the judgment of the United States
Supreme Court that the income tax was unconstitutional, he expressed the
opinion that it was a grand decision, evidencing a high respect for
private property, but in the next breath came the question, "How are you
ever to manage continuing the payment of those enormous pensions of
yours?"

It is not, I think, difficult to explain why Stubbs and Gardiner are
more precious possessions for students than Lecky. Gardiner devoted his
life to the seventeenth century. If we may reckon the previous
preparation and the ceaseless revision, Stubbs devoted a good part of
his life to the constitutional history from the beginnings of it to
Henry VII. Lecky's eight volumes on the eighteenth century were
published in thirteen years. A mastery of such an amount of original
material as Stubbs and Gardiner mastered was impossible within that
time. Lecky had the faculty of historic divination which compensated to
some extent for the lack of a more thorough study of the sources. Genius
stood in the place of painstaking engrossment in a single task.

The last important work of Lecky, "Democracy and Liberty," was a brave
undertaking. Many years ago he wrote: "When I was deeply immersed in the
'History of England in the Eighteenth Century,' I remember being struck
by the saying of an old and illustrious friend that he could not
understand the state of mind of a man who, when so many questions of
burning and absorbing interest were rising around him, could devote the
best years of his life to the study of a vanished past." Hence the book
which considered present issues of practical politics and party
controversies, and a result that satisfied no party and hardly any
faction. It is an interesting question who chose the better part,--he or
Stubbs and Gardiner--they who devoted themselves entirely to the past or
he who made a conscientious endeavor to bring to bear his study of
history upon the questions of the present.

SIR SPENCER WALPOLE

A paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the November
meeting of 1907.

SIR SPENCER WALPOLE

Sir Spencer Walpole was an excellent historian and industrious writer.
His first important work, entitled "The History of England from 1815,"
was published at intervals from 1878 to 1886; the first installment
appeared when he was thirty-nine years old. This in six volumes carried
the history to 1858 in an interesting, accurate, and impartial
nar