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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
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