Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/40

 have I done? How have I done it? How far have I fulfilled my own hopes? How far have I realised the good wishes of my friends? How have I justified the good opinion of those who placed me where I am? Perhaps it would be more modest if I left it to others to judge and to pass judgment. But I would rather try to report what I have tried to do, and how I have tried to do it, than leave it unsaid. No man is so fit to review a book as the author himself, because he both knows what he meant to say and will be the first to hear and feel what his kind friends the critics would make the world believe that he has said. In the first place, let me say that I have tried to fulfil the promise which I made in my inaugural lecture—' I desire to introduce myself to you not as a philosopher, not as a politician, but as a worker at history.' That I have worked at history is, I think, proved by the bulk of the results: for during the ten years I have completed ten volumes, and nearly an eleventh volume, of the English Historians published by the Master of the Rolls; I have edited the whole of the third volume and assisted in the first and second volumes of the Councils of the English Church; I have published the volume of Select Charters, which has now passed into a third edition, and two volumes of the Constitutional History of England, besides other work edited or passed through the press for practical aid in historical study. I am aware that it is not the bulk but the character of the work by which it must ultimately be tried; I can only say that I hope my work has not been unworthy of Oxford, or of England. Judging from the reception accorded to it, I think I should say that it has met with more appreciative and intelligent reception in Germany than in England; and I may add that I believe that I owe to this the honour, and a very great honour I esteem it, of an invitation to take part as a fellow editor in the great series of German Historical Monuments, known for the last fifty years under the name of Pertz, which has now passed into the hands of a commission of which Dr. Waitz is the chief. I am proud indeed to be an instrument, in the humblest way, in repaying the debt which English history owes to German scholarship.