s and castles all over
England. He taught himself to sketch, not artistically, but
sufficiently well to record characteristic points, and by the end of
his life he had accumulated a collection of hundreds of drawings made
by himself of notable buildings in France, Germany, Italy, and
Dalmatia, as well as in the British Isles. Architecture was always
thenceforward to him the prime external record and interpreter of
history. But it was the only art in which he took the slightest
interest. He cared nothing for pictures or statuary; was believed to
have once only, when his friend J. R. Green dragged him thither,
visited a picture-gallery in the course of his numerous journeys; and
did not seem to perceive the significance which paintings have as
revealing the thoughts and social condition of the time which produced
them. Another branch of inquiry cognate to history which he prized
was comparative philology. With no great turn for the refinements of
classical scholarship, and indeed with some contempt for the practice
of Latin and Greek verse-making which used to absorb much of the time
and labour of undergraduates and their tutors at Oxford and Cambridge,
he was extremely fond of tracing words through different languages
so as to establish the relations of the peoples who spoke them, and,
indeed, used to argue that all teaching of languages ought to begin
with Grimm's law, and to base his advocacy of the retention of Greek
as a _sine qua non_ for an Arts degree in the University on the
importance of that law. But with this love for philology as an
instrument in the historian's hands, he took little pleasure in
languages simply as languages--that is to say, he did not care to
master, and was not apt at mastering, the grammar and idioms of a
tongue. French was the only foreign language he spoke with any
approach to ease, though he could read freely German, Italian, and
modern Greek, and on his tour in Greece made some vigorous speeches
to the people in their own tongue. He had learnt to pronounce Greek in
the modern fashion, which few Englishmen can do; but how much of his
classically phrased discourses did the crowds that acclaimed the
distinguished Philhellene understand? So too he was a keen and
well-trained archaeologist, but only because archaeology was to him a
priceless adjunct--one might almost say the most trustworthy source--of
the study of early history. As evidence of his accomplishments as an
antiquary I cannot d