e student's attention, far more interesting and
important than the progress of society.' He would probably have agreed
with Coleridge that knowledge of current speculative opinions is the
surest ground for political prophecy; and he delights in tracing back
to distant sources the religious movements of the nineteenth century.
He declares that the heroic measures introduced by legislation within
our own recollections are the links of a continuous chain extending
from a prehistoric past to an invisible future. We have here a writer
who in one chapter handles complicated statistics and economical
calculations with obvious relish, and turns from them with equal
pleasure to abstruse disquisitions on the filiation of ideas and the
march of mind.

There are at least two chapters in the History that exemplify the
attention given by Walpole to ecclesiastical controversies, and to the
significance of the antagonism between the New Learning and dogmatic
orthodoxy. In his fourth volume the story of the Oxford Tractarians is
related at some length, and he remarks on the singular coincidence,
that almost simultaneously with the secession of the English High
Churchmen the Free Church was established by disrupture from the
Established Church in Scotland. He affirms that both these schisms, so
different in motive and direction, had their origin in events dating
from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The disintegrating
forces of geology, astronomy, and scientific research generally upon
the received tradition are examined; the beginning of modern Church
reform is noted; and in a chapter of the final volume of the _History
of Twenty-five Years_ it is maintained that the great question before
the religious world in the middle of the nineteenth century was the
possibility of resisting the inroads of science. He describes the
vigour with which the polemical campaign was conducted on both sides;
how the orthodox position was assailed by writers of the _Essays and
Reviews_, by the criticism of Bishop Colenso, by Broad Churchmen and
the champions of free thought; how it was defended by prosecutions in
the ecclesiastical courts and in appeals to the Privy Council from
both parties. It was certainly a remarkable epoch in the history of
opinions, when the country was agitated by the ardent zeal of
disputants over questions of ritual and dogma that now seem to have
fallen into cool neglect; and Walpole gives, as usual, a careful array
of th