Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/229

1922 Flora of the Island of Arran, on which he published a work in 1859. at the age of 21, to Modern Democracies, on which he published two volumes in 1921, when he was 83. He wrote books of travel; books of descriptive politics (with which his name will perhaps be specially associated); studies in law, and studies in history. Two of his books—the Holy Roman Empire and the American Commonwealth—are permanent classics; two others—his Studies in History and Jurisprudence and his Modern Democracies—are mines of solid learning and searching observation. If he did not write on the classics, he was a sound classical scholar, with a classical scholar's gift of happy quotation. If he was a politician, he was also an educationalist. One of his early writings was a report on the condition of education in Lancashire, published in 1867; and he rendered an even greater service when he acted as chairman of a royal commission on secondary education in 1894. If any man ever did, he may seem to have filled his life and fulfilled his plans. Yet he had his unachieved ambitions. The work on Modern Democracies was originally planned as a History of Democracy; but the mass of material proved too abundant for the potter's hand. And there was a work on Justinian of which he sometimes spoke, and of which, it may be, some portions are to be found among his unpublished papers.

He was a spare figure, with eyes that you could not but associate with a rapid and piercing vision, set deep under bushy brows. His voice was not resonant, and it had no large compass; but he persuaded and convinced by the weight of what he said. He had a great discourse in conversation. He had seen many countries, and lived through many years; and his retentive memory gave him a rich material on which he readily drew. There were times when his wealth was his own embarrassment; and discursiveness might on occasion be the penalty of his width of range. But he had a shrewd judgement: he never missed the point, even if he turned aside for the moment to follow the many suggestions of association which his memory conjured before him; and you could trust him to reach with a just precision the conclusion of the whole matter. He had the encyclopaedic mind which is vouchsafed to a chosen few among scholars. He could readily have joined the company of Scaliger or Casaubon or Grotius. Perhaps he was not, in the strict modern sense, a researcher; but he was, to a very high degree, an inquirer. He was an eager traveller in many lands, with a zest for climbing; and he travelled in the mind as he travelled in the body, with no less zest for reaching peaks and points of vantage. He had that abundant curiosity which is the mother of observation and wisdom; and it was joined with an