modern views of the historian's work, which is so well set forth in certain papers reprinted by Mr. Elton in the first section of his second volume. When I first knew York Powell he was a law tutor at Christ Church with a prodigious memory, a vast fund of miscellaneous knowledge, and an instinct for the scientific investigation of the truth. But he was not yet a historian. His scientific training had been acquired by his studies with Vigfusson in preparing the Corpus Poeticiim Boreale, and his trend of thought was rather toward Icelandic scholarship than historical work. But during the twelve years in which I saw much of him, and especially after Vigfusson's death, he turned more and more toward history, and alike in his reviewing work for the Manchester Guardian and in his semi-editorial work for the Clarendon Press, as for instance upon Sir James Ramsay's Lancaster and York, he began to consider the principles upon which history should be written. Since he had never had any regular historical training, he had to work out those principles for himself. Beginning in the early eighties with a distinct interest in the philosophy of history and some rather fanci- ful ideas as to the duties of a historian, the rigor of his training with Vigfusson and of his own law studies turned him more and more toward the practical duties of a historian in discovering and stating the truth.