164 MODERN HISTORY OF EUROPE 



Probably most of us who are here will agree to the justice of this 

 opinion; and to me it seems that the book is attractive not merely 

 because the author is so careful to refrain from making general 

 statements on insufficient grounds, but because there is so much of 

 the wise and temperate man in the appreciation of characters and 

 national tendencies. One would not look in vain for passages where 

 his authority might be called in question, particularly before the 

 Conquest and after the middle of the thirteenth century. The es- 

 sential thing is that his judgments cannot be dissociated from his 

 temperament and principles, especially where a moral issue arises. 

 The concluding pages of his third volume, with their copious use of 

 analogy, illustration, and tempered eloquence, bring him to the con- 

 fines of rhetoric, nor does he shrink here or in other writings from 

 letting us see what he really thinks of Puritanism. 



As for Gardiner, he is crowned with the bright laurel that belongs 

 to one who has treated fearlessly, candidly, and with unbounded 

 wealth of learning the most controverted period of English history. 

 Still he is by no means a stranger to the methods of the law court 

 and the language of the pulpit. His answer to Father Gerard in the 

 matter of Gunpowder Plot is an argument which, unjustly I think, 

 has been taxed with special pleading} the conclusion to his little 

 volume on the Thirty Years' War is aglow with the fire of Macaulay; 

 and he does not hesitate to incorporate in his History of England 

 an outburst like this, which is prompted by the undisguised con- 

 victions of a Protestant: "The world was to learn that there were 

 men who were ready to suffer and to die, if need be, on behalf of 

 principles more true, and of an order more fruitful of a good and 

 noble life than anything which Ferdinand and Maximilian had found 

 it possible to conceive. From the study of Bacon, from the parsonage 

 of George Herbert, from the pulpit of Baxter, from the prison of 

 Eliot, a light was to break forth, splendid in its multiplicity of color 

 and of brilliancy, which would teach the world to shrink from anarchy 

 and despotism alike, and to intrust the treasure of its moral and 

 intellectual progress to ordered liberty." 1 In a letter to Freeman, 

 J. R. Green expresses admiration of Gardiner, and can quite under- 

 stand why, striving as he does to banish "loose talk," he should 

 look askance at the influence which the Short History might have in 



measured along many different standards, and far he it from any one to speak 

 slightingly of the man who, without adding to what was known by the learned, 

 has charmed and delighted and instructed large masses of men. His place may 

 be high, and even the highest, provided that he be honest and reasonably indus- 

 trious in the search for truth. But such a man will find his reward in many 

 places. Here we have to think first of the augmentation of knowledge the 

 direct augmentation which takes place when the historian discovers and publishes 

 what has not been known, and the indirect augmentation which takes place 

 when his doings and his method have become a model and an example for other 

 scholars. And here Dr. Stubbs surely stood supreme." 

 1 History of England, vol. v, p. 169. 



