Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/66

 rule they give more real information as to the work criticised than ours do; and they are more moderate in denunciation.

So much of our reviewing is done in newspapers and critical notes in magazines and quarterlies that this sort of criticism nearly engrosses the name; and the great old reviews are come to be collections of essays, the book supposed to be criticised standing merely in the place of text or thesis to a discourse in which neither book nor author may be mentioned. But the historical value of this sort of essay might be very great; and, as history is of course only one of the subjects that compete for a limited number of places in such periodicals, it has frequently been suggested that we should have a historical review of our own; by 'we,' I mean the students of history who are at work here or in London and elsewhere connected with the two Universities. Such a design has much to recommend it. It would be very becoming to the English school of history to have an accredited organ; it ought not to be beyond our powers and resources to maintain such a journal as is kept alive in many of the smaller universities of Germany; and it would be very useful indeed to have a record of the incidental discoveries, and of the minor studies which every historical scholar makes in the process of his work, many of which are thrown away as soon as the immediate occasion for their use is over, or, being employed as appendices to works already too bulky, remain practically unread and unknown. But there are objections or rather hindrances to such a scheme which have hitherto been sufficient to prevent us from making the attempt. It is very questionable whether we can as yet appeal to a public sufficiently extended, and sufficiently educated, to make the design remunerative to either publishers or contributors: the writers whose work would be most valuable are all of them busy men to whom the writing of two or three articles a year would, if made a matter of rigueur, become exceedingly burdensome; and the prospects of any new review in England at this moment can hardly be called encouraging. The older quarterlies have long ceased to provide us with such reading as was found in the Edinburgh and Quarterly of fifty years ago, when Hallam, Allen, and Palgrave