his life an
advanced Liberal, with an unswerving trust in popular government as
essential to the welfare of his country and to the just and proper
management of its affairs at home and abroad. His literary bent was
evidently taken from hereditary association with politics, and from
his own official training. As an historian he enters with intense
interest into the strife of parties, the parliamentary vicissitudes,
into the swing backward and forward of reform and reaction, into the
exact causes and incidents that affected the rise and the fall of
ministries. In describing the state of manners at certain periods, and
the changes wrought in the national life by the efforts of philosophic
writers and philanthropists, his facts and figures are always ample
and accurate; he pays close attention to financial and economical
movements. As a politician he distrusted the spirited policy that
involved England in the warlike adventures and hazards of an eventful
and stirring time. The Afghan war of 1838-43 was, he said, the most
ruinous and unnecessary war which the English had ever waged. The
Crimean war he evidently regarded as a useless expenditure of blood
and money, which might well have been avoided. On Lord Beaconsfield's
Imperialism he passes severe censure: and the interference of that
statesman in 1877 to protect the Turkish Sultan against Russia is very
sharply condemned. He has even some doubt whether the purchase of the
Suez Canal Shares was a wise stroke of policy. This book, in short, is
a corroboration of the well-known remark that the history of our
country has been mainly written by Whigs and Liberals, with the
exception of a few authors who, like Hume and Alison, have hardly
preserved an historic reputation. Nevertheless, whether we agree or
not with the prudent and pacific views towards which Walpole
manifestly leaned, his narrative, his statements of disputable cases,
his distribution of the arguments for and against his conclusions, are
invariably accurate, fair, and dispassionate. His anxiety to give full
authority for facts and opinions is shown in an almost too copious
supply of foot-notes. Lord Acton, who found the late Bishop Creighton
too economical of these citations, compares his practice to Mr.
Walpole's if several hundred references to Hansard and the Annual
Register had been struck out from the History of England.

In his preface to the first volume the author explains briefly the
method that he ha