Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/83

 ON THE PURPOSES AND METHODS OF HISTORICAL STUDY.

(May 15, 1877.)

AST year, in fulfilment of my statutable obligation to deliver two solemn lectures annually on some subject of modern history or political biography, I took occasion of the fact that I was just completing my tenth year of service as Professor, to discuss some of the more obvious phenomena which had, during the preceding ten years, marked the progress of Historical Study in Oxford first and in Europe generally. As is invariably the case when one has written a book or made a speech, subsequent reflexion, after no long time, brings home to one the conviction that, besides saying much that were better unsaid, one has left out very much that ought to have been said if the intention were to be realised with which the discussion was attempted. In this particular instance, I confess, one whole region of my subject was left out of sight: my object, indeed, was principally to view the extension and advance of the study, and it was only incidentally that I felt called upon to say a word here and there on the method and purposes of it. But, judging from the utterances which have recently, both before and after the delivery of those two lectures, fallen from the mouths of some of the most clever and cultivated men of this generation, it would appear that the method and purpose of historical reading were points by no means second in interest to the external development of the study of history.

These utterances are in themselves valuable as the mature judgments of men who have at all. events known how to draw from history precious lessons on the subjects on which they desired to be taught; but they have an additional value in