genets; Froude
hewed his path through the State papers of the Tudors; while Gardiner
patiently unravelled the tangled skein of Stuart misgovernment. John
Richard Green, one of the youngest of the school, took a wider subject,
the continuous history of the English people. He was fortunate in
writing at a time when the public was prepared to find the subject
interesting, but he himself did wonders in promoting this interest, and
since then his work has been a lamp to light teachers on the way.

In a twofold way Green may claim to be a child of Oxford. Not only was
he a member of the University, but he was a native of the town, being
born in the centre of that ancient city in the year of Queen Victoria's
accession. His family had been engaged in trade there for two
generations without making more than a competence; and even before his
father died in 1852 they were verging on poverty. Of his parents, who
were kind and affectionate, but not gifted with special talents, there
is little to be told; the boy was inclined, in after life, to attribute
any literary taste that he may have inherited to his mother. From his
earliest days reading was his passion, and he was rarely to be seen
without a book. Old church architecture and the sound of church bells
also kindled his childish enthusiasms, and he would hoard his pence to
purchase the joy of being admitted into a locked-up church. So he was
fortunate in being sent at the age of eight to Magdalen College School,
where he had daily access to the old buildings of the College and the
beautiful walks which had been trodden by the feet of Addison a century
and a half before. An amusing contrast could be drawn between the
decorous scholar of the seventeenth century, handsome, grave of mien,
calmly pacing the gravel walk, while he tasted the delights of classic
literature, and little 'Johnny Green', a mere shrimp of a boy with
bright eyes and restless ways, darting here and there, eagerly searching
for anything new or exciting which he might find, whether in the bushes
or in the pages of some romance which he was carrying.

But, for all his lively curiosity, Green seems to have got little out of
his lessons at school. The classic languages formed the staple of his
education, and he never had that power of verbal memory which could
enable him to retain the rules of the Greek grammar or to handle the
Latin language with the accuracy of a scholar. He soon gave up trying to
do so. Instead