ting it with a smooth surface, as a thing tested
and ascertained. Mr. Lea, in other passages, has shown his disbelief in
Caesarius of Heisterbach, and knows that history written in reliance
upon him would be history fit for the moon. Words as ferocious are
recorded of another legate at a different siege (Langlois, _Regne de
Philippe le Hardi_, p. 156). Their tragic significance for history is
not in the mouth of an angry crusader at the storming of a fortress, but
in the pen of an inoffensive monk, watching and praying under the
peaceful summit of the Seven Mountains.

Mr. Lea undertakes to dispute no doctrine and to propose no moral. He
starts with an avowed desire not to say what may be construed
injuriously to the character or feelings of men. He writes pure history,
and is methodically oblivious of applied history. The broad and
sufficient realm of fact is divided by a scientific frontier from the
outer world of interested argument. Beyond the frontier he has no
cognisance, and neither aspires to inflame passions nor to compose the
great eirenikon. Those who approach with love or hatred are to go empty
away; if indeed he does not try by turns to fill them both. He seeks his
object not by standing aloof, as if the name that perplexed Polyphemus
was the proper name for historians, but by running successively on
opposing lines. He conceives that civilised Europe owes its preservation
to the radiant centre of religious power at Rome, and is grateful to
Innocent III. for the vigour with which he recognised that force was the
only cure for the pestiferous opinions of misguided zealots. One of his
authorities is the inquisitor Bernardus Guidonis, and there is no writer
whom, in various shapes, he quotes so often. But when Guidonis says that
Dolcino and Margarita suffered _per juditium ecclesie_, Mr. Lea is
careful to vindicate the clergy from the blame of their sufferings.

From a distinction which he draws between despotism and its abuse, and
from a phrase, disparaging to elections, about rivers that cannot rise
above the level of their source, it would appear that Mr. Lea is not
under compulsion to that rigid liberalism which, by repressing the
time-test and applying the main rules of morality all round, converts
history into a frightful monument of sin. Yet, in the wake of passages
which push the praises of authority to the verge of irony, dire
denunciations follow. When the author looks back upon his labours, he
disce