_Reformation_, the strongest book, with the _Symbolik_, which Catholics
had produced in the century, was laid down on known lines, and scarcely
effected so much novelty and change as the writings of Kampschulte and
Kolde. His book on the first age of the Church takes the critical points
as settled, without special discussion. He appeared to receive impulse
and direction, limit and colour, from his outer life. His importance was
achieved by the force within. Circumstances only conspired to mould a
giant of commonplace excellence and average ideas, and their influence
on his view of history might long be traced. No man of like
spirituality, of equal belief in the supreme dignity of conscience,
systematically allowed as much as he did for the empire of chance
surroundings and the action of home, and school, and place of worship
upon conduct. He must have known that his own mind and character as an
historian was not formed by effort and design. From early impressions,
and a life spent, to his fiftieth year, in a rather unvaried
professional circle, he contracted homely habits in estimating objects
of the greater world; and his imagination was not prone to vast
proportions and wide horizons. He inclined to apply the rules and
observation of domestic life to public affairs, to reduce the level of
the heroic and sublime; and history, in his hands, lost something both
in terror and in grandeur. He acquired his art in the long study of
earlier times, where materials are scanty. All that can be known of
Caesar or Charlemagne, or Gregory VII., would hold in a dozen volumes; a
library would not be sufficient for Charles V. or Lewis XVI. Extremely
few of the ancients are really known to us in detail, as we know
Socrates, or Cicero, or St. Augustine. But in modern times, since
Petrarca, there are at least two thousand actors on the public stage
whom we see by the revelations of private correspondence. Besides
letters that were meant to be burnt, there are a man's secret diaries,
his autobiography and table-talk, the recollections of his friends,
self-betraying notes on the margins of books, the report of his trial if
he is a culprit, and the evidence for beatification if he is a saint.
Here we are on a different footing, and we practise a different art when
dealing with Phocion or Dunstan, or with Richelieu or Swift. In one case
we remain perforce on the surface of character, which we have not the
means of analysing: we have to be cont