re
measured, but not less emphatic than Freeman's, his sense of Green's
services to English history. These two he used to call his masters;
but no one who has read him and them needs to be told that his was one
of those strong and rich intelligences which, in becoming more perfect
by the study of others, loses nothing of its originality.
His first continuous studies had lain among the Angevin kings of
England, and the note-books still exist in which he had accumulated
materials for their history. However, the book he planned was never
written, for when the state of his lungs (which forced him to spend
the winter of 1870-71 at San Remo) had begun to alarm his friends,
they urged him to throw himself at once into some treatise likely to
touch the world more than a minute account of so remote a period could
do. Accordingly he began, and in two or three years, his winters
abroad sadly interrupting work, he completed the _Short History of the
English People_. When a good deal of it had gone through the press, he
felt, and his friends agreed with him, that the style of the earlier
chapters was too much in the eager, quick, sketchy, "point-making"
manner of his _Saturday Review_ articles, "and did not possess" (says
the friend whom I have already quoted) "enough historical dignity for
a work which was to take in the whole history of England. It was then,
being convinced of this, that he cancelled a great deal of what had
been stereotyped, and re-wrote it, re-creating, with his passionate
facility, his whole style." In order to finish it he gave up the
_Saturday Review_ altogether, though he could ill spare what his
writing there brought him in. It is seldom that one finds such
swiftness and ease in composition as his, united to so much
fastidiousness. He went on remoulding and revising till his friends
insisted that the book should be published anyhow, and published it
accordingly was, in 1874. Feeling that his time on earth might be
short, for he was often disabled even by a catarrh, he was the readier
to yield.
The success of the _Short History_ was rapid and overwhelming.
Everybody bought it. It was philosophical enough for scholars, and
popular enough for schoolboys. No historical book since Macaulay's
_History_ has made its way so fast, or been read with so much avidity.
And Green was under disadvantages from which his great predecessor did
not suffer. Macaulay's name was famous before his _History of England_
appear
|