between

was not much in common 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.

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

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 As, for example, in a

more success.
letter about Froude:

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;

all things, which believes what it believes firmly and intelligently, but with a belief that is fully convinced that truth and justice must in the end confirm the doctrine that it upholds, with a belief that party statement and highly colored pictures of friend and foe alike are dangerous enemies of truth and justice, and damage in the long run the cause that employs them; that all sides have everything to gain and nothing to lose by full and fair knowledge of the truth.

This is not perhaps a good specimen of the Professor's style, either from a logical or from a grammatical point of view. But why a layman should object to the substance of it, I cannot imagine. Stubbs can hardly have supposed that Freeman or Mr. Goldwin Smith would have put any other thing above truth and justice. Nor would he have cited his colleague at Cambridge, the Reverend Charles Kingsley, as one who never drew highly colored pictures of friend or foe. He once said of himself: "What a good layman I should have made"; and to use "clerical" in the sense of "religious" is to put oneself on a level with Sir Wilfred Witwould, who thought that "orthodox" was the Greek for claret. Even in his Inaugural Lecture Professor Stubbs could not abstain from the clerical remark that the present of Italy, as distinguished from her past, was a "living death." But, after all, in a teacher of history it is knowledge, not opinion, that matters.

Professor Stubbs had little or no sympathy with modern Oxford. Liberalism in politics he thought foolish. Liberalism in theology he thought wrong. It says much for the kindness of his heart and his fidelity to friendship, that he never ceased his intimacy with John Richard Green, who gave up his Orders and became a Freethinker. When he found a volume of Renan, he put it in the waste-paper basket, though Renan was, at least, a

great Oriental scholar, and as little like the "shallow infidel" as need be. He had not much belief in examinations; and for philosophy, idealist or materialist, he had no taste. His leader in academic matters was Dr. Pusey, his staunchest ally was Dr. Liddon, and in his first sermon from the University pulpit on the 3rd of November, 1867, he made the astounding statement that, "with a few notable exceptions, the whole of the popular Press was ostentatiously and implacably set against religion." Unless by religion he meant the peculiar tenets associated with the name of Pusey, a wilder assertion was never made; and, little as Stubbs knew of the world, it is quite unpardonable in him to have made it. But we forget trifles like this when we come to consider the Constitutional History of England, which was published in three volumes during the years from 1874 to 1878. Mr. Hutton is never tired of comparing this work with the Decline and Fall, thus doing it a great injustice. Stubbs would have been the last man to range himself with the greatest of all English, perhaps of all, historians. Gibbon has neither equal nor second, and the only subsequent historian who has approached him in the magnitude of his task, or the breadth of his treatment, is Finlay. Stubbs's real rivals are Hallam and Milman, whom he surpassed in learning, if not in practical wisdom. He aspired rather to the German ideal, and, when the first volume appeared, a contemporary critic remarked that it was rather a German than an English book. And yet Stubbs, as his name implies, was English to the core. He had the love of liberty, though not of Liberalism; the dislike of sentiment; the hatred of equivocation and indirectness; the aversion from "the fetid atmosphere of a Court," which the inhabitants of these islands cherish, or used to cherish, as virtues. He knew a man as his

brother Yorkshiremen knew a horse. Although he laid stress in his Preface upon the fact that he was writing a history of institutions, there is plenty of flesh and blood on his bones. He knew how to say much in few words, as in the case of Henry Beaufort.

The Cardinal of England passed away; not, as the great poet has described him, in the pangs of a melodramatic despair, but with the same businesslike dignity in which for so long he had lived and ruled.

Sometimes, but not often, he let himself go. Henry the Fifth excited all his enthusiasm.

He was religious, pure in life, temperate, liberal, careful and yet splendid, merciful, truthful, and honorable ... a brilliant soldier, a sound diplomatist, an able organizer and consolidator of all forces at his command; the restorer of the English navy, the founder of our military, international, and maritime law.

To the Plantagenets, and the England of the Middle Ages, such ample justice had never been done before. Stern moralist as he was, though making dangerously "liberal" allowance for the vices of "Churchmen" and kings, he had the human sympathy without which it is not really possible to reconstruct the past. The Select Charters, which preceded his greater work, displayed his initial power, and vindicated his right to be an authoritative exponent of the Constitution. He himself thought that he was better appreciated in Germany than in England. But in Freeman he had the same sort of champion as Huxley was to Darwin; and Freeman used the columns of the Saturday Review to trumpet his fame, until he must have been almost sick of it himself. He was not blind to the faults of his trumpeting friends. He perceived that Freeman's iteration deserved an unclerical epithet, and he

had no faith whatever in the enterprise which produced Green's Short History of the English People.

"For a popular history," he wrote to Freeman, "such as he contemplates, surely Charles Knight and the Pictorial people have done what is necessary and possible from existing materials."

Wisdom did not die with Charles Knight; and every one knows what a splendid success Green's book had. That Stubbs did not altogether like it, is clear from his letters. His views of Charles the First and of Laud were, as he says, fundamentally different from Green's. Even on George the Third he would not trust him. Freeman was more remote from the topics that burn; and Stubbs would indeed have been ungrateful if he had not admired Freeman.

"Stubbs was not satisfied," says Mr. Hutton with extreme unction, "to be wholly without pastoral cares." It must, however, be admitted that very little sufficed. When, in 1875, nine years after resigning Navestock in Essex, he accepted Cholderton in Wiltshire, it was on condition that he "might legally count as residence in his benefice the whole of the term-times at Oxford, and would still be entitled to three months' leave without licence," which used to be called French leave. The Church of England is famous for her admirable elasticity; and perhaps this is as good an instance of it as could be found. It is pleasant to add that he did really visit Cholderton for three months in the summer, and was thought "a nice kind gentleman" by his flock. He did not think Mr. Disraeli a nice kind gentleman when in this same year he gave the Deanery of Ripon, which would just have suited Stubbs, to another; and he complained rather bitterly that he himself "had not let down the party to which he

belonged." In 1879, however, Lord Beaconsfield gave him a Canonry at St. Paul's. It was not altogether a suitable appointment, for the Canons of St. Paul's ought to be popular preachers. Stubbs should have been Canon of Christchurch and Professor of Ecclesiastical History, instead of Dr. Bright, a far less able man. Still, it was a welcome recognition, even from the unhonored head of his own party; and it enabled him once more to be happy without the cure of souls. It also brought him into close relations with Dean Church, which would have been an advantage to any one. As might be expected, his sermons did not draw large congregations; and he characteristically remarked that the newspapers, after stating that Mr. This or Dr. That preached in the morning, added: "In the afternoon the pulpit was occupied by the Canon in residence." But the Canonry had the great merit of making him comfortable, and enabling him to pursue the work of his life without distraction. Unfortunately, he allowed himself to be put on the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission, where "every one had a psalm and no doctrine and no patience." What had he to do with such futilities? The lawyers, especially Lord Coleridge, only irritated him by reading the Reformation Acts as if they saw them for the first time. But he himself proposed a fantastic scheme of referring to the bishops points considered by the Lord Chancellor doctrinal, which Parliament would never look at, except as a curiosity. The Judicial Committee he thought a "foul thing." It has at least stopped the persecution of heretics, which is a fouler thing still. As, however, nothing came of the Commission, and ecclesiastical appeals have been stopped by the veto of the bishops, one can only regret that so much of Stubbs's time was wasted in a manner so unprofitable.

Then the crash came. Up to this point the career of Dr. Stubbs had been perfectly suited to his talents. He was the most learned of English historians, and he had, for nearly twenty years; filled the Chair of Modern History at Oxford with European renown. For five years he had been also a Canon of St. Paul's, in easy circumstances, a dignitary of the Church which he adorned. He would have been a perfect Dean, either of his beloved Ripon or of any other cathedral. The one ecclesiastical office for which nature had unfitted him was a bishopric; and that was what Mr. Gladstone offered him in February, 1884. The see was Chester, out of which the modern dioceses of Manchester and Liverpool had been carved. Mr. Gladstone had the best intentions; and he knew, of course, that Stubbs was a political opponent. Mr. Hutton quotes the high authority of Mr. Bryce for the fact that one of Mr. Gladstone's "reasons for offering a bishopric to Dr. Stubbs was the importance he attached to his knowledge of ecclesiastical law and custom." There are some things which the least intelligent reader may be assumed to know; and it would have been more interesting to learn what the other reasons were. A modern bishop does not require either great intellect or great learning. Besides the moral and religious qualifications which may be taken for granted, he needs dignity, courtesy, aptitude for business, patience of detail, knowledge of men, and taste for ceremonial observances. Stubbs's kindness made him courteous; and he had an unerring eye for a bore or a fool. Ceremony, which he called "fuss," he detested; and even Mr. Hutton admits that even as a professor he was undignified. No one could help respecting his simple goodness and his transcendent ability. But the chief result of making him a bishop was to prove the truth of his own remark,