Born, at Oxford, 12 Dec. 1837. At Magdalen Coll. School, 1845–51; with private tutors, 1851–53. Matric. Jesus Coll., Oxford, 7 Dec. 1855; Scholar, 1855–60; B.A., 1860; M.A., 1862; Ordained Deacon, 1860. Curate of St. Barnabas, King Square, London, 1860–63. Curate of Holy Trinity, Hoxton, 1863–66; perpetual curate of St. Philip’s, Stepney, 1866–69. Contrib. to “Saturday Rev.,” 1862. Prosecuted historical studies. Librarian of Lambeth Palace, 1869–83. Gave up clerical life, 1869. Married Alice Stopford, June 1877. Hon. Fellow Jesus Coll., Oxford, 1877–83. Hon. LL.D., Edinburgh, 1878. Visit to Egypt, 1881. Increasing ill-health. Died, at Mentone, 7 March, 1883. Works: “Short History of the English People,” 1874; “Stray Studies from England and Italy,” 1876; “A History of the English People” (4 vols., expanded from preceding), 1877–80; “Readings from English History,” 1879; “A Short Geography of the British Islands” (with his wife), 1880; “The Making of England,” 1881. Posthumous: “The Conquest of England” (completed by his wife), 1883. He edited: “Literature Primers,” 1875–79; “History Primers,” 1875–84; “Classical Writers,” 1879–82; Addison’s “Essays,” 1880.

Personal

  I recall little or nothing of childhood beyond a morbid shyness, a love of books, a habit of singing about the house, a sense of being weaker and smaller than other boys. Our home was not a happy one—the only gleam of light in it was my father’s love for and pride in me. He was always very gentle and considerate; he brought me up by love and not by fear, and always hated to hear of punishment and blows. I was fourteen when he died, but I recall little of him save this vague tenderness; a walk when he encouraged me to question him “about everything;” his love of my voice—a clear, weak, musical child’s voice—and of my musical ear and faculty for catching tunes; and his pride in my quickness and the mass of odd things which I knew…. All was not fun or poetry in these early schooldays. The old brutal flogging was still in favour, and the old stupid system of forcing boys to learn by rote. I was set to learn Latin grammar from a grammar in Latin! and a flogging every week did little to help me. I was simply stupefied,—for my father had never struck me, and at first the cane hurt me like a blow,—but the “stupid stage” soon came, and I used to fling away my grammar into old churchyards and go up for my “spinning” as doggedly as the rest. Everything had to be learned by memory, and by memory then, as now, I could learn nothing. How I picked up Latin Heaven knows; but somehow I did pick it up, and when we got to books where head went for something, I began to rise fast among my fellow-schoolboys. But I really hated my work, and my mind gained what it gained not from my grammars and construing, but from an old school library which opened to me pleasures I had never dreamed of.

  My first acquaintance with the late J. R. Green was made at Oxford in the autumn of 1859, when he was a senior man, about to pass his first school in greats, and I was in my freshman’s term…. When I first met him I was at once struck with his bright, speaking eyes, and his remarkably sparkling conversation, the like of which I have never heard since. I was once able to identify him by his conversation. A country clergyman mentioned to me his having met at a dinner in a friend’s house a most wonderful person, who made himself exceedingly pleasant, and enchanted everyone by the racy way in which he said whatever he had to say. My friend did not know who he was, but there was no mistaking the description; only one man in Oxford answered to it; that was J. R. Green…. To those whom he liked no one could make himself so delightful, but no one in his younger days made himself more enemies. He had a terrible gift of sarcasm; he knew it, it gave him a sense of power, and he may possibly have used it sometimes for the pleasure of using it. He was a most awkward opponent in any wordy debate, his repartee was instantaneous and decisive, never spiteful nor malicious. He was not popular with his contemporaries; such persons seldom are; the fault was probably more often theirs than his. To his intimates his singular individuality of character, his tender love, his perpetual wit, and his great power of sympathy rendered him the most fascinating of friends. Half-hours in his company were never dull; and, when the need arose, no one could show more delicate or more helpful sympathy than such as I have known him to bestow on those whom he had made his friends.

  Incomplete as his life seems, maimed and saddened by the sense of powers which ill health would not suffer to produce their due results, it was not an unhappy one, for he had the immense power of enjoyment which so often belongs to a vivacious intelligence. He delighted in books, in travel, in his friends’ company, in the constant changes and movements of the world. Society never dulled his taste for these things, nor was his spirit, except for passing moments, darkened by the shadows which to others seemed to lie so thick around his path. He enjoyed, though he never boasted of it, the fame his books had won, and the splendid sense of creative power. And the last six years of his life were brightened by the society and affection of one who entered into all his tastes and pursuits with the most perfect sympathy, and enabled him, by her industry and vigour, to prosecute labours which physical weakness must otherwise have checked before the best of all his works had been accomplished.

  There was probably no man whose writings and whose personality had a closer connexion with one another than those of John Richard Green. A singular mixture of strength and weakness distinguished him; but neither strength nor weakness could have been spared; both went to make up a character in which even the weaker elements became a kind of strength. And both his character and his writings were deeply impressed by the special circumstances of his life. Nothing perhaps tended more to make Green and his writings what they were than his birth as an Oxford citizen. It told more to the advantage of the readers of his writings than it did to the advantage of his own personal career; but, on the whole, it was a strengthening and ennobling element. His native city and its history were ever near to his heart. Those who knew him best in the days when his mind and character were forming were struck, and were sometimes annoyed, by a kind of dislike which he often expressed towards the University of Oxford. This is a feeling which is certainly not common among its members, at any rate not among such members of it as Green. Now in this there was something of that waywardness and capriciousness which was so apt to come out in all that he did and wrote, something too of that love of saying startling things in a startling way which was perhaps natural in one of the very best of talkers.

  His was a nature which could not take rest whilst any work remained to be done, and in the East-end the work of a parson of genius was no less than infinite. Into each position to which he was appointed—St. Barnabas, Holy Trinity, Hoxton, a mission-curacy at St. Peter’s, Stepney, and finally the neighbouring vicarage of St. Philip’s—he threw himself with the whole energy of his nature, and from each in turn, after an effort more or less prolonged, he withdrew with shattered health…. But he retired from the post he had so bravely held, a broken man. The seeds of consumption had been sown unsuspected by himself in those arduous years, and almost immediately declared themselves. Henceforward he was doomed, as he said, to the life of the student and the invalid, flitting winter by winter to those southern shores, whence came back to his friends in England the sheaves of charming letters he has left behind him. Of those days, the days of his travel, the days of his best historic work, the days of perfect happiness in married life, the days over which hung always the close shadow of the end which now at last has come, there is no space to speak. Despite the depression of illness and of waning strength, they were perhaps his happiest days, not only on account of the dear companionship in which he dwelt, but because he was giving what remained of life undividedly to the work he held to be his duty. Indeed, he never ceased working. Years before he had truly, though half-lightly, forecast his own epitaph, “He died learning.” When he was too weak to sit, his toil went forward on the sofa, and when he could not rise, it still went forward on his bed. Amidst all the vivacity and the merriment which no inroads of disease impaired, he felt, like his favourite Bede, the responsibility of knowledge, and would fain have passed it on before the end came.

  That slight nervous figure, below the medium height; that tall forehead, with the head prematurely bald; the quick but small eyes, rather close together; the thin month, with lips seldom at rest, but often closed tightly as though the teeth were clenched with an odd kind of latent energy beneath them; the slight, almost feminine hands; the little stoop; the quick alert step; the flashing exuberance of spirits; the sunny smile; the torrent of quick invective, scorn, or badinage, exchanged in a moment for a burst of sympathy or a delightful and prolonged flow of narrative—all this comes back to me, vividly! And what narrative, what anecdote, what glancing wit! What a talker! A man who shrank from society, and yet was so fitted to adorn and instruct every company he approached, from a parochial assembly to a statesman’s reception!… Green was an omnivorous reader even in those busy days. No new book escaped him, and he seemed to master its contents with a bewildering rapidity. He was full of quick discernment; and I remember one night his reading out some passages of Swinburne’s then new book of “Poems and Ballads,” selected by the Athenæum for scathing ridicule, and saying, “This is the greatest master of poetical language since Shelley; but he can’t think.”

  It was in 1863 that we met; I was not yet a professor, he had not begun to wear the air of an ascetic. We were invited to Wells, to a meeting of the Somerset Archæological Society, to stay with a common friend whom you will have no difficulty in identifying. I was told, “if you leave the station at two you will meet Green, and possibly Dimock,” the biographer of St. Hugh whom I knew already. I knew by description the sort of man I was to meet; I recognised him as he got into the Wells carriage, holding in his hand a volume of Renan. I said to myself, “if I can hinder, he shall not read that book.” We sat opposite and fell immediately into conversation. I dare say that I aired my erudition so far as to tell him that I was going to the Archæological meeting and to stay at Somerleaze. “Oh, then,” he said, “you must be either Stubbs or Dimock.” I replied, “I am not Dimock.” He came to me at Navestock afterwards, and that volume of Renan found its way uncut into my wastepaper basket. That is all; a matter of confusion and inversion, and so, they say, history is written. Well, perhaps a friendship between two historical workers may be called a historic friendship and, to be historical, should gather some of the mist of fable about its beginning: anyhow it was a friendship that lasted for his life, and the loss of which I shall never cease regretting.

  It is now just twenty years since I made Green’s acquaintance, and my recollections of what speedily ripened into a warm friendship are still fresh. He had reluctantly decided to retire from the East-end parish on account of failing health. He still wore the clerical costume and the white tie, and I remember well the impression his appearance made upon me. His figure was slight and below middle height, but, once you had seen him, your gaze was concentrated on his face and head. Mr. Sandys’s portrait, prefixed to the “Conquest of England,” is very like in the intensity of the expression, but not so much so in the features. The nose was very small, and was overshadowed by the brow of the highly-developed forehead. In a cloak-room you could always recognize his hat by its extraordinary diameter. The eyes were rather sunk, and were not, I think, quite straight; but no one who ever encountered them could forget their keenness—their appearance of being able to see through anything. He was very conscious of his own bodily insignificance, and I think, of all the countless anecdotes he knew, none pleased him more than that which represents Wilkes as saying, “Give me half an hour’s start, and I can beat the handsomest man in England.” He was a great admirer of physical beauty, both in men and women, and especially of tallness.

  I remember that that night I renewed my acquaintance with Mr. J. R. Green, of Jesus College, who has become widely known by his “History of the English People,” and other historical writings of great value. Green died at Mentone, after residing there several winters, and on his grave in the Mentone Cemetery there is the striking inscription, “he died learning.” He rather scandalized some of the brethren by saying that he looked upon the prophecies of Israel in much the same way as upon the prophecies of Merlin. He had a countenance of singular charm, beautiful eyes and a beaming look. Singularly enough, his first curacy had been in connection with the Pastoral Aid Society; next he was drafted off to one of those East London livings which Dr. Tait would give to his clever young men, not perhaps very much to the advantage of the East Enders, and he was afterwards transferred to the Librarianship of Lambeth, than which a more appropriate appointment could not have been made.

  Another remarkable man I saw but once [in 1881], but that once made a great impression on me—J. R. Green…. He was in a very far stage of consumption when I paid him a visit in Kensington Square. He only could speak in a whisper, but his talk was full of fire, ideas, and interests in the ideas of others; and his pretty, gentle wife sat by and treasured every word he spoke, till his coughing became violent; then she took us away, telling us how she was beginning to write quite easily with her left hand to his dictation, her right being paralysed after long years of incessant work. He dictated sometimes eleven hours in the day.

  During our walks Mr. Freeman also talked much of his special friends. For Mr. J. R. Green, whom he always called “Johnny,” he had a strong affection. Mr. Freeman was fourteen years his senior, and had known him ever since his boyhood, when he carried him on his shoulders. I remember the day in May, 1882, when he took me to lunch at Mr. Green’s house in London, and there I saw for myself how much the elder and the younger writer were to each other. It was only the year before Mr. Green’s death, and he looked very frail. He wore a little black skull-cap. His eyes were bright and his manner and talk particularly charming. That he shared Mr. Freeman’s vivid sense of the ludicrous, was shown by the frequent laughter at that lunch-table. Among other things which amused him, was Mr. Freeman’s declaration that he never let a man die at the end of a chapter in the “Norman Conquest,” because Johnny told him not to.

  All his friends speak of the singular brilliancy of his conversation, and attribute it partly to the vivacity and alertness of his intellect, and the readiness with which mere statements of fact grouped themselves in his mind into vivid pictures. But it also implied the quick sympathy of an exquisitely sensitive nature. If he could appreciate Freeman’s historical dissertations, he could enjoy the charm of naïve simplicity in women and children.

  This distaste for the routine methods of education debarred him from high university distinctions, but was in reality, as the event proved, his scholarly and artistic salvation. His genius was too original to suffer compression into the academic mould, which would have deadened his most vital intellectual impulses.

  Green, born in Oxford, and spending many of his happiest years there, knew and loved both town and University. He went to Magdalen Grammar School at the age of eight, and he won an Open Fellowship at Jesus at sixteen, before he was old enough to go into residence. His biographers tell us that he entered college a friendless, homeless boy, and that he continued, as an undergraduate, to lead a solitary life. His Welsh co-students, with their close home-associations, looked upon him as an English interloper, and left him much to himself. But he found books in the Library, sermons in the stones of Oxford, and good in everything. He read enormously; and he wandered, in his solitary, studious way, among the spots and the buildings which were rich in their associations of ancient times, recalling, as he went, the memories of the past, and in his own mind combining them and putting together in coherent form…. His rooms at Jesus are unknown; and the Hall-porter, in 1899, had never heard his name.

Short History of the English People, 1874

  Mr. Green’s style is eminently readable and attractive. A lively imagination, not always under the most rigid control, imparts its own colors to the dry details of history, where a more scrupulous or conscientious writer would have wearied himself, and fatigued his readers, unwilling to venture beyond the arid region of facts…. Upon inaccuracies in detail we have not insisted, prejudicial as such inaccuracies must be in a manual intended for schools, for it is not to be expected that in so wide a subject they could be altogether avoided. Our objections are of a graver and more general kind. It is against the whole tone and teaching of the book that we feel ourselves called upon most emphatically to protest. Under the disguise of a school history, Mr. Green has disseminated some very violent opinions in politics and religion. His design is not the less subtle and dangerous because, in accomplishing this object, he has been misled into ingenious perversions of facts, and in the ardour of his temperament has misrepresented the conduct and motives of men—of those especially who have upheld the Church and the Monarchy. His sympathies seem not with order, but with disorder; not with established Government, but with those who have attempted to overthrow it. In the most ardent and furious of the leaders of the French Revolution he finds “a real nobleness of aim and temper,” which he denies to the champions of good government, or the peaceful upholders of religion and morality. To him the aristocracy, in conjunction with the Monarchy, seem the plagues of mankind, united in a dire conspiracy against popular freedom, progress, and development. Is this a history, we ask, to be put into the hands of the young and incautious? Is it from this they are to learn wisdom and moderation, to form just and equitable judgments of past events, or of the great actors of times that are gone? Is this the teaching by which they are to estimate rightly the deeds of kings, the worth of an aristocracy, the beneficial effects of order and religion? We think not. We have warned our readers against the errors and tendencies of Mr. Green’s book. It is for them to exercise the necessary precautions, both for themselves and for those who are committed to their care and guidance.

  This book has extraordinary merits. It is rather a commentary on the history of England than a history itself, and therefore those who already have some knowledge of the subject are likely to be most profited by its use. The qualities which have given to the work its great popularity are the brilliancy of its style, the breadth of its generalizations, the vividness with which it portrays the general drift of events, the clearness with which it shows the relations of cause and effect, the prominence which it gives to the literary and social progress of the people, and the skill with which the author has made his selections and exclusions. The book has been shown to be somewhat inaccurate in matters of minor detail; but the inaccuracies are, for the most part, such as may easily be remedied by careful revision, without disturbing the general arrangement of the work. For the purposes of the general reader it is superior to all other works in a single volume. Its value is also increased by a carefully drawn list of authorities at the beginning of each subject. These lists afford a somewhat comprehensive and very valuable bibliography of English history.

  His accuracy has been much disputed. When the first burst of applause that welcomed the “Short History” had subsided, several critics began to attack it on the score of minor errors. They pointed out a number of statements of fact which were doubtful, and others which were incorrect, and spread in some quarters the impression that he was on the whole a careless and untrustworthy writer. I do not deny that there are in the first editions of the “Short History” some assertions made more positively than the evidence warrants, but this often arises from the summary method of treatment. A writer who compresses the whole history of England into eight hundred pages of small octavo, making his narrative not a bare narrative but a picture full of colour and incident, but incident which, for brevity’s sake, must often be given by allusion, cannot be always interrupting the current of the story to indicate doubts or quote authorities for every statement in which there may be an element of conjecture; and it is probable that in some instances when the authorities are examined their result will appear different from that which the author has given them. On this head the “Short History,” if not perfect, is open to no grave censure. Of mistakes, strictly so called—i. e., statements demonstrably incorrect and therefore ascribable to haste or carelessness—there are enough to make a considerable show under the hands of a hostile critic, yet not more than one who has read a good deal of history will be prepared to expect. The book falls far short of the accuracy of Bishop Thirlwall or Ranke, short even of the accuracy of Gibbon or Carlyle; but it is not much below the standard of Mr. Grote’s care, it is up to that of Macaulay or Robertson, and decidedly above Dean Milman or David Hume. I take famous names, and could easily put a better face on the matter by choosing for comparison contemporary writers whose literary eminence is higher than their historical.

  It views events in their just proportions, and places them in their true perspective; and estimates with commendable judgment and impartiality the various forces and movements that have given to the English people a value and significance. He has taken his conception of history mainly from Professor Freeman, but has brought to its consideration a vividness, a brilliance of style, and a picturesque human interest that entitle the author to rank with the romantic historians of English literature.

  He is best known by his historical work on English subjects, especially the famous “Short History of the English People,” perhaps the most popular work of its class and kind ever written. Mr. Green professed, on a principle which has been growing in favour for some time, to extend the usual conception of historical dealing to social, literary, and other matters. These, however, had never as a fact been overlooked by historians, and the popularity of the book was chiefly due to its judicious selection of interesting facts, to the spirit of the narrative, and to the style, based partly on Macaulay, but infused with modernness which exactly hit the taste of the readers of our time.

  It has often been said that Mr. Green taught us to write history. No similar book has ever been so successful, and the method and execution are admirable, but it was meant to be, and is, an historical narrative, and for that very reason some may prefer the “Student’s History” of Professor Gardiner.

  The strong sense of literary form, which is conspicuous in all his work, led him to bring together topics which, if treated at all, are broken up and become discontinuous on the old system. He wished to bring out the unity and continuity of great religious or literary movements or of economic changes, such as the growth of town life, in which the leading moments are not defined by the accession of kings or the event of battles. The narrative had, to a great extent, to be reorganised and the stress laid upon a different series of events. It was impossible, therefore, that Green should fully satisfy critics who desiderated a manual on the old model. Green had, in fact, written something quite different, and something which, as Freeman cordially admitted, was admirable from his own point of view. He had written, within a brief compass, nothing less than the first history of England which would enable his countrymen to gain a vivid and continuous perception of the great processes by which the nation had been built up, and which had been overlooked or incidentally noticed in the histories which adhere rigidly to sequences of outward political fact.

A History of the English People, 1877–80

  By far the most important general history of England that has ever been written. It not only covers the whole period of English history down to the close of the Napoleonic wars, but it also embodies the results of those researches into special periods which of late have been so characteristic of English historical activity. To these merits must be added several others of scarcely less importance. The author writes in an unusually vigorous and interesting style. His pages are not encumbered with notes, but at the beginning of the history of each period is to be found a very complete and valuable account of the sources from which information on the subject treated is to be drawn. These bibliographical instructions will be found of the greatest use to the special student of English history.

The Making of England, 1881

  Mr. Green’s new book possesses all the well-known charms of his fascinating style, and combines with them a great many other excellences in a far higher degree than usual…. Where the subject demands it, his colours are as bright and as vivid as ever; but, where logical argument or grave philosophical reflection is needed, Mr. Green rises to the situation, and the weightier passages thus interspersed between his glowing word-pictures certainly whet the reader’s appetite far better than the uninterrupted feast which he used to spread so much too lavishly before us. Moreover his present book is a piece of real original research. We do not say that it probes very deep into the fundamental question. As far as scholarship goes, it cannot compare with Mr. Elton’s profoundly learned and broadly scientific work just published, which deals with much the same period; but, looking at it as an essay written wholly within the narrow bounds of Mr. Freeman’s Teutonic school, and based almost entirely upon the documentary evidence, it deserves high praise for its thoroughness and its general ability. It marks Mr. Green as a competent original historian, not a mere clever adapter and literary confectioner of other men’s solid material…. Taking it all in all, Mr. Green’s new book is a most useful contribution to our knowledge of a very dark period, and it stamps his place as a far higher one than that secured by his more captivating, but far less original, “Short History of the English People.” It will probably long represent the last word of the Teutonists on the nature and extent of the primitive English settlement.

  In the early spring of 1881, he was seized by a violent attack of illness, and it needed but a little time to show that there could never be any return to hope. The days that might still be left to him must henceforth be conquered day by day from death. In the extremity of ruin and defeat he found a higher fidelity and a perfect strength. The way of success was closed, the way of courageous effort still lay open. Touched with the spirit of that impressioned patriotism which animated all his powers, he believed that before he died some faithful work might yet be accomplished for those who should come after him. At the moment of his greatest bodily weakness, when fear had deepened into the conviction that he had scarcely a few weeks to live, his decision was made. The old plans for work were taken out, and from these a new scheme was rapidly drawn up in such a form that if strength lasted it might be wrought into a continuous narrative, while if life failed some finished part of it might be embodied in the earlier “History.” Thus, under the shadow of death, the “Making of England” was begun. During the five summer months in which it was written that shadow never lifted. It was the opinion of his doctors that life was only prolonged from day to day throughout that time by the astonishing force of his own will, by the constancy of a resolve that had wholly set aside all personal aims. His courage took no touch of gloom or disappointment; every moment of comparative ease was given to his task; when such moments failed, hours of langour and distress were given with the same unfaltering patience. As he lay worn with sickness, in his extreme weakness unable to write a line with his own hand, he was forced for the first time to learn how to dictate; he had not even strength himself to mark the corrections of his printer’s proofs, and these, too, were dictated by him, while the references for the volume were drawn up as books were carried one by one to his bedside, and the notes from them entered by his directions. With such sustained zeal, such eager conscientiousness was his work done that much of it was wholly rewritten five times, other parts three times; till as autumn drew on he was driven from England and it became needful to bring the book rapidly to an end which fell short of his original scheme, and to close the last chapters with less finish and fulness of labor.

  This book, published in 1882, brought down English history to the consolidation of the kingdoms under Egbert, and showed Green’s qualities as a critical historian. His rare power of dealing with fragmentary evidence, his quick eye for what was essential, his firm hold of the main points, his ripe knowledge of all that could illustrate his subject, above all, his feeling for reality, and his insight into probabilities, enabled him to give life and movement to the earliest period of our national life. Apart from its other merits this book exercised a wide influence, which is still growing, as an example of the methods by which archæology can be turned into history. It gave a stimulus to the pursuit of local archæology, and showed archæologists the full importance of their work. It proved not merely that the merits of the “Short History” were those of literary style and brilliancy of presentation, but that the whole book was the fruit of patient research and thorough knowledge, which only needed longer time and a larger scale to establish its conclusions.

The Conquest of England, 1883

  J. R. Green once said of himself: “I know what men will say of me—‘He died learning.’” Nothing in the whole of his works affords a more striking instance of his penetrating insight than this casual remark, recorded in the prefatory memoir which precedes the “Conquest of England.” “He died learning.” These three words, like all true sayings, have a profound application; they hit exactly the most noteworthy, and yet perhaps the least noted, feature of Green’s rare and admirable genius. We may indeed doubt whether, like all men of vivid imagination, he did not overrate the intelligence of others. It is quite possible that critics might not of themselves have said of our author what he has said of himself. But the words, once uttered, are a revelation. Any person of ordinary acumen can see their truth. The true source of all that was best in J. R. Green’s work was that he died, and one must also add lived, learning…. He is so brilliant as a writer, his skill in presenting to our view the most striking aspect of his subject is so obvious, that even intelligent students overlook, even if they do not deny, the compass of his knowledge. He never plays the pedant, and therefore he never gets with the public full credit for learning. But whoever reads Green’s notes on the condition and history of English towns—notes which, as we understand the matter, have not received the last touches that would have been given them by their writer if he had lived—will easily see that he was, in spite of the brilliancy of his style, something much better and greater than a striking writer, and that he died learning because he had lived the studious, concentrated life of a learned man devoted to learning.

General

  I can assure you that hardly any enterprise we have ever been engaged in has been more satisfactory to me personally, and not less to other members of the firm, than your Primers. Believe me, my dear Green, that you are loved, and honoured, and trusted among us all in a very high degree, and we count all that you do with and for us as among our most precious work.

  No one who really wishes to learn can read his “Short History of the English People” without being impressed by the power of the writer to impart knowledge in a fresh and original form; nor can he compare that book with the subsequent larger History without being struck with the writer’s conscientious desire to abandon pre-conceived notions which we look in vain for in many authors of high repute. In estimating, as far as it is possible to do, the value of Mr. Green’s work, it is first necessary to ask what we expect from a historian. If it is to give us a thoroughly accurate account of events which have happened, no doubt Mr. Green has often been found wanting. It is mere panegyric, and nothing else, to speak of him as here and there substituting one name for another, or one date for another. He was often incorrect on matters of much higher importance than these. Readers who have a special acquaintance with any part of his vast subject can easily suggest sources of information which he has neglected and arguments to which he has paid no attention. But is not fulness of knowledge incompatible with the undertaking of so vast a work as a complete History of England, and would he not have himself delayed his undertaking if it had been possible for him to do so?… If Mr. Green had been able to defer his work for twenty years there is no reason to suppose that he would ever have attained anything like the accuracy, say, of Mr. Freeman. It was not in his nature to do so, though it was in his nature to aim at it. But, for all that, it is not impossible that he may have been able to impart to us something that Mr. Freeman does not give us. Both these writers have the invaluable power of making the past live before us, but they do it in a very different way. Mr. Freeman fixes on concrete facts, on geographical positions, acts recorded to have been done, or laws issued by authority. At these he gazes till he makes them tell their secret and the secret of the men among whom these things were done. Mr. Green proceeded in a precisely opposite way. That which impressed him most in men was that they were alive. That which he saw in history was the continuous life of the race, the change of thought which makes each generation differ from the last.

  The “Short History” is wonderful; in many respects it is admirable. It did not indeed fill up the particular hole which it was meant to fill up; but it revealed the existence of another hole and filled that up most happily. The “Making of England” was needful for his reputation; it has high merits in itself; it is amazing as the work of one whose strength had already given way. But the Green of twenty years back both promised and had begun greater things than these. I cannot regret that he has made so brilliant an introduction to my own work; but it was not an introduction for which I looked, but a continuation. The times to which I must ever look back are the days when he and I walked together over so many of the most stirring sites of English, Norman, and Angevin history, when he was planning what we now never can have, the tale of the second Making of England told in full as perhaps he alone could have told it.

  Green writes the story of his England as a keenly observant American traveller might record the impressions of a journey through the dear old home of his fathers. He himself realizes the England of the past, its topography, and the features, forms, and characters of its successive swarms of invaders, as if he had been an onlooker of the whole series of transactions. With his keenness of imagination, combined with his intensely sympathetic admiration for the race which laid the foundations of England’s greatness, Green could not choose but overflow in graphic eloquence that is almost epic. But his was no mere outburst of uninformed exuberance. He was nearly forty years of age when he published his “Short History,” and he had been amassing materials for it all his life. How exhaustive and painstaking was his investigation into the materials of our early history is seen in the abundant notes to his “Making of England,” which may be taken as an example of the thoroughness with which he went to work throughout in mastering the authorities on which he based his structure. His eager eloquence of style is simply the reflection of his clearness of conception and his enthusiasm for his subject.

  Attempting a schoolbook, produced a literary masterpiece, though his “Short History” had both to be expanded and to be purged of many errors before, as “The History of the English People,” it became a model of what condensation can effect. In his “Making of England,” Green showed remarkable power of painting the external conditions that influence the life of a people.

  The animated and poetical style, the independent and original judgment, as well as the novel conception of the whole, at once attracted the admiration of the great majority of its readers. It is not, perhaps, a work of faultless accuracy, but that is hardly to be expected from a book which is written up to a theory; for facts as looked upon by the spectator, whose mind is already made up on the subject, show the most obliging readiness to assume any form he chooses. The literary power of Green is undeniable; in some passages, as in his account of the last uprising of Wales before its conquest by Edward I., his naturally picturesque style develops into genuine poetry, while his narrative is usually spirited and his delineation of character striking, if perhaps a little too imaginative. Yet we think that those have formed too high an estimate of his qualities who would rank him with Macaulay. His narrative power is confined to occasional episodes, between which we find intervals, where the interest languishes, if it does not die altogether; if we are tempted to go on beyond a period which has pleased us, it is not because the enchantment of the narrative carries us on, but because we hope to find in a new chapter another unconnected passage as spirited as that we have been reading; and this expectation is often disappointed. Having once gained the attention of his audience by a masterly summary of English history, Green hoped to retain it for the larger work, into which the “Short History” was expanded. This attempt, however, was not so successful. The larger history may have gained in value as a class-book by its more elaborate form; as a literary effort it lost in terseness and force more than it gained by higher elaboration.

  The sentence is much longer than Macaulay’s, the paragraph very much longer than Macaulay’s. The single-sentence paragraph is abolished. The variety that Macaulay secured by varying the length of the paragraph and its structure is lacking here. The paragraphs are not well massed. The element of variety being made little of, an attempt is made to supply its place with that of intensity and weight. There are no waste sentences. The short sentences are sententious, and the long ones, while admirable in accuracy, are sometimes a little heavy. The coherence is good, but it is the coherence of severe method, and depends neither on connectives nor on transitional clauses. After all, it is a noble style, though not an easy one.

  It is not difficult to point out the defects of his picturesque method. The interest of his style lies to a great extent in his power of illustration, but at times he uses it in excess. The elaboration of analogy and the extravagant quotation of the memorable sayings of his characters interrupt the flow of his paragraphs; and by his favourite device of a succession of short jerky sentences he often signally fails in his endeavour to be vivid. There is a suggestion that the writer has not assimilated his material, and is only feeling his way to a complete description through a multitude of notes. The well-known passages on the character of Elizabeth … illustrate this: it is too long and too miscellaneous in style. The result is little else than a bare summation of the details, not that artistic whole which should be something more than the total of the contributing facts. This flaw in individual passages is the more striking as in the general conception of his subject, especially in the “Short History,” he shows the sublimating power of a writer of high order. Green’s habit of work, moreover, was too hurried for a perfect style. His constitutional keenness, increased rather than diminished by ill-health, made his style at times immature, as at others it made it vivacious. It was not from lack of revision—for he recast his more important books—that a certain restlessness remains in his more finished work…. In his best passages his art is impressionist, fresh, and suggestive; when he seems to fail it is by excess of colour and crudeness of composition. The shortcomings of his technique, however, can never make us forget that he is essentially an artist in prose.

  In John Richard Green a poet in history combined the picturesqueness of Froude with something of the exactitude and breadth of Freeman. The “Short History of the English People,” in 1874, produced a sensation such as is rarely effected in these days by any book that is not a masterpiece of imaginative art. It treated history in a new vein, easily, brightly, keenly, sometimes with an almost jaunty vivacity. The danger of Green lay in his excess of poetic sensibility, his tendency to be carried away by his flow of animal spirits, to confound what was with what must or should have been; but he was a delightful populariser of history, a man of strongly emphasised character who contrived to fascinate a world of readers by charging his work with evidences of his own gay subjectivity.

  The extraordinary imaginative power which enabled Green to throw himself into the life of the distant past. This is his supreme merit as a historian, and in this quality he has never been surpassed.