friends who wished to drive him into copying German models. This class
Green called 'Pragmatic Historians';[58] and, while acknowledging their
solid contributions to history, he maintains his conviction that there
is another method and another school worthy of imitation, and that he
must 'hold to what he thinks true and work it out as he can'.

Green was a rapid reader and a rapid writer. In a letter to Freeman,
written when he was wintering in Florence in 1872, he admits covering
the period from the Peasant Revolt to the end of the New Learning
(1381-1520) in ten days. But he was writing from notes which represented
years of previous study. In another letter, written in 1876, he
confesses a tendency to 'wild hitting', and perhaps he was too rapid at
times in drawing his inferences. 'With me', he says, 'the impulse to try
to connect things, to find the "why" of things, is irresistible; and
even if I overdo my political guesses, you or some German will punch my
head and put things rightly and intelligibly again.' It is this power of
connecting events and explaining how one movement leads to another which
makes the stimulating quality of Green's work; and to a nation like the
English, too little apt to indulge in general ideas, this quality may be
of more value than the German erudition which tends to overburden the
intelligence with too great a load of 'facts'. And, after all the
labours of Carlyle and Froude, of Stubbs and Freeman, and all the
delving into records and chronicles, who shall say what _are_ facts, and
what is inference, legitimate or illegitimate, from them?

[Note 58: Pragmatic: 'treating facts of history with reference to
their practical lessons.' _Concise Oxford Dictionary._]

Whatever were the shortcomings of the book, which Green in his letters
to Freeman called by the affectionate names of 'Shorts' and 'Little
Book', it inaugurated a new method, and won a hearing among readers who
had hitherto professed no taste for history; and, financially, it proved
so far a success that Green was relieved from the necessity of
continuing work that was uncongenial. He had already given up his parish
in 1869. Ill-health and the advice of his doctor were the deciding
factors; but there is no doubt that Green was also finding it difficult
to subscribe to all the doctrines of the Church. He took up the same
liberal comprehensive attitude to Church questions as he did to
politics, and opposed any attempt to stifle h