and width of reading, rather less praise; and his dicta,
once quoted with veneration even by good authorities, and borrowed, with
or without acknowledgment, by nearly all second-hand writers, are being
more and more neglected by both. Nor is this unjust, for Hallam, though
possessed, as has been said, of sound and wide scholarship, and of a
taste fairly trustworthy in accepted and recognised matters, was too apt
to be at a loss when confronted with an abnormal or eccentric literary
personality, shared far too much the hide-bound narrowness of the rules
which guided his friend Jeffrey, lacked the enthusiasm which not seldom
melted Jeffrey's chains of ice, and was constantly apt to intrude into
the court of literary judgments, methods, procedures, and codes of law
which have no business there.

Many other estimable, and some excellent writers fill up the space of
fifty years, which may be described best, both for remembrance and for
accuracy, as the space between Gibbon and Carlyle. William Roscoe, who
was born as far back as 1753 and did not die till 1831, was the son of a
market-gardener near Liverpool, and had few advantages of education, but
became an attorney, attached himself strenuously to literature,
especially Italian literature, and in 1796 published his _Life of
Lorenzo de Medici_, which, after finishing it, he followed up nine years
later with the _Life of Leo the Tenth_. Both obtained not merely an
English but a continental reputation, both became in a manner classics,
and both retain value to this day, though the Italian Renaissance has
been a specially favourite subject of modern inquiry. Roscoe was a
violent Whig, and not a very dispassionate student in some respects; but
he wrote well, and he is an early example of the diffusion of the
historic spirit proper, in which Gibbon had at once set the example and,
with some lapses, attained nearly to perfection.

William Mitford (1744-1827) was even an older man than Roscoe, and
belonged to a slightly less modern school of history-writing. He was a
man of means, a friend of Gibbon, his fellow-officer in the militia, and
like him a strong Tory, though unlike him he could not keep his politics
out of his history. Although Mitford's hatred of democracy, whether
well- or ill-founded, makes him sometimes unfair, and though his
_History of Greece_ contains some blunders, it is on the whole rather a
pity that it should have been superseded to the extent to which it
a