672 JOHN FISKE. 



and so must in some measure fail to understand in what degree he had 

 his vast resources of imagination under control. Any judge whose humau 

 sympathies are narrower than his must find it a baffling task to look for 

 the unity of interest, of opinion, and of ideal which in his mind bound 

 together the many undertakings that marked his career, and the various 

 stages of development through which his thought passed." The critic 

 who had Fiske's range of reading is probably not to be found among 

 us, but if we accept the proposition that he had historical work in view 

 during all the time of this preliminary study in so many fields, still we 

 can safely state that the precise form in which he proposed to put forth 

 his labor was not determined until after he met John Richard Green in 

 London, and talked with him about the " Short History of the English 

 People" which Green was then planning. " I heard him," says Fiske, 

 " telling about his scheme, and I thought it would be a very nice thing 

 to do something of the same sort for American history." 



This meeting with Green could not have taken place until 1879. It 

 is plain, therefore, that if he relied upon his own capacity to support his 

 family when he left the Harvard Library, it must have been through 

 literary labor. He had been invited in 1878, while still connected with 

 the Library, to deliver six lectures in the Old South Meeting House 

 Course. This service was performed in 1879, and in June of the same 

 year he was invited by Huxley to lecture before the University College 

 in London. The acceptance of this invitation was fraught with great 

 results. His lectures before the Harvard students were characterized 

 by President Eliot : the first set, as '• interesting and inspiring ; " the 

 later lectures, as "graphic and stimulating." The Old South lectures 

 demonstrated his power with the public. The London lectures, before 

 a radically different audience, corroborated this conclusion, and his visit 

 brought him in friendly contact with the great body of distinguished men 

 in England who were then busy investigating Darwin's " Theory of 

 Development" and Spencer's " Doctrine of Evolution." Here, too, he 

 met Green and had his mind turned definitely towards specific work in 

 t lie field of American history. Circumstances thus determined that it 

 was to be through lectures and writing American history that he was 

 to earn his living, a determination which necessarily involved serious 

 limitations as to the time which he could devote to research and which 

 materially influenced the quality of his work. 



His success as a lecturer in London led to his being called there again 

 in 1880, when he delivered his three lectures on '" American Political 

 Ideas" at the Royal Institute. These he repeated at the Philosophical 



