his ultimate ends, to which every particular plan that he took up, and every particular line of thought which he followed, was completely subordinate. However open to objection may have been many of his practical suggestions, it must be remembered, that they were never the result of accidental fancies, but of fixed and ruling ideas. However fertile he might be in supplying details when called for, it was. never on them, but on principles, that he rested his claim to be heard; often and often he declared that, if these could be received and acted upon, he cared nothing for the particular applications of them, which he might have proposed, and nothing for the failure of particular schemes, if he could hope that his example would excite others to execute them better.

Striving to fulfil in his measure the definition of man, in which he took especial pleasure, "a being of large discourse, looking before and after," he learned more and more, whilst never losing his hold on the present, to live also habitually in the past and for the future. Vehement as he was in assailing evil, his whole mind was essentially not destructive but constructive; his love of reform was in exact proportion to his love of the institutions which he wished to reform; his hatred of shadows in exact proportion to his love of realities. "He was an idoloclast," says Archdeacon Hare," at once zealous and fearless in demolishing the reigning idols, and at the same time animated with a reverent love for the ideas which those idols carnalize and stifle." Impatient as he was, even to restlessness, of evils which seemed to him capable of remedy, he yet was ready, as some have thought even to excess, to repose with the most undoubting

confidence on what he held to be a general law; and those who know his writings will understand the pleasure with which he would dwell on the depth of meaning which he believed to be contained in the parable of the "earth, of herself, bringing forth first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear." "Before a confessed unconquerable difficulty," he said and felt, "the mind reposes as quietly as in possession of a discovered truth."

His works were often, from the necessity of the case, written in haste, and were therefore expressed at times nakedly and abruptly; but the substance of every paragraph had, as he often said, been in his mind for years, and sometimes actually written at greater length or in another shape. Perpetually as the standard of what was required of him in his writings rose before him, he never shrunk from the additional labour which it imposed upon him. His sense of deficient knowledge often deterred him from publishing on points of the greatest interest to him; he always made it a point to read far more than he expressed in writing, and to write much which he never gave to the world. Even in his latest years he was endeavouring to acquire, for philological purposes, a knowledge of the Sanscrit and Sclavonic languages; he was constantly engaged in a correspondence with scientific men or scholars on minute points of history and geography; and, in all subjects of interest to him, his strong memory was perpetually turning to account the studies of his youth and childhood, whilst his quickness and power of combination assisted him in appropriating with facility what he casually read or heard.

What he actually achieved in his writings falls so far short of what he intended to achieve, that it seems almost like an injustice to judge of his aims and views by them. Yet, even in what he had already published in his lifetime, he was often the first to delineate in outline what others may hereafter fill up; the first to give expression in England to views which, on the continent, had been already attained; the first to propose, amidst obloquy or indifference, measures and principles, which the rapid advance of public opinion has so generally adopted, as almost to obliterate the remembrance of who first gave utterance to them. And those who know the intentions which were interrupted by his premature death, will form their notion of what he was as an historian, philosopher, and theologian, not so much from the actual writings which he lived to complete, as from the design of the three great works, to which he looked forward as the labours of his latest years, and which, as belonging not more to one period of his life than another, and as forming, even in his mere conception of them, the centres of all that he thought or wrote on whatever subject, would have furnished the key to all his views-a History of Rome, a Commentary on the New Testament, and, almost including both of these within itself, a Treatise on Church and State, or Christian Politics.

1. His early fondness for history grew constantly upon him; he delighted in it, as feeling it to be "simply a search after truth, where, by daily becoming more familiar with it, truth seems for ever more within your grasp" the images of the past were habitually in his mind, and haunted him even in sleep; the

greater part of his literary labours was devoted to this study. What objects he put before him, as an historian, may best be judged from his own view of the province of history. It was, indeed, altogether imperfect, in his judgment, unless it was not only a plan but a picture; unless it represented "what men thought, what they hated, and what they loved;" unless it "pointed the way to that higher region, within which she herself is not permitted to enter; and in the details of geographical or military descriptions he took especial pleasure, and himself remarkably excelled in them. Still it was in the dramatic faculty on the one hand, and the metaphysical faculty on the other hand, that he felt himself deficient; and it is accordingly in the political rather than the philosophical or biographical department of history,—in giving a combined view of different states or of different periods-in analyzing laws, parties, and institutions, that his chief merit consists.

What were his views of Modern History will appear in the mention of his Oxford Professorship. But it was in ancient history that he naturally felt the greatest delight. "I linger round a subject, which nothing could tempt me to quit but the consciousness of treating it too unworthily," were his expressions of regret when he had finished his edition of Thucydides; "the subject of what is miscalled ancient history, the really modern history of the civilization of Greece and Rome, which has for years interested me so deeply, that it is painful to feel myself, after all, so unable to paint it fully." His earliest labours had been devoted not to Roman, but to Greek hisHistory of Rome, vol. i. p. 98; vol. ii. p. 173.

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tory; and there still remains amongst his MSS. a short sketch of the rise of the Greek nation, written between 1820 and 1823, and carried down to the time of the Persian wars. And in later years, his edition of Thucydides, undertaken originally with the design of illustrating that author rather historically than philologically, contains in its notes and appendices, the most systematic remains of his studies in this direction, and at one time promised to embody his thoughts on the most striking periods of Athenian history. Nor, after he had abandoned this design, did he ever lose his interest in the subject; his real sympathies (if one may venture to say so) were always with Athens rather than with Rome; some of the most characteristic points of his mind were Greek rather than Roman; from the vacancy of the early Roman annals he was for ever turning to the cotemporary records of the Greek commonwealths, to pay "an involuntary tribute of respect and affection to old associations and immortal names on which we can scarcely dwell too long or too often;" the falsehood and emptiness of the Latin historians were for ever suggesting the contrast of their Grecian rivals; the two opposite poles in which he seemed to realize his ideals of the worst and the best qualities of an historian, with feelings of personal antipathy and sympathy, were Livy and Thucydides.

Even these scattered notices of what he had once hoped to have worked out more fully, will often furnish the student of Greek history with the means of entering upon its most remarkable epochs under his guidance. Those who have carefully read his works, or shared his instructions, can still enjoy the