d. No
countenance could be in stronger contrast with his son's, and yet in
both there is the same look of repulsive isolation from men. Richard's
is a face of cultivation and refinement, but there is a strange severity
in the small delicate mouth and in the compact brow of the lion-hearted,
which realizes the verdict of his day. To an historical student one
glance at these faces, as they lie here beneath the vault raised by
their ancestor, the fifth Count Fulc, tells more than pages of history.'
Our reviews and magazines may abound to-day in such vivid pen-pictures
of places and men; but it was Green and others of his day who watered
the dry roots of archaeology and restored it to life.

But from his earliest days as a student Green had looked beyond the
figures of kings, ministers, and prelates, who had so long filled the
stage in the volumes of our historians. However clearly they stood out
in their greatness and in their faults, they were not, and could not be,
the nation. And when he came to write on a larger scale, the title which
he chose for his book showed that he was aiming at new ideals.

The _Short History of the English People_ is the book by which Green's
fame will stand or fall, and it occupied him for the best years of his
life. The true heroes of it are the labourer and the artisan, the friar,
the printer, and the industrial mechanic--'not many mighty, not many
noble'. The true growth of the English nation is seen broad-based on the
life of the commonalty, and we can study it better in the rude verse of
Longland, or the parables of Bunyan, than in the formal records of
battles and dynastic schemes.

The periods into which the book is divided are chosen on other grounds
than those of the old handbooks, where the accession of a new king or a
new dynasty is made a landmark; and a different proportion is observed
in the space given to events or to prominent men. The Wars of the Roses
are viewed as less important than the Peasants' Revolt; the scholars of
the New Learning leave scant space for Lambert Simnels and Perkin
Warbecks. Henry Pelham, one of the last prime ministers to owe his
position to the king's favour, receives four lines, while forty are
given to John Howard, a pioneer in the new path of philanthropy. Besides
social subjects, literature receives generous measure, but even here no
rigid system is observed. Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare take a
prominent place in their epochs; Byron, Wordswo