e
student can be to comprehend how that work goes forward. Though he was
too peculiar in his views and his way of stating them to have been
adapted either to the House of Commons or to a local assembly, and
would indeed have been wasted upon nineteen-twentieths of the business
there transacted, he loved politics and watched them with a shrewdly
observant eye. Though he indulged his foibles in some directions, he
could turn upon history a stream of clear common sense which sometimes
made short work of German conjectures. And he was free from the
craving to have at all hazards something new to advance, be it a
trivial fact or an unsupported guess. He was accustomed of late years
to complain that German scholarship seemed to be suffering from the
passion for _etwas Neues_, and the consequent disposition to disparage
work which did not abound with novelties, however empty or transient
such novelties might be.

To think of the Germans is to think of industry. Freeman was a true
Teuton in the mass of his production. Besides the seven thick
volumes devoted to the Norman Conquest and William Rufus, the four
thick volumes to Sicily, four large volumes of collected essays,
and nine or ten smaller volumes on architectural subjects, on the
English constitution, on the United States, on the Slavs and the
Turks, he wrote an even greater quantity of matter which appeared in
the _Saturday Review_ during the twenty years from 1856 to 1876, and
it was by these articles, not less than by his books, that he
succeeded in dispelling many current errors and confusions, and in
establishing some of his own doctrines so firmly that we now
scarcely remember what iteration and reiteration, in season and out
of season, and much to the impatience of those who remembered that
they had heard these doctrines often before, were needed to make
them accepted by the public. Freeman's swift facility was due to
his power of concentration. He always knew what he meant an article
to contain before he sat down to his desk; and in his historical
researches he made each step so certain that he seldom required to
reinvestigate a point or to change, in revising for the press, the
substance of what he had written.

In his literary habits he was so methodical and precise that he could
carry on three undertakings at the same time, keeping on different
tables in his working rooms the books he needed for each, and passing
at stated hours from one to the other. It is