MENTAL AND MORAL HEREDITY 233 



he in his work touched by the rivalries, the conventional methods, 

 the artificial hraitations, and the utiUtarian aims of the schools. 

 College work at Oxford and history work went on apart, with 

 much mental friction and difficulty of adjustment and sorrow of 

 heart. Without any advisers, almost without friends, he groped 

 his way, seeking in very sohtary fashion after his own particular 

 vocation." 



To those who regard History — -as we all do nowadays — as some- 

 thing more than a record of Kings' births, ascents to the Throne, 

 and descents to the grave, or desultory or vivid descriptions, 

 varying according to the temperament of the writer, of battles 

 and disasters, retreats and victories, Richard Green's attempt to 

 present the facts of Enghsh History not as isolated events, but 

 as factors in a process of evolution, came as a welcome departure 

 from the time-worn method in vogue in his day. He endea- 

 voured to show the relationship of deeds accompUshed in the 

 Past to the consequences which the Present paid for them and 

 the Future reaped. To himself he would say : "A State is 

 accidental ; it can be made or unmade, and is no j^eal thing to 

 me. But a nation is very real. That you can neither make 

 nor destroy." To him History had its philosophy, and whether 

 he was conscious of it or not, this philosophy centred around 

 the idea of evolution. To him the story of a great people is 

 not to be found in the ecclesiastical annals of a period which are 

 too often but the records of the mere squabbles of priests, but 

 must be sought in the things men did, in the institutions they 

 evolved, in the names of their streets, in the memorials of their 

 guilds, in the nature of their market-places, in their struggles 

 over poll and toll and tax, and in their social customs. 



Dr. Frederick Adams AVood, deahng not with the history of a 

 nation but of a social class, has endeavoured to further extend 

 the appUcation of scientific methods to the elucidation of historical 

 problems. There is no social class that lends itself so well to 

 scientific treatment as the Royal Class. In the first place, it is 

 limited in numbers, and, therefore, the whole field of investigation 

 can be more completely explored than any other. In the second 

 place, its individuals Uve in such pubhcity, and their deeds are 

 of such interest or importance, that they are more fully 

 recorded than those of any other class; and through 

 these records an estimation of the character of the men and 

 women who committed them can be formed. Court diaries and 

 biographies, moreover, contain the expression of personal judge- 

 ments which contemporaries were able to form of the character 

 of the royal personages with whom they came in immediate contact. 

 It seldom happens that a King has escaped such an estimation 

 of his character by one contemporary alone, and it is, therefore, 



