this part of his labours is notable chiefly for its effect
on himself. He never went over altogether to men like Schottmueller, who
said of him that he made no research--_er hat nicht geforscht_--meaning
that he had made his mind up about the Templars by the easy study of
Wilkins, Michelet, Schottmueller himself, and perhaps a hundred others,
but had not gone underground to the mines they delved in. Fustel de
Coulanges, at the time of his death, was promoting the election of the
Bishop of Oxford to the Institute, on the ground that he surpassed all
other Englishmen in his acquaintance with manuscripts. Doellinger agreed
with their French rival in his estimate of our English historian, but he
ascribed less value to that part of his acquirements. He assured the
Bavarian Academy that Mr. Freeman, who reads print, but nevertheless
mixes his colours with brains, is the author of the most profound work
on the Middle Ages ever written in this country, and is not only a
brilliant writer and a sagacious critic, but the most learned of all our
countrymen. Ranke once drew a line at 1514, after which, he said, we
still want help from unprinted sources. The world had moved a good deal
since that cautious innovation, and after 1860, enormous and excessive
masses of archive were brought into play. The Italian Revolution opened
tempting horizons. In 1864 Doellinger spent his vacation in the libraries
of Vienna and Venice. At Vienna, by an auspicious omen, Sickel, who was
not yet known to Greater Germany as the first of its mediaeval
palaeographers, showed him the sheets of a work containing 247
Carolingian acts unknown to Boehmer, who had just died with the repute of
being the best authority on Imperial charters. During several years
Doellinger followed up the discoveries he now began. Theiner sent him
documents from the _Archivio Segreto_; one of his friends shut himself
up at Trent, and another at Bergamo. Strangers ministered to his
requirements, and huge quantities of transcripts came to him from many
countries. Conventional history faded away; the studies of a lifetime
suddenly underwent transformation; and his view of the last six
centuries was made up from secret information gathered in thirty
European libraries and archives. As many things remote from current
knowledge grew to be certainties, he became more confident, more
independent, and more isolated. The ecclesiastical history of his youth
went to pieces against the new criti