LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 551 



tory at any German university to-day who is not a product of the 

 Ranke school. 



By the use of this term " school," it is not meant that all of Ranke's 

 students were cast in one mould. On the contrary, the great historian 

 took special care to develop the individual talent and peculiar strength 

 of all his pupils. The marvellous variety of men and work that have 

 issued from Ranke's historical laboratory is the best proof of the 

 broad views of its director. Among Ranke's pupils are such widely 

 different specialists as George Waitz, author of the Constitutional 

 History of Germany, and Pertz's most illustrious successor in editing 

 the Monumenta ; Heinrich von Sybel, editor of the " Historische Zeit- 

 schrift," and author of the best German work upon the period of the 

 French Revolution ; Wilhelm von Giesebrecht, the historian of the Ger- 

 man Emperors ; Max Duucker, author of the best German History of 

 Antiquity, particularly of the Orient ; and Wattenbach, the historian of 

 the Papacy and author of " Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen." Ranke's 

 influence is not confined to Gei'many. A recent article upon Ranke, 

 by Hans Prutz, says that in Ranke's school were trained those men 

 who to-day in France and England are pursuing the most scholarly 

 investigations in history. M. Gabriel Monod and Bishop Stubbs are 

 cases in point. According to Ranke's method, the best historians of 

 newly awakened Italy are now working. Prutz says that the newly 

 founded American Historical Association siijuified its obligations to 

 Ranke in extending to him, when he was ninety years old, through 

 its President, George Bancroft, an election to honorary membership. 



Ranke's success as a university professor was of the highest kind, 

 for he not only made remarkable contributions to his chosen science, 

 but trained up a generation of historians who have extended his criti- 

 cal methods far and wide. As an academic lecturer he was never pop- 

 ular. President Andrew D. White, in " The Forum " for February, 

 1887, has given a graphic and amusing picture of Ranke in his lecture- 

 room : " He had a habit of becoming so absorbed in his subject as to 

 slip down in his chair, hold his finger up toward the ceiling, and then, 

 with his eye fastened on the tip of it, go mumbling through a kind of 

 rhapsody, which most of my German fellow students confessed they 

 could not understand. It was a comical sight : half a dozen students 

 crowding around his desk listening to the Professor, as priests might 

 listen to the Sibyl on her tripod, the other students being scattered 

 through the room in various stages of discouragement." This de- 

 scription is confirmed by the testimony of many of Ranke's German 

 pupils. Alfred Stern says Ranke never had what men call a good 



