Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/74

 And this leads me on to that farther circle of European historic study towards which I have been looking at several points in both these lectures. We ought to be taking advantage of the great interest with which English history is now being read in Germany, and, more than that, we ought to learn from that interest that German history might be quite as remunerative to us as ours is to the Germans. Such has always been my contention. The study of French and Italian history appeals to our fancy, to our ecclesiastical and political tastes, but the history of Germany is bound up with our national and natural identity. And you may depend upon it, in our comparative history we have to receive as much as we have to give. Consider the number of precious contributions that we have received already. Immeasurably the best edition of the Anglo-Saxon Laws, by Schmid; the work of Lappenberg and Konrad Maurer on Anglo-Saxon Constitutional Antiquities; Pauli's exhaustive History of Medieval England; Ranke's History of England under the Stewarts; Pauli's History of the Present Century, of which the third volume has just appeared, furnishing by far the most accurate and well-proportioned view of recent history, and anticipating, I do not question it, most of the conclusions of the next generation, as to the great men and great events on which we have looked too closely to see them in their due proportion and relations. There is scarcely a nook of our ancient and medieval history which the Germans are not now exploring. To Jaffé we owe the republication, from original texts, of the writings of Aldhelm and Boniface, the first Englishmen who wrote at all. The letters of Alcuin, the great scholar of York and light of learning in the West, have not only been most elaborately edited by Jaffé, Dümmler and Wattenbach, but are being subjected to a minute historical analysis by Professor Sickel at Vienna, an analysis which brings out, and must bring out more and more as it proceeds, the points of international and inter-ecclesiastical intercourse in the critical century of Anglo-Saxon growth. The Roman and the early Christian inscriptions in Britain have found in Dr. Hübner a critic who not only can collect and record and