so to speak, the phenomena as in a picture; his
speculative faculty tried to harmonise them, measure them, and
forecast their effects. Hence it was a necessity to him to know
what was passing in the world. The first thing he did every day,
whatever other pressure there might be on him, was to read the daily
newspaper. The last thing that he ceased to read, when what remained
of life began to be counted by hours, was the daily newspaper. This
warm interest in mankind is the keynote of his _History of the
English People_. It is the whole people that is ever present to him,
as it had been present before to few other historians.

Such power of imagination and sympathy as I have endeavoured to
describe is enough to make a brilliant writer, yet not necessarily a
great historian. One must see how far the other qualifications,
accuracy, acuteness of observation, and judgment, are also brought
into action.

His accuracy has been much impeached. When the first burst of applause
that welcomed the _Short History_ had subsided, several critics began
to attack it on the score of minor errors. They pointed out a number
of statements of fact which were doubtful, and others which were
incorrect, and spread in some quarters the impression that Green was a
careless and untrustworthy writer. I do not deny that there are in the
first editions of the _Short History_ some assertions made more
positively than the evidence warrants, some pictures drawn from
exceedingly slender materials. Mr. Skene remarks of the account given
of the battle between the Jutes and the Britons which took place in
the middle of the fifth century, somewhere near Aylesford in Kent, and
about which we really know scarcely anything, "Mr. Green describes it
as if he had been present." The temptation to such liberties is strong
where the treatment of a period is summary. A writer who compresses
the whole history of England into eight hundred pages of small
octavo, making his narrative not a bare narrative but a picture full
of colour and incident--incident which, for brevity's sake, must often
be given by allusion--cannot be always interrupting the current of the
story to indicate doubts or quote authorities for every statement in
which there may be an element of conjecture; and it is probable that
when the authorities are scrutinised their result will sometimes
appear different from that which the author has presented. On this
head the _Short History_ may be admitted t