Metropolitan Tabernacle was erected for him in 1859-61; with it were connected almshouses, a pastor's college, and an orphanage, over all of which he exercised and maintained effective supervision. He had a unique gift as an orator, and enlivened his fervour with quaint humour; his voice was of marvellous clearness and reach, and he wielded his mother-tongue with native vigour. His theological acquirements were slender and his commentaries uncritical. With the newer criticism he had no sympathy; and four years before his death he withdrew from the Baptist Union because no action was taken against persons charged with what he and conservative divines regarded as fundamental errors. His sermons, issued weekly from 1855, showed enormous energy of productivity, and continued to be surprisingly fresh; they had an average issue of 30,000, and were translated into several foreign tongues. He published over a hundred volumes, including The Saint and his Saviour (1867), John Ploughman's Talk (1868), The Treasury of David (a commentary on the Psalms, 1865-80), Interpreter (1874), Sermons in Candles (1891), and Messages to the Multitude (1892). A collection of Spurgeon's speeches was edited by Pike (1878); there are short Lives by Pike, Ellis, and Shindler (1891-92), and the authoritative autobiography in four volumes was compiled by his wife and Mr Harland (1897-98).

Sir John Robert Seeley (1834-95) was the third son of Mr Seeley the publisher. He was educated at the City of London School and at Christ's College, Cambridge, was bracketed with three others as senior classic in 1857, and next year was elected a Fellow of his college. In 1863 he became Professor of Latin in University College, London, in 1869 of Modern History at Cambridge, and there to the end of his industrious life he remained. Ecce Homo had appeared anonymously in 1865, and excited an extraordinary commotion in the religious world. It was denounced with vehemence by many evangelicals like Lord Shaftesbury as subverting the foundation of Christian faith and hope; on the other hand, its reverent tone and literary charm commended the book to many orthodox minds. For while it deliberately excluded consideration of the supernatural and insisted on Christ's human work as the founder of a Church of humanity, it did not profess to deal with all the aspects of Christ's missionsome even expected it to be followed by an Ecce Deus, which was no part of Seeley's plan. The work certainly produced no little influence on contemporary thought. Strictly anonymous at first, it was soon pretty confidently referred to the Cambridge historian, and was ultimately acknowledged by him as his. Natural Religion (1882), also anonymously published, was perhaps an even more effective presentation of the author's view of the essence of Christianity; but as an eirenicon between science and faith, it persuaded neither

the Christian nor the Agnostic. For it posited a non-supernatural Christianity, and contented itself with a religion which was practically the pursuit of the ideal in life. Seeley's Life and Times of Stein (1879) was the best history of the creator of modern Germany, but, written without enthusiasm, it was generally pronounced tedious. His Short Life of Napoleon the First (1885) insisted on treating that portentous phenomenon as a clever and unscrupulous condottiere merely, and almost wholly ignored his power of political combination, his administrative sagacity, and his profound legislative achievement. In so far the historian showed himself liable to a prepossession. In his his

torical work generally Seeley sought for the driest light and refused to appeal to the emotions; and his concern in history was with the State and its development, with public documents and diplomatics though he strove to find in past political consecutions answers to the pressing problems of the present. In one work he struck a chord in the public breast; his Expansion of England (1883) did much to build up British Imperialism, to show the significance of the struggle between France and Britain in the eighteenth century, and to emphasise the value of Britain's oversea inheritance. His Growth of British Policy, unfinished at his death, was an almost equally pregnant essay on our foreign policy, its conditioning causes, methods, and results, from the accession of Elizabeth down to the beginning of the eighteenth century; to this Professor Prothero prefixed a short Life of the author (1895). An Introduction to Political Science, published in 1896, comprises two series of lectures. Seeley's work on Goethe, a reissue of magazine articles, was sound and

Lord de Tabley was the title, borne after his succession in 1887 to his father, the second baron, by the Hon. JOHN BYRNE LEICESTER WARREN (18351895), one of the truest poets of his time, though he never attained popularity with the public, and even to many lovers of poetry became well known only a few years before his death. Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, he was for a time attached to the embassy at Constantinople under Sir Stratford de Redcliffe. In 1859 he was called to the Bar, and about the same time published, under a pseudonym, a volume of poems-his own, and not, as has been erroneously said, the joint work of himself and a dead friend. Other volumes of verse-including Ballads and Metrical Sketches, The Threshold of Atrides, Glimpses of Antiquity, Præterita, Eclogues and Monodramas, Studies in Verse followed in 1860-65; and two powerful dramas, Philoctetes (1866) and Orestes (1868), were Greek not in subject-matter alone. In 1868, too, the author (pseudonymous or anonymous as yet) made his only entry into English public life as candidate for Mid-Cheshire on the Liberal side. He was not elected, and soon after took up his residence in London, where he lived the life of a literary recluse in the society of a few warm friends. He was not a bookman merely, but an enthusiastic expert in botany, in book-plates, and in Greek coins. Fruits of these studies appeared in a work on book-plates (1880) and one on The Flora of Cheshire (1899). Rehearsals (1870) and Searching the Net (1873) were collections of poems; The Soldier's Fortune (1876) was a poetic tragedy. Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical (1893), comprised selections from past work with new pieces, and a supplementary volume appeared in 1895. At his death his fame was steadily growing; and a posthumous volume, Orpheus in Thrace, and other Poems, edited by the Hon. Lady Leighton Warren (1901), was universally greeted as a rare addition to the treasury of English poetry. Lord de Tabley's high-strung, too sensitive temperament is reflected in much of his verse-his noble melancholy, his all-but pessimistic outlook on a world of empty strife and vain ambition. And another and equally sensitive side of his character appears in the poems and passages which give rich and melodious utterance to the poet's heart-felt joy in the ineffable beauty of nature.

See the Memoir by Sir M. E. Grant Duff prefixed to The Flora of Cheshire (1899); Mr Gosse's Critical Kit-Kats (1896); and the biographical sketch by Professor Hugh Walker (1903).

A succession of feverish attacks compelling him to resign this post, he returned to England, and in 1868 gladly accepted the office of secretary of the newly-founded Palestine Exploration Fund, an appointment he retained till his success as a writer of fiction made him independent of this staff (1885). His first work, Studies in French Poetry, appeared in 1868, and attracted much attention, rather by its interest and pleasant style than from its exhaustiveness. Three years later he began to collaborate in story-writing with James Rice (1844-82), who from Northampton came to Queen's at Cambridge, from law drifted into literature, had published one or two unimportant novels, and was now editor of Once a Week. Together they produced Readymoney Mortiboy (1872), My Little Girl, With Harp and Crown, This Son of Vulcan, The Golden Butterfly (1876, which greatly increased their popularity), The Monks of Thelema, By Celia's Arbour, The Chaplain of the Fleet, and The Seamy Side (1881). This literary partnership between two men of different gifts, comparable for intimacy with that of Beaumont and Fletcher or of Erckmann and Chatrian, continued unbrokenand with the happiest results-until the death of the younger collaborateur. Thenceforward Besant continued to produce fiction wholly his own in invention and development, with unabated energy and fertility, though for the most part in a distinguishably different manner, sending forth in succession All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), All in a Garden Fair, Dorothy Forster, Children of Gibeon, Armorel of Lyonesse, The Ivory Gate, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice, The Master Craftsman, The Rebel Queen, The Fourth Generation, The Lady of Lynn, and other stories.

Ready-money Mortiboy (drafted by Rice and partly written before the partnership began) and The Golden Butterfly are probably the best-known of all the books associated with Besant's name; and though it be admitted that the books produced by the collaborateurs are richer in humour, more vivid in characterisation, fresher and more entertaining altogether, this does not prove that these features were wholly or mainly Mr Rice's contribution, but that Besant grew older. Unquestionably the later novels were many of them somewhat incredible and factitious, didactic and overweighted with detail, as well apt to repeat ideas and situations. Perhaps Besant was right in regarding Dorothy Forster, a story of the Earl of Derwentwater and the Rebellion of 1815, as his best tale. All Sorts and Conditions of Men, on the other hand, was the most notable of a series which produced a marked and unexpected influence on the public heart and conscience; they stimulated and guided the philanthropic (and fashionable) movement that led to the establishment of the People's Palace in the east end of London.

Another series of Sir Walter's literary enterprises concerned the topography and history of London.

It was his ambition to be the Stow of nineteenthcentury London; and he projected a vast scheme in which he was to have the help of experts, retaining for his own share the general history of London from the earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century. This he seems ever to have regarded as his magnum opus, and to it he devoted the continuous labour of five years. To this plan, unfinished at his death, belonged the pleasant volumes on Westminster, London, South London, and East London

(written by him with some assistance), and the more ambitious work on

London in the Eighteenth Century, thoroughly characteristic of the man, and published in 1902. From the Autobiography published in the same year it appeared that he had completed a history of London from the beginning as far as the end of the eighteenth century. His attitude towards religious and theological problems was frankly expounded in the same book, and was by no means conservative. His relations with Mr Rice (who, it should be added, wrote a well-known history of the British Turf)

money Mortiboy was dramatised by the author. As We are and as We may be was a collection of miscellanies, posthumously published in 1903.

Thomas Hill Green (1836-82) was born at the rectory of Birkin in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and educated at Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first in classics, and later a third in law and modern history. He was elected and re-elected a Balliol Fellow, became the first

he had explained in a preface to the library edition of Ready-money Mortiboy in 1887.

As secretary of the Palestine Exploration Fund Besant edited or wrote works on Jerusalem, Palestine, and the survey; and as first chairman of the Society of Authors he laboured strenuously to secure, especially to inexperienced writers for the press, as full a share as possible of the profits accruing from their labours. His zeal in their behalf, testified to by a great expenditure of time and work, led him ultimately to be unduly suspicious and not a little unfair to one of the two partners in the business of publishing books.

Further French studies were a work on the French humourists (1873) and small works on Rabelais, Montaigne, and Coligny; he wrote also Lives of Professor Palmer and Richard Jefferies; and there were opuscules from his hand on Whittington, Captain Cook, and King Alfred. Ready

lay tutor of the college, and, under Jowett, the main influence in Balliol. He married a sister of J. HAU Symonds in 1871, and became in 1877 Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy. Green's noble character, contagious enthusiasm, philosophical independence and profundity, and strong interest in social questions gathered around him many of the best men at Oxford. Popular education and temperance lay near his heart, and he gave himself with great earnestness to School-Board work and political reform. He was the Mr Gray' of Robert Elsmere. In 1874 he contributed his masterly intro

duction to the Clarendon Press edition of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, subjecting Hume's philosophy in detail to searching and hostile analysis from an idealist point of view. His own philosophy, which sprang from the sympathetic study of Kant and Hegel, was largely a polemic against current empiricism as stultifying philosophy and rendering the ethical standard nugatory; he was a trenchant critic of British empirical philosophy, whether that of Hume or of Lewes or of Herbert Spencer. His Prolegomena to Ethics, left incomplete at his death, was edited in the following year by Mr A. C. Bradley; and two addresses or lay-sermons to his pupils were issued with an unfinished preface by Arnold Toynbee. His condemnation of Hume and scattered essays in Mind and elsewhere were edited by R. L. Nettleship (1885-88), the third volume containing a Memoir.

The Short History remains unique in historical literature.

For nine more years Green was engaged in a heroic struggle to do as much work as increasing ill-health would allow. His opportunities for research were seriously curtailed by the necessity of always wintering abroad. In 1877 he married Miss Alice Stopford, whose invaluable assistance made the remaining years of his life happier and more fruitful than they could otherwise have been. He never returned to his project of Angevin history, but set himself to work out the general history of England on an ever-increasing scale. In 1878-80 he published in four volumes his History of the English People, in which he ex

JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

By permission of Messrs Macmillan & Co.

panded the Short History, and rewrote those periods of it which had been defectively treated in the former book. Then he began from the beginning to utilise on a large scale the authorities which he had been studying for so many years. One volume, The Making of England, which brought the history down to 828, was published in January 1882. With feverish activity he went on dictating another volume to his wife, but it was still unfinished when he died at Mentone on 7th March 1883; it appeared as a posthumous work under the name of The Conquest of England. It is to these last two books that we must look to estimate the immense labour which it had cost Green to draw his brilliant picture of the nation's progress; and it is in these books that we see most clearly the extraordinary imaginative power which enabled Green to throw himself into the life of the

distant past. This is his supreme merit as a historian, and in this quality he has never been surpassed.

Oxford in the Middle Ages.

At the time of the arrival of Vacarius, Oxford stood in the first rank among English towns. Its town church of St Martin rose from the midst of a huddled group of houses, girt in with massive walls, that lay along the dry upper ground of a low peninsula between the streams of Cherwell and the upper Thames. The ground fell gently on either side, eastward and westward, to these rivers, while on the south a sharper descent led down across swampy meadows to the city bridge. Around lay a wild forest, the moors of Cowley and Bullingdon fringing the course of Thames, the great woods of Shotover and Bagley closing the horizon to the south and east. Though the two huge towers of its Norman castle marked the strategic importance of Oxford as commanding the river valley along which the commerce of southern England mainly flowed, its walls formed, perhaps, the least element in its military strength, for on every side but the north the town was guarded by the swampy meadows along Cherwell, or by the intricate channels into which the Thames breaks among the meadows of Osney. From the midst of these meadows rose a mitred abbey of Austin canons, which, with the older priory of St Frideswide, gave the town some ecclesiastical dignity. The residence of the Norman house of the D'Oillis within its castle, the frequent visits of English kings to a palace without its walls, the presence again and again of important councils, marked its political weight within the realm. The settlement of one of the wealthiest among the English Jewries in the very heart of the town indicated, while it promoted, the activity of its trade. No place better illustrates the transformation of the land in the hands of its Norman masters, the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden expansion of commerce and accumulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. To the west of the town rose one of the stateliest of English castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly less stately abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the Norman kings raised his palace of Beaumont. The canons of St Frideswide reared the church which still exists as the diocesan cathedral, while the piety of the Norman Castellans rebuilt almost all the parish churches of the city, and founded within their new castle walls the church of the Canons of St George. We know nothing of the causes which drew students and teachers within the walls of Oxford. It is possible that here as elsewhere a new teacher had quickened older educational foundations, and that the cloisters of Osney and St Frideswide already possessed schools which burst into a larger life under the impulse of Vacarius. As yet, however, the fortunes of the University were obscured by the glories of Paris. English scholars gathered in thousands round the chairs of William of Champeaux or Abelard. The English took their place as one of the 'nations' of the French University. John of Salisbury became famous as one of the Parisian teachers. Beket wandered to Paris from his school at Merton. But through the peaceful reign of Henry the Second Oxford was quietly increasing in numbers and repute. Forty years after the visit of Vacarius its educational position was fully established. When Gerald of Wales read his amusing Topography of Ireland to its students, the most