ot creditable to
them. Even so Ezekiel found the Israelites of his day, forgetful of
their past history and its lessons, sunk in torpor and indifference. He
looked upon the wreckage of his nation, settled in the Babylonian plain;
in his fervent imagination he saw but a valley of dry bones, and called
aloud to the four winds that breath should come into them and they
should live.

In our islands the prophets who wielded the most potent spell came from
beyond the Border. Walter Scott exercised the wider influence, Carlyle
kindled the intenser flame. As artists they followed very different
methods. Scott, like a painter, wielding a vigorous brush full charged
with human sympathies, set before us a broad canvas in lively colours
filled with a warm diffused light. Carlyle worked more in the manner of
an etcher, the mordant acid eating deep into the plate. From the depth
of his shadows would stand out single figures or groups, in striking
contrast, riveting the attention and impressing themselves on the
memory. Scott drew thousands of readers to sympathize with the men and
women of an earlier day, and to feel the romance that attaches to lost
causes in Church and State. Carlyle set scores of students striving to
recreate the great men of the past and by their standards to reject the
shibboleths of the present. However different were the methods of the
enchanters, the dry bones had come to life. Mediaeval abbot and
crusader, cavalier and covenanter, Elizabeth and Cromwell, spoke once
more with a living voice to ears which were opened to hear.

Nor did the English Universities fail to send forth men who could meet
the demands of a generation which was waking up to a healthier political
life. The individual who achieved most in popularizing English history
was Macaulay, who began to write his famous Essays in 1825, the year
after he won his fellowship at Trinity, though the world had to wait
another twenty-five years for his History of the English Revolution.
Since then Cambridge historians like Acton, or Maitland, have equalled
or excelled him in learning, though none has won such brilliant success.
But it was the Oxford School which did most, in the middle of the
nineteenth century, to clear up the dark places of our national record
and to present a complete picture of the life of the English people.
Freeman delved long among the chronicles of Normans and Saxons; Stubbs
no less laboriously excavated the charters of the Planta