Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/351

 But it is time to be serious. If it is fair to estimate the importance of a reign by the contrast which may be drawn between the two that precede and follow it, the reign of Henry VII should be regarded as one of the most important, and in some respects the most important reign in English History. But to argue thus would really be a mistake; really much of the importance that does attach to it is not its own, but arises from the general character of the age in which it fell, the criftical, transitional age, which would have been very much what it was whatever sort of king was on the throne of England.

If the points which English History has thus in common with general European History during this period be left out of consideration, both the interest and the real significance of the actual events of the history of England fall into the background. Such interest as it has becomes a dreary and commonplace interest; its dramatic action, if it can be said to have any, is extremely slow; there is little that calls for sympathy in men or institutions, and the pages of the annalist are dry and jejune to an exceptional degree. And what interest it has in the nature of personal incident, is apart from the life of the nation. With the single exception of that part of the incident which concerns the conspiracies and pretensions of the Yorkist faction, which again derives its interest from the tragedy of the preceding reign, the pages of the annalist, where there are any, are so dull that we scarcely complain of their jejuneness. We have no temptation to follow the humdrum movements of the court as we trace the military itinerary of Edward I or the judicial itinerary of Henry II; and it is by an effort that we have to remind ourselves what great things, irrespective of political events, were going on in England during these years; how it was the period of the great activity of Caxton and his early followers, the period of the foundation or development of colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, of the renewal of old studies, of the friendship of Erasmus and More; of discovery of a new world, and of unexampled development of commercial enterprise.

It is cuiious how little notice is taken of these things