e to
recognise a face passing close in the street. Yet with these
shortcomings he was a born traveller, went everywhere, saw everything
and everybody worth seeing, always seized on the most characteristic
features of a landscape, or building, or a person, and described them
with a freshness which made one feel as if they had never been
described before. Of the hundreds who have published books on the
Desert of Sinai and the Holy Land, many of them skilful writers or men
of profound knowledge, he is the only one who is still read and likely
to continue to be read, so vivid in colour, so exquisite in feeling,
are the pictures he has given. Nature alone, however, nature taken by
herself, did not satisfy him, did not, indeed, in his later days (for
in his boyhood he had been a passionate lover of the mountains)
greatly interest him. A building or a landscape had power to rouse his
imagination and call forth his unrivalled powers of description only
when it was associated with the thoughts and deeds of men.

The largest part of his literary work was done in the field of
ecclesiastical history, a subject naturally congenial to him, and
to which he was further drawn by the professorship which he held at
Oxford during a time when a great revival of historical studies was
in progress. It was work which critics could easily disparage, for
there were many small errors scattered through it; and the picturesque
method of treatment he employed was apt to pass into scrappiness. He
fixed on the points which had a special interest for his own mind as
illustrating some trait of personal or national character, or some
moral lesson, and passed hastily over other matters of equal or
greater importance. Nevertheless his work had some distinctive merits
which have not received from professional critics the whole credit
they deserved. In all that Stanley wrote one finds a certain
largeness and dignity of view. He had a sense of the unity of
history, of the constant relation of past and present, of the
similarity of human nature in one age and country to human nature in
another; and he never failed to dwell upon the permanently valuable
truths which history has to teach. Nothing was too small to
attract him, because he discovered a meaning in everything, and he
was therefore never dull, for even when he moralised he would light
up his reflections by some happy anecdote. With this he possessed a
keen eye, the eye of a poet, for human character,