ed, and Macaulay's scale was so large that he could enliven his
pages with a multitude of anecdotes and personal details. Green was
known only to a small circle of friends, having written nothing under
his own signature except one or two papers in magazines or in the
Transactions of archaeological societies; and the plan of his book,
which dealt, in eight hundred and twenty pages, with the whole
fourteen centuries of English national life, obliged him to handle
facts in the mass, and touch lightly and briefly on personal traits. A
summary is of all kinds of writing that which it is hardest to make
interesting, because one must speak in general terms, one must pack
facts tightly together, one must be content to give those facts
without the delicacies of light and shade, or the subtler tints of
colour. Yet such was his skill, both literary and historical, that his
outlines gave more pleasure and instruction than other people's
finished pictures.

In 1876 he took, for the only time in his life, except when he had
supported a working-man's candidate for the Tower Hamlets at the
general election of 1868, an active part in practical politics.
Towards the end of that year, when war seemed impending between Russia
and the Turks, fears were entertained that England might undertake the
defence of the Sultan, and a body called the Eastern Question
Association was formed to organise opposition to the pro-Turkish
policy of Lord Beaconsfield's Ministry. Green threw himself warmly
into the movement, was chosen to serve on the Executive Committee of
the Association, and was one of a sub-committee of five (which
included also Mr. Stopford Brooke and Mr. William Morris the poet[23])
appointed to draw up the manifesto convoking the meeting of delegates
from all parts of the country, which was held in December 1876, under
the title of the Eastern Question Conference. The sub-committee met at
my house and spent the whole day on its work. It was a new and curious
experience to see these three great men of letters drafting a
political appeal. Morris and Green were both of them passionately
anti-Turkish, and Morris indeed acted for the next two years as
treasurer of the Association, doing his work with a business-like
efficiency such as poets seldom possess. Green continued to attend the
general committee until, after the Treaty of Berlin, it ceased to
meet, and took the keenest interest in its proceedings. But his weak
health and frequent wi