l lesson. Stanley, who had a touch of
the rhetorical temperament, and was always eager to improve an
occasion, certainly suffered in this way. When he brings out a
general truth he is not content with it as a truth, but seeks to turn
it also to edification, or to make it illustrate and support some
view for which he is contending at the time. When he is simply
describing, he describes rather as a dramatic artist working for
effect than as a historian solely anxious to represent men and
events as they were. Yet if we consider how much a historian gains,
not only from an intimate knowledge of his own time, but also, and
even more largely, from playing an active part in the events of his
own time, from swaying opinion by his writings and his speeches,
from sitting in assemblies and organising schemes of attack and
defence, we may hesitate to wish that Stanley's time had been more
exclusively given to quiet investigation. The freshness of his
historical portraits is notably due to the sense he carried about
with him of moving in history and being a part of it. He never
mounted his pulpit in the Abbey or walked into the Jerusalem
Chamber when Convocation was sitting without feeling that he was about
to do something which might possibly be recorded in the annals of
his country. I remember his mentioning, to illustrate undergraduate
ignorance, that once when he was going to give a lecture to his
class, he suddenly recollected that Mr. Goldwin Smith, then Regius
Professor of Modern History, was announced to deliver a public
lecture at the same hour. Telling the class that they would be
better employed in hearing Mr. Goldwin Smith than himself, he led
them all there. The next time the class met, one of them, after
making some acute comments on the lecture, asked who the lecturer
was. "I was amazed," said Stanley, "that an intelligent man should
ask such a question, and then it occurred to me that probably he did
not know who I was either." There was nothing of personal vanity or
self-importance in this. All the men of mark among whom he moved
were to him historical personages, and he would describe to his
friends some doing or saying of a contemporary statesman or
ecclesiastic with the same eagerness, the same sense of its being a
fact to be noted and remembered, as the rest of us feel about a
personal anecdote relating to Oliver Cromwell or Cardinal Richelieu.

His sermons, like nearly all good sermons, will be inadequately
a