464 CHARLES MERIVALE. 



affected the motives, hopes, and behavior of civilized men. His chief 

 work, the " History of the Romans under the Empire," begins with 

 the struggles that marked the fall of the Republic, and carries the 

 story on to the death of Marcus Aurelius. It covers, therefore, 

 nearly two centuries of Christian history, — the two ceuturies in which 

 the new religion had its hardest contest with the superstitions and the 

 philosophies it came to supplant. 



Strange to say, at the time when Dr. Merivale began his work, this 

 great period was without adequate historical treatment in English. 

 Arnold did not come down so far, and Gibbon took up the story after 

 this period was passed. Even now it would be difficult, apart from 

 Dean Merivale's own work, to name any extensive and authoritative 

 English treatise on the period. Doubtless one of the reasons why 

 other writers have avoiiltd the time is that which constituted one of 

 its attractions for Dr. Merivale. The sources are so varied and so 

 copious that the man who undertakes to master them has great need 

 of courage. No other period of ancient or mediaeval history has any- 

 thing like the same bulk of material to be read and sifted. In fact, 

 one has to come down to comparatively recent times to find sources 

 rivalling those of this period in variety and volume. 



How far Dean Merivale has succeeded in making the most of this 

 copious material, I shall not be so presumptuous as to attempt to pro- 

 nounce. Some qualities of his work are obvious on the face of it. 

 He is admitted on all hands to be minutely accurate as to his facts. 

 This, though not perhaps the very highest quality of an historian, is 

 at least one of the highest. It is much to know that your author 

 states nothing as a fact without full and adequate authority ; that, 

 when there is a conflict of testimony, or a question which the sources 

 do not clearly settle, he does not allow his imagination to supply, even 

 by ingenious hypothesis, the defects of his material. Herein lies, as 

 it seems to me, Dean Merivale's most striking characteristic as an 

 historian. He has never, so far as I know, been caught in a slip as to 

 the facts of a matter. Every page of his history bears evidence of the 

 immense diligence and patience with which he compared and sifted 

 the mass of original authorities on each topic. 



But it may be floubted whether his history will ever be widely 

 popular. The very excellence of which I have spoken is, for the gen- 

 eral reader, not far removed from a defect. Most people who profess 

 to read history demand, I suspect, more of literary and philosophic 

 sauce than is offered in Dean Merivale's pages. He never aspires to 

 what is commonly called eloquence. He has no burning denuncia- 



