e things which are the merit of Germans. "Quaecunque in Germanorum
indole admiranda atque imitanda fere censemus, ea in Doellingero maxime
splendent." The patriotic quality was recognised in the address of the
Berlin professors, who say that by upholding the independence of the
national thought, whilst he enriched it with the best treasure of other
lands, he realised the ideal of the historian. He became more German in
extreme old age, and less impressive in his idiomatic French and English
than in his own language. The lamentations of men he thought good
judges, Mazade and Taine, and the first of literary critics, Montegut,
diluted somewhat his admiration for the country of St. Bernard and
Bossuet. In spite of politics, his feeling for English character, for
the moral quality of English literature, never changed; and he told his
own people that their faults are not only very near indeed to their
virtues, but are sometimes more apparent to the observer. The belief in
the fixity and influence of national type, confirmed by his authorities,
Ganganelli and Moehler, continued to determine his judgments. In his last
letter to Mr. Gladstone, he illustrated the Irish question by means of a
chronicle describing Ireland a thousand years ago.

Everybody has felt that his power was out of proportion to his work, and
that he knew too much to write. It was so much better to hear him than
to read all his books, that the memory of what he was will pass away
with the children whom he loved. Hefele called him the first theologian
in Germany, and Hoefler said that he surpassed all men in the knowledge
of historical literature; but Hefele was the bishop of his predilection,
and Hoefler had been fifty years his friend, and is the last survivor of
the group which once made Munich the capital of citramontane
Catholicity. Martensen, the most brilliant of Episcopalian divines,
describes him as he talked with equal knowledge and certainty of every
age, and understood all characters and all situations as if he had lived
in the midst of them. The best ecclesiastical historian now living is
the fittest judge of the great ecclesiastical historian who is dead.
Harnack has assigned causes which limited his greatness as a writer,
perhaps even as a thinker; but he has declared that no man had the same
knowledge and intelligence of history in general, and of religious
history which is its most essential element, and he affirms, what some
have doubted, th