ty with which he
realised, and the skill with which he portrayed, the life of the
people of England as a whole, and taught his readers that the exploits
of kings and the intrigues of ministers, and the struggles of parties
in Parliament, are, after all, secondary matters, and important
chiefly as they affect the welfare or stimulate the thoughts and
feelings of the great mass of undistinguished humanity in whose hands
the future of a nation lies. He changed the old-fashioned distribution
of our annals according to reigns and dynasties into certain periods,
showing that such divisions often obscure the true connection of
events, and suggesting new and better conceptions of the periods into
which the record of English progress naturally falls. And, lastly, he
laid, in his latest books, a firm and enduring foundation for our
mediaeval history by that account of the Teutonic occupation of
England, of the state of the country as they found it, and the way
they conquered and began to organise it, which I have already dwelt on
as a signal proof of his constructive faculty.

Many readers will be disposed to place him near Macaulay, for though
he was less weighty he was more subtle, and not less fascinating. To
fewer perhaps will it occur to compare him with Gibbon, yet I am
emboldened by the opinion of one of our greatest contemporary
historians to venture on the comparison. There are indeed wide
differences between the two. Green is as completely a man of the
nineteenth century as Gibbon was a man of the eighteenth. Green's
style has not the majestic march of Gibbon: it is quick and eager
almost to restlessness. Nor is his judgment so uniformly grave and
sound. But one may find in his genius what was characteristic of
Gibbon's also, the combination of a mastery of multitudinous details,
with a large and luminous view of those far-reaching forces and
relations which govern the fortunes of peoples and guide the course of
empire. This width and comprehensiveness, this power of massing for
the purposes of argument the facts which his literary art has just
been clothing in its most brilliant hues, is the highest of a
historian's gifts, and is the one which seems most surely to establish
Green's position among the leading historical minds of his time.

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[22] This sketch was written in 1883. A volume of Green's Letters,
with a short connecting biography by Sir Leslie Stephen, was
published in 1901. The lette