angry exclamation, but she checked him with a wave of her hand.

"Young man," she said, "I counsel you to pray to St. Anthony, your patron, to grant me patience. With what foolish inventions are you filling our ears? If you truly come from Sir William Roden to me, you must know that my Lord Marlowe visited Ruddiford with the purpose of asking Mistress Margaret's hand for his brother, whom you see there. He bore letters from me to Sir William. This letter is surely a reply to them, and I make no doubt at all that Sir William accepts my proposal, and Lord Marlowe's. You are ill instructed, Master Secretary, unless your ignorance be feigned. I cannot tell your object, but I advise you to beware."

Antonio, trembling, went down on one knee. "Madam, have pity, and be just," he said, with eyes that implored. "I can only tell you what happened; your anger is a mystery to me. Lord Marlowe arrived at Ruddiford on Christmas Eve. At once, in my hearing and that of others, he offered himself,-himself, I do solemnly assure you -in marriage to Mistress Margaret. There was no word of marriage with this gentleman," he turned his head towards Richard, who suddenly laughed aloud.

"Is she beautiful, this Mistress Margaret of yours?" he said.

"She is a fair young lady," Antonio answered, with lowered eyes.

"And Sir William? And my letters?" Lady Marlowe asked, with quick fierceness.

Antonio, still kneeling, with natural eloquence told his story. "The whole affair seemed to Sir William passing strange," he said. "He felt that he could do but one thing,-lay it before your ladyship. Therefore, as no letter could fully explain it, he sent me."

His voice faltered a little. Lady Marlowe, leaning on her desk, shading her

eyes with long white fingers loaded with rings, watched him so that the young fellow, bold, cunning, but with little experience, shivered to the marrow of his bones; yet it was not quite with fear, but rather with the fascination of a bird before a snake. He had been fairly sure that in all this strange business it would be wiser to find himself on Lady Marlowe's side. Now he seemed to know that this position might mean more than he had reckoned

on.

"Mother, what shall we do?" young Richard's voice broke in roughly. "Must I lose Ruddiford? Can I now marry this woman whom Harry has left behind?"

"Peace, Dick," said Lady Marlowe. Then she looked again at Antonio. "Go, and rest," she said. "Come back to me in the evening, and you shall hear my will."

Then Richard Marlowe watched his mother as she read Sir William Roden's letter, smiling over it, but not pleas antly. There was something in her look which kept the young man silent till she had done.

"Yes, Dick," she said at last. "And they say that your brother is not mad?" "Nor is he, Mother. I do not trust that foreign fellow. It may be all a string of lies."

"But with what object? No, he has told the truth,-or part of it. I would put him to the question, but the boy is too pretty," and she laughed.

"His face does not please me; 'tis black and villainous," said Richard. "But, Mother, I counted on being Master of Ruddiford; you had promised. Will Harry come back from the wars and marry this maiden, and take the castle and estates for himself? And all without a word to you and me?"

"I suppose," said Lady Marlowe, "after this Wakefield battle, the Queen and Harry will do as they please. But

him with reverence and affection. It is indeed wholesome to read of a life so honest, simple, manly, and true. The idea of cant or pretence was loathsome to him. When he was bored by a long service, with many hymns, he said so. Most things did bore him, except history, real religion, and fun. His humor was irrepressible; and he seldom attempted to repress it. He did not even require an audience. I remember, when I was at Oxford, contemplating with awe the Professor of History, as he read in the Union a magazine which contained a review by Mr. Froude of Sir George Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay. Suddenly he got up, and put down his Fraser with the muttered words: "When rhetoricians fall out, historians may come by their own." That seems to me more artistic than Mr. Hutton's solemn description of Hallam as "the strangest of all pretenders to impartiality where any Churchman or Church question was concerned." Hallam was a Whig. Stubbs was a Tory. It is possible to admire one without sneering at the other; and Stubbs, at least, paid Hallam the compliment of stopping where he began. Mr. Hutton is apparently a prey to the delusion that there can be only one kind of history and one kind of historian. Stubbs never forgot that he was a clergyman, or, as Mr. Hutton says, a Churchman. But it would be as bigoted to complain of him on that ground, as to find fault with Hallam for taking the side of the laity. Stubbs, like Hallam, had his prejudices; like Hallam, he was human, and he was always loyal to the Church he served. What was perhaps most admirable and most touching was the quaint homeliness, the simple modesty with which he concealed his vast store of laboriously acquired information. Not even the self-sacrificing generosity with which, in spite of his large family, he cut down all needless expenses that

he might have more to give away, is more truly Christian than his unnatural freedom from the pride of intellect or knowledge.

It was no easy path to learning that he took. Although he came of a good old Yorkshire stock, and his forbears had been yeomen time out of mind, his father could not send him to a public school, or to a good school of any kind; and he would not have gone to Oxford if he had not been taken as a servitor at Christchurch. He had, of course, great natural ability, and a memory which never failed him. But he read prodigiously before he won his First Class and his Fellowship at Trinity. If he owed his early chance to Archbishop Longley, whom he al ways gratefully revered, from the moment he set foot in Christchurch he did everything for himself. He was never tired of reading, and he never forgot what he read. If he had become a College Tutor, he would certainly have been popular, and would probably have written some of the wittiest rhymes in the Oxford anthology. In this respect he began badly, as Mr. Hutton needlessly illustrates. But he steadily improved; and his well-known lines on Froude and Kingsley, too familiar for quotation, have all the marks of a good epigram, except brevity. On the other hand, he found the country, as Creighton found it after him, propitious for a student's life. He had no great love of it in itself; and he regarded two daily services in his church as an obligation. Like Creighton, he took pupils, one of whom was Mr. Swinburne. Here, again, Mr. Hutton is unfortunate, and with less excuse than before. Because Mr. Swinburne wrote him a warm and affectionate letter about his old tutor, Mr. Hutton must needs make a personal attack upon the late Master of Balliol, to whom Mr. Swinburne was sincerely and deeply attached. Although there

was not much in common between

Stubbs and Jowett, they were on friendly terms; and Stubbs became Chaplain at Balliol while Jowett was Master. But even a "Churchman" is intolerable to Mr. Hutton, when he happens to be a Broad Churchman. While vicar of Navestock, in Essex, Stubbs was also a guardian of the poor and a diocesan inspector of schools. When Archbishop Longley was translated from York to Canterbury, in 1862, he made Stubbs librarian at Lambeth, and in 1863 his appointment by Sir John Romilly, to edit for the famous Rolls Series the Chronicles of Richard the First, was a vast benefit to learning. His characters of Richard himself, of Dunstan, of Henry the Second, of Edward the First, proved to historical students that a new historian had arisen, compared with whom Brewer, and Luard, and Shirley were mere antiquaries and Dryasdusts. Although Stubbs was rather afraid of eloquence, and picturesque historians, such as Macaulay, did not appeal to him, yet few men could be more eloquent than

he, or more vividly epigrammatic. Take, for instance, the contrast between Richard and Saladin, which is much more than the "trick of telling phrase" that Mr. Hutton calls it.

knew the two men, by study and insight, as a contemporary knew them, that he could describe them from the soul outwards, not from the skin inwards. Stubbs's perfect singleness of mind and disinterested love of truth for its own sake, his native Yorkshire shrewdness, combined with the thoroughness and accuracy of his research, qualified him, as no other man was qualified, to find the living among the dead, and to draw from musty documents a human drama. Although he said, in reference to Buckle, that he did not believe in the philosophy of history, he certainly did not treat history as a science. He was full of historic aversions and predilections, from the days of Dunstan to his own. He communicated his politics without reserve to Freeman, who certainly did not share them. In 1859, he was for Austria against the "wretched Italians," and felt "extreme contempt" for Victor Emmanuel. Perhaps Freeman may have felt more inclined to agree when Stubbs told him that no dissenter could write a History of England, because they had no ancestors and could see nothing good before the Reformation. Stubbs was fond of drawing pedigrees; and he must have known that every one has the same number of ancestors, whether they are ennobled, beheaded, or left to themselves. If he were joking, one can only say that he usually jokes with less difficulty and more success. As, for example, in a letter about Froude:

Saladin was a good heathen, Richard a bad Christian; set side by side, there is not much to choose between them; judged each by his own standard, there is very much. Could they have changed faith and place, Saladin would have made a better Christian than Richard, and Richard, perhaps, no worse heathen than Saladin; but Saladin's possible Christianity would have been as far above his actual heathenism as Richard's possible heathenism would have been above his actual Christianity.

Mr. Hutton has missed the point. Tricks of phrase do not produce passages like this. It is because Stubbs

He mauls Cardinal Pole pretty considerably, but I think it is the cheapest thing to do, as Gardiner and Bonner both come so much better out of any examination than he does;

or about Capitular Masses, when

the question turned into what were Chapter-Houses used for, to which I cannot give an answer; nor, think, can he-probably to get cold in;

or in his quaint ejaculation that he likes

the men who passed under the old system better than the Balliolized idiots who get classes under the new.

In 1866, Mr. Goldwin Smith resigned the Chair of Modern History at Oxford. With the possible exception of Halford Vaughan, no such brilliant lecturer had been known in the University. He was an advanced Liberal, not to say a Radical, and had taken a prominent part in the politics of the day. Lord Derby, who was Chancellor of Oxford as well as Prime Minister, could hardly be expected to keep up the Liberal tradition by appointing Freeman, if a suitable Conservative were to be found. He was indeed fortunate in his choice of M. Stubbs, whose studies lay quite out of his own line. Mr. Stubbs, for his part, accepted the post without hesitation. Undisturbed research would perhaps have suited him still better. But he had a family to keep, and he must have felt, modest as he was, that no man in England could maintain the historical credit of the University better than he. He was not an impressive lecturer. He seemed to be more interested in his manuscript than in his audience. The single volume which is the sole monument of his professorship shows him at his best, combining with his native sagacity and unrivalled knowledge the eloquence and the humor which he too often suppressed. His character of Henry the Eighth is a literary masterpiece, which neither his predecessor nor his successor has excelled. He knew too much, and assumed too much, for the "Balliolized idiot," or even the ordinary underHis formal graduate, to follow him.

In

deliverances on public occasions, which have alone survived, were models of terseness, thoroughness, and wit. politics, which cannot be eliminated from history, he stood at opposite poles

to the author of Three English Statesmen. In the unrestrained freedom of his private correspondence, it may be seen what a Tory he was.

"We are very quiet," he wrote to Freeman in 1864, "now we have got rid of that Garibaldi. I do not think that Gladstone or Lord Shaftesbury were either of them sensible enough to have sent him away for political reasons. I believe that for once they both spoke the truth when they denied that -but it is what they should have done."

Stubbs can hardly have believed Lord Shaftesbury to be a liar, whatever he may then have thought of Mr. Gladstone; and one must not take too seriously his persistent chaff of Freeman. Nevertheless, his hostility to the Italian movement was genuine, and of a piece with his life-long distaste for Liberalism. He was too honorable a man, morally too great a man, to abuse his position as professor for the interests or the purposes of a party. As he said himself in his Inaugural Lecture, his object was not to make Whigs or Tories, but to make them good Tories or good Whigs. As for Radicals, he would, I think, have left them to the police, with perhaps a saving clause for Freeman, Green, and Mr. Bryce.

When he came to deal with facts, his love of truth prevailed over all other considerations, though it was certain that the cause of the medieval Church would not suffer in his hands. He made no secret from the first of his conviction that history justified the ways of God to man. He described himself as "steeped in clerical and Conservative principles." Conservative he certainly was. But what did he mean by "clerical"? He has himself answered the question, in defining “the clerical spirit and mind" to be that

which regards truth and justice above