equently, he undervalued work which would never have
been done from disinterested motives; and there were three of his most
eminent contemporaries whom he decidedly underestimated. Having known
Thiers, and heard him speak, he felt profoundly the talent of the
extraordinary man, before Lanfrey or Taine, Haeusser and Bernhardt had so
ruined his credit among Germans that Doellinger, disgusted by his
advocacy, whether of the Revolution, of Napoleon, or of France,
neglected his work. Stahl claims to be accounted an historian by his
incomparably able book on the Church government of the Reformation. As a
professor at Munich, and afterwards as a parliamentary leader at Berlin,
he was always an avowed partisan. Doellinger depreciated him accordingly,
and he had the mortification that certain remarks on the sovereign
dialectician of European conservatism were on the point of appearing
when he died. He so far made it good in his preface that the thing was
forgotten when Gerlach came to see the assailant of his friend. But
once, when I spoke of Stahl as the greatest man born of a Jewish mother
since Titus, he thought me unjust to Disraeli.

Most of all, he misjudged Macaulay, whose German admirers are not always
in the higher ranks of literature, and of whom Ranke even said that he
could hardly be called an historian at all, tried by the stricter test.
He had no doubt seen how his unsuggestive fixity and assurance could
cramp and close a mind; and he felt more beholden to the rivals who
produced d'Adda, Barillon, and Bonnet, than to the author of so many
pictures and so much bootless decoration. He tendered a course of
Bacon's Essays, or of Butler's and Newman's Sermons, as a preservative
against intemperate dogmatism. He denounced Macaulay's indifference to
the merits of the inferior cause, and desired more generous treatment of
the Jacobites and the French king. He deemed it hard that a science
happily delivered from the toils of religious passion should be involved
in political, and made to pass from the sacristy to the lobby, by the
most brilliant example in literature. To the objection that one who
celebrates the victory of parliaments over monarchs, of democracy over
aristocracy, of liberty over authority, declares, not the tenets of a
party, but manifest destiny and the irrevocable decree, he would reply
that a narrow induction is the bane of philosophy, that the ways of
Providence are not inscribed on the surface of things,