Buckle, Lecky, Stubbs, Freeman, Rawlinson,
Green, Seeley, Creasy and Stephen—men
of almost equal eminence, as S. R.
Gardiner, James Bryce, Goldwin Smith,
Herbert Paul and Justin McCarthy. Much of
the work of these writers has enriched thought
as well as informed the mind. Nor ought
we to neglect to speak of the men who have
done much excellent work in departments
akin to that of the historian. We refer to
the writers, among whom are jurists,
university lecturers, professors and other
eminent men of letters, who by their research
have thrown light on English political
institutions and the recent trend of the nation
in legislation as well as in national expansion.
A few of these may be cited, as E. S. Creasy,
who wrote authoritatively on The Rise and
Progress of the English Constitution; T.
Erskine May on Parliamentary Law and Usage
as well as on the Constitutional History of
England since George III and on Democracy
in Europe; Henry Maine on Popular Government
and International Law; Frederick
Pollock on The Science of Politics and the
History of English Law; and R. F. D. Palgrave
on The House of Commons, with illustrations
of its history and practice. Further and
helpful light on the politics and political
problems of the time is afforded by the
memoirs of prominent statesmen and the many
instructive biographies which recent years
have produced. Among the more
important of these may be mentioned the many
biographies of Mr. Gladstone, notably those
by John Morley and by G. Barnett Smith,
who also wrote a Life of John Bright, sketches
of The Prime Ministers of Queen Victoria and
a History of the English Parliament. Baron
Rowton's monograph on Lord Beaconsfield
(Benjamin Disraeli) should also be known to
the modern student of English politics, as
well as the monographs in the English
Statesmen Series; H. D. Traill's Marquis of
Salisbury in the Queen's Prime Ministers
Series; John Morley's Life of Richard Cobden;
Leslie Stephen's Life of Henry Fawcett;
Andrew Lang's Life and Letters of Sir Stafford
Northcote (Earl of Iddesleigh); Winston
Spencer Churchill's Life of Lord Randolph
Churchill; Herbert Paul's illuminative Modern
England; and Lord Rosebery's Lives of
William Pitt and Sir Robert Peel and his
Questions of Empire. In the record of notable
books in politics and the political life of the
motherland it is proper to note the important
treatise on The American Commonwealth
by James Bryce, dealing with the American
constitution and its development, a work
which has been written not only with a scholar's
dispassionateness but with remarkable
intelligence and sympathy. Here also we
must chronicle J. R. Seeley's Expansion of
England; Lord Cromer's Modern Egypt;
Sir Alfred Lyall's The Rise of the British
Dominion in India; and the instructive series
of political biographies connected with
England's
dominion in India, edited by Sir W.
W. Hunter, under the title of Rulers of India.
The series embraces the lives of the great
English consuls and governors-general in
India, from the era of Clive, Cornwallis and
Hastings to that of Dalhousie, Canning,
Lawrence and Mayo.
Wide and entertaining is the field of general biography, in the department that deals with the lives and work of contemporary men outside the ranks of statesmen and politicians. Our limited space will permit the mention of but a few productions of note that are likely to endure. Perhaps the more useful to the student consulting these pages are those that deal with littérateurs and include the monographs of recent years on the great writers of the English motherland. Of these, John Morley's series of English Men of Letters has the merit, not only of compactness of form as well as of modest cost, but the special advantage of being written by literary specialists of eminence, of keen critical powers, trained judgment and, as a rule, fine qualities in writing English prose. Besides these may be mentioned such works as Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay, Froude's Life of Carlyle, Uowden's Life of Shelley, Forster's Life of Dickens, Stanley's Life of Thomas Arnold, Saintsbury's Matthew Arnold, Colonel Maurice's Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, Collingwood's John Ruskin, Harrison's Tennyson, Mill and Ruskin, Stopford Brooke's Tennyson and His Art, Prothero's Life of Dean Stanley and Leonard Huxley's Life and Letters of Prof. T. H. Huxley. A colossal undertaking also deserves to be noted—the 60 volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography, which has recently been completed under the editorship first of Leslie Stephen and finally of Sidney Lee.
The transition is natural to the essay and the numberless writers in modern belles-lettres. The age is rich in workers here, especially in poetry, art and criticism. One of the sanest and most thoughtful of these critics was Richard Holt Hutton, the late editor of the London Spectator, who wrote largely and with earnestness on modern philosophical, literary and religious topics. To single out but one of his works we may mention Criticisms on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers. Another of these writers of eminence is George Saintsbury, professor of English literature at the University of Edinburgh. Besides his History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1790-1895), he has compiled an excellent collection of Specimens of English Prose Style, and written Essays on English Literature and a Short History of French Literature. Leslie Stephen was another able and competent critic, whose Hours in a Library, Studies of a Biographer and History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century repay perusal. Frederic Harrison is yet another well-equipped writer, of the positivist school, whose Victorian Literature, study
