308
��NOTES BY THE WAY.
��March 8.
��Mr. Firth,
��wellian side, in discontent, puritanism, and rebellion, it is merely fiddle-faddle. His evident bias made him blind to all merit in our loyalist service and struggles.
" I think that my conviction of his chief error, the total deficiency to estimate what we painters call ' aerial perspective,' is not only compatible with what The Athenceum finely shows to have been his lifelong habit of from-day-to-day step-by-step pro- gress, but moreover to have been resultant from this habit carried to excess. He could not get outside of himself and the irksomely slow gradual evolution of ideas. It was the spirit of an annalist, or diarist ; not the genius of an historian. In fact, I cannot with all my due admiration for his marvellous industry and per- tinacity behold any such genius at all. He had never acquired a sound judgment on the size and importance of things. His historical habit was like the exhausted receiver of an air-pump, wherein a feather or a guinea might fall with equal rapidity deprived of wind-resistance. He accumulated multitudinous grains of facts like dust, into a head, and scarcely discriminated at all as to their relative value. Hence it followed that he was raising at the end mounds of unfertilized lumber, in great part rubbish, requiring to be resifted after removal, and only the good part retained."
Ebsworth again refers to Gardiner on March 8th :
" The fact remains that his life was an incessant drudgery. . . . It is a certainty, and no fancy, that to his chosen successor, my friend Mr. Firth of Oxford, as I am entitled to call him, we can all look for the promised completion of Gardiner's ' Cromwell,' and the necessary continuation up to the Restoration : the only man capable of performing the task, and, I feel sure, far better than Gardiner would possibly have done it. Firth has the large-mindedness, the all-roundness, and unprejudiced insight and philosophy, which S. R. G. lacked."
��HAZLITT.
��was consequent upon Hazlitt ' in Longman's
��1902, Aug. 24. The following in reference to Hazlitt
Hazlitt. " dear " Andrew Lang's article on Birrell's Magazine, August, 1902 :
" I scarcely claim that William Hazlitt can be rightly included among our ' Great Writers,' but for certain rare excellences he is more delightful than many men whose powers were more complete and sustained. To one who, like me, has known and loved him in literature as a distinct and powerful influence, possessing that rare quality which Matthew Arnold, when writing on Heine, defines as ' charm,' there is a special and unfading interest centred in Hazlitt. He is, for one thing, inseparably connected with the group of half
�� �
