ose few
months it was incessantly rewritten; no less than ten copies were made
of the first chapter. It was warmly received by the few persons who
were capable of judging its merits. But he was himself far from
satisfied with it as a literary performance, thinking that a reader
would find it at once too speculative and too dry, deficient in the
details needed to make the life of primitive England real and
instructive. If this had been so it would have been due to no failing
in his skill, but to the scantiness of the materials available for the
first few centuries of our national history. But he felt it so
strongly that he was often disposed to recur to his idea of writing a
history of the last seventy or eighty years, and was only induced by
the encouragement of a few friends to pursue the narrative which, in
_The Making of England_, he had carried down to the reign of Egbert.
The winter of 1881 was spent at Mentone, and the following summer in
London. He continued very weak, and was sometimes unable for weeks
together to go out driving or to work at home. But the moment that an
access of strength returned, the note-books were brought out, and he
was again busy going through what his wife's industry had tabulated,
and dictating for an hour or two till fatigue forced him to desist.
Those who saw him during that summer were amazed, not only at the
brave spirit which refused to yield to physical feebleness, but at the
brightness and clearness of his intellect, which was not only as
active as it had ever been before, but as much interested in whatever
passed in the world. When one saw him sitting propped up with cushions
on the sofa, his tiny frame worn to skin and bone, his voice
interrupted by frequent fits of coughing, it seemed wrong to stay,
but, after a little, all was forgotten in the fascination of his talk,
and one found it hard to realise that where thought was strong speech
might be weak.

In October, when he returned to Mentone, the tale of early English
history had been completed, and was in type down to the death of Earl
Godwine in A.D. 1052. He had hesitated as to the point at which the
book should end, but finally decided to carry it down to A.D. 1085,
the date of the dispersion of the last great Scandinavian armament
which threatened England. As the book dealt with both the Danish and
Norman invasions, he called it _The Conquest of England_. It appeared
after his death, wanting, indeed, those expansions in