Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 7.djvu/287

 ii8.vn.APKn.M9iw NOTES AND QUERIES. 279 and throughout the country deeds were burnt to the accompaniment of peals of bells, while the people danced to the cry of ' Vive la Repub- Uque !' " After the Terror the College de France remained standing, " but the Professor of History found it advisable to select his subjects from the ancient world." In the last year of the Con- sulate Napoleon abolished the Academy of Moral and Political Science, and created a department of Ancient History and Literature, but no place was found for modern and mediaeval history, although Daunou was appointed to the control of the national archives. A chapter is devoted to the Romantic School— Thierry and Michelet; followed by the Political School—Guizot, Mignet, Thiers. Of Thiers's ' Consulate and Empire ' Mr. Gooch says: " It must always occupy a prominent place in historiography. It was written by one of the foremost political figures of the century. It was among the main factors in the growth of the Napoleonic legend." Hut Thiers knew little of Germany, and " his knowledge of England was still less, and one of the blots on his work is his failure to do justice to the policy of Pitt and the genius of Wellington." The story of France is closed with the disaster of 1870. Of Napoleon III. Mr. Gooch writes that he " suffered first from adulation, then from ralumny. There is no longer need for either. His reign was brilliant and deadly, superficial and tragic. He was a mixture of Machiavelli and Don Quixote, whom it is impossible to hate. However severe the judgment both of the ruler and the man, the impression he leaves is rather of melancholy than of anger." As regards our own country, the English people were slow to take interest in history, partly, no doubt, from the way in which it was taught in schools, with the drudgery of learning by rote the dates of the kings and queens and a few of the events that took place during their reign. Sharon Turner's ' Anglo-Saxons,' Gibbon, Robertson, and Hume failed to take hold on the general reader. Then came Hallam's ' Europe in the Middle Ages,' from which " may be dated the beginning of systematic historical study in England." Of Lingard Mr. Gooch says that " he won reputa- tion as a serious historian by his ' Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church.' Though the object of the book was to glorify the Catholic centuries, he wrote with a reticence that rendered it palatable to Protestant readers." Of Macaulay's Essays Mr. Gooch writes with enthusiasm : " If Macaulay did not invent the historical essay, he found it of brick, and left it of marble." Macaulay, as Mr. Gooch rightly says, " was the first English writer to make history universally inter- esting." There are many still living who re- member the rapid sale of the volumes of his ' History' on publication, and the rush to Mudie's to obtain the loan of them by such as could not afford to buy. Never before or since has the public been so excited over the publication of an historical work. Of the Essays, Mr. Gooch thinks that on Warren Hastings per- haps the most brilliant. There are only two to which exception is taken : that on Rurleigh, " a thoroughly mediocre performance," and that on Bacon, " the most dramatic failure of his [Macaulay's] life." Bacon, however, has been since vindicated by Dixon and by Spcdding. The only other writer of that period who gave an impetus to history was Carlyle when he wrota that " wild, savage book," ' The French Revolu- tion,' that had come " hot out of his own soul, born in blackness, whirlwind, and sorrow." Mr. Gooch criticizes its faults and mistakes, as he does those of ' Frederick ' ; but we cannot agree with him that while ' Frederick' is " full of purple patches," it "adds little to knowledge." He is, we consider, altogether too hard on Carlyle, although he says of him that he was "the great- est of English historical portrait-painters." An epoch in historiography occurred in I860, when Green published his ' Short History.' " The hero of the book was the people ; only thus could English history be conceived as a whole. The deeds of kings fall into their pre per place, and we hear little of drums and trumpets." As Mr. Gooch well puts it, " the history of England was no longer an old almanack," but the development of a living organism, the English people." We trust we have said enough to induce students to purchase the book for themselves. In a future edition Mr. Gooch will no doubt make additions, and we hope he will then give more space to the work of recent historians. We would also put in a plea for Charles Knight, who, although ho had no pretensions to scholar- ship, produced the first popular complete history of England, fall of good illustrations. The Fleming* in Oxford: being Documents selected from the Rydal Papers in illustration of the Lives and Ways of Oxford Men, 1050-1700. Edited by John Richard Magrath.—Vol. I. 1650-1680; Vol. II. 1680-1690. (Oxford Historical Society.) The interest of these papers lies not more in the Eicture they give us of Oxford life during the latter alf of the seventeenth century than in the insight they afford into the relations between Oxford and the world outside. Daniel Fleming was a North- Country magnate, a large landholder in Westmor- land, Cumberland, and Lancashire, a man of family and of sufficient wealth, himself the father of fifteen children, and a person whose education and natural capacity fitted him to discharge worthily the obligations of his position. He had been him- self a Commoner of Queen's College, Oxford, and to Oxford he sent four of his eleven sons—three to- Queen's, one to St. Edmund Hall. From the vast mass of correspondence preserved by him Dr. Magrath has selected, and most minutely anno- tated, all that is dated from Oxford, or addressed to Oxford, as well as any other letters which may serve to illustrate the outlook and temper of Oxford men who had passed beyond the range of the University. To these he has added numerous extracts from Daniel Fleming's great book of accounts, which are concerned rather with domestic life in the North than with Oxford, but include many interesting items bearing on the schooling of boys : the customs, the books used, and the attit ude of masters and scholars towards one another, as well as details of expenditure for wages, journeys, and the more casual demands of daily life. The student will seek in vain for any outstand- ing personality, any touches of genius, any new or shrewd judgment on tho important affairs then enacting, in the correspondence of these Oxford men. Daniel Fleming is by much the most striking figure here presented, but none of his friends seems