36 



OUR COLUMNS. 



October, 1891. 



mm ®f)all 31 laeaD? 



By J. E. MoKRis, M.A. 



S^Q^ET us suppose that Mr. A or Miss B finds time heavy on his or her hands. Mr. A. 

 has plenty of leisure after office hours, Miss B cannot devote the whole day to 

 fancy work or music or lawn tennis. As Autumn goes on and the evenings get 

 longer, the cry is for something to do. Three volume novels cannot give enjoyment for 

 ever ; University Extension Lectures occur only at intervals, and perhaps the particular 

 course now going on does not suit every taste ; the periodicals must be read in the Library, 

 and something is wanted to take home for reading. Now let us suppose that both the 

 young business man and the recently emancipated school girl have literary tastes. The 

 English upper and middle class public is undoubtedly fond of reading, and our two friends 

 are seriously minded and good specimens of our race. Each has done the daily tasks, in 

 the office or at home, conscientiously to please employer or parent ; now for relaxation and 

 mental improvement. 



Firstly, tastes are dissimilar. I shall therefore start on the class of books which suit my 

 own taste. Not an Englishman or Englishwoman exists who does not take pride in our 

 national history, and rightly so. Who can understand the present but in the light of the 

 past ? History alone can help us in practical politics. But my preamble seems to he 

 going to be longer than the bulk of my paper. 



Students of history are of two kinds, those who read in an easy chair, and those who sit 

 up at a table. Let me write for each kind, and let me assume that the reader is in earnest, 

 knows a good many plain facts already, and recognises that history is not a mere string of 

 dates and reigns. My advice is, " Get at the personality of great men, put yourself in 

 their position, try to realize their character, aims, motives, temptations." There are two 

 great guides, never yet surpassed, who paint a statesman, possibly sometimes in wrong- 

 colours, but in such colours that you have a living man before you : Lord Macaulay and 

 John Richard Green. Doubtless you are acquainted with both. But they are worth read- 

 ing and re-reading. Take Green's descriptions of the two Williams, King John, Simon 

 de Montfort, Edward I., the King-maker, Mary Queen of Scots, you learn an additional 

 fact every time you go through his short and careful analyses of character. My advice 

 is : Don't make the common mistake of reading the " Short History of the English People " 

 from end to end, with its inevitable result — confusion of ideas followed by a feeling of 

 gladness that the task has been heroically accomplished, and of boredom. Take a period 

 only ; get a clear idea as to what sort of man So-and-So was ; then tackle boldly a bigger 

 authority, Freeman for the Norman Conquest, Stubbs for the Plantagenets. A very little 

 practice, a little use of common sense as to w^hat to skip, what mere dry bones of consti- 

 tutional history and legislation to take for granted, and you soon get into the swing of 

 reading even alarmingly big authors, big in both senses of the word, writers of many 

 volumes and of world-wide authority. Next turn to monographs ; take, say, Warwick in 

 the Men of Action series. Then see if you cannot turn to the corresponding period of 

 general European history. Try certain chapters in Gibbon's Decline and Fall, making a 

 strict limitation in your own mind that you will only read certain ones, discoverable through 

 the Index. 



A first course now reads something in this style : Green from Edward the Confessor to 

 Henry 11. , Freeman's Norman Conquest with its splendid marginal analysis, England as a 

 continental power under Henry IL, Gibbon's chapters on the First Crusade. Another 



