6 Transactions. 



a great deal. He wished to illustrate what lie meant, as far as his 

 recollection unassisted enaliled him to do so, by a reference to two 

 or three of the books in which he thought the modern method of 

 history had been successfully adopted ; that was to say, books 

 which might be said to be not a kind of map such as was found in 

 the ordinary atlas, but like that of the Ordnance Survey, which 

 would enable us to live again the life of the past, to see v/ith the 

 eyes of the men of those days. He took for example such a book 

 as Mommsen's history of Rome. There were chapters dealing with 

 the Etruscan race and history which had impressed themselves 

 upon his mind from youth upwards. The whole of it was founded 

 on antiquarian research. The author gathered a great deal — per- 

 haps too much — from medals, coins, ancient and hardly legible 

 inscriptions. He might have misinterpreted these inscriptions, 

 and his enemies had not been slow to say so ; but he had pre- 

 sented vividly and in great part truthfully a subject about which 

 most people knew nothing, or at least very little, until after his 

 labours had been attempted. This was only one illustration of the 

 manner in which that writer had used these particulars. He came 

 to a second and most interesting book, the life of Lord Bacon, in 

 seven great volumes, by Spedding, a well-known book. That was 

 based of course, in part upon well authenticated and previously 

 known information ; but it had been immensely embellished by 

 research research from letters, from documents hitherto undis- 

 closed and which had been discovered by the diligence of men 

 animated entirely almost, he supposed, by antiquarian interest, 

 which were utilised by Mr vSpedding, and out of which he manu- 

 factured a most powerful and dramatic history not only of Bacon 

 himself but of the Elizabethan age in which he lived — a book 

 which ""ave a far better idea of the times of Elizabeth than any 

 history he knew, beginning with Hume and coming down to the 

 latest attempt. There was a third book v/hich he would refer to in a 

 similar connection , that was Carlyle's life of Frederick the Great. 

 He thou"-ht that Carlyle was, in the wide sense and in instinct, one 

 of the "reatest antiquarians probably that ever lived, because 

 he had laid under contribution every single thing that could be 

 imao-ined — portraits, pictures, every small scrap of tradition, folk- 

 lore. He described almost as an eye-witness the scenes through 

 which his heroes passed, for he had traced the lineaments of nature 

 as they were then and as they have been changed since. More- 



