professors, not many, who really answer such a description are not often to be met with in public affairs; but this by the way. Being a very human traveller and fisherman, Bryce could fully understand the one thing doctrinaires never can-that men can live and even thrive without formulas; and thus the medieval Iceland, where there were law-courts and a great deal of law but no executive officers and no permanent governing body, presented to him not an awkward anomaly but an excellent witness to the normal development of custom, in this case all the more normal because it took place within the bon ids of an island secure against external interference.

The facts show us in Iceland, almost as if they had been arranged for the purpose, how usage grows into custom, custom into authoritative rules, and those rules into a formal system of law; how law becomes entangled in formalism, and its reduction to simplicity 'is the latest legal achievement of a civilised age.' Bryce evidently enjoyed his text, and also the opportunity of bringing in one or two good stories of the heroic age which he had read in their original Icelandic. One passing remark is, I think, dictated by excessive charity. 'Substantial justice is all the layman cares for.' Yes, on the assumption (which he is pretty sure to make) that justice is wholly on his own side and will be satisfied by nothing short of his full claim and costs. And Baron Parke, who is compared with the eleventh-century pleaders of Iceland as a typical formalist, had plenty of common sense and regard for substantial justice when a point of pleading did not bar the way. That he was technical, however, cannot be denied; and Bryce's estimates of other English judges' merits, to be found mainly in the volume of biographies, are acute and judicious.

This last-mentioned book-'Studies in Contemporary Biography-is perhaps the best witness to Bryce's fairmindedness and the width of his human interests. Much has been well said of Disraeli, much of Gladstone; Bryce achieved the feat of celebrating Mr Gladstone, his own parliamentary chief, without adulation, and appreciating Lord Beaconsfield, with whom he had very few opinions or tastes in common, without malice or injustice. His records of Oxford friends and companions,

by no means confined to his own Faculty, and including men of such different capacities as T. H. Green the philosopher and J. R. Green the historian, are of permanent value for the history of university life in the 19th century. With this mere indication I pass on to the latest stage of his activity.

In the spring of 1913 the Congress of Historical Studies met in London; it had last met at Berlin in 1908, and was to have met again at Petrograd in 1918. Bryce should have presided at the London meeting on his return from Washington, but it was found necessary to prolong his stay there some months, and his address was read for him by the Master of Peterhouse, whom he was shortly to succeed as President of the British Academy. The fear of war was not yet in the air, and the address contemplated a peaceful time of exploration in the fields of archæology and ethnology; it disclosed a wider interest in those studies than had yet appeared in Bryce's published work, and pointed to the closer union of the civilised world through more frequent contact and improved communications, a theme which was resumed after the war in his Raleigh lecture; and in conclusion historians were exhorted to practise and promote impartiality. That lesson is now more needed than ever.

On historical method in general Bryce had spoken two years earlier in America; while he justly treated as extinct the assumption that whoever can write at all can write history, he put in a caution against the so-called scientific historian who thinks of nothing but hunting for new facts and documents, important or unimportant, and leaves them just as dry and lifeless as he found them. Aridity raises no presumption of accuracy.' Yet there still lurks in our seats of learning a disposition to believe that a clumsy or crabbed writer is more likely to deserve serious attention than a readable one. Bryce himself, I rather think, has suffered from this absurd superstition.

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It was less than a month before the war when Bryce gave his first address to the British Academy as its President, looking forward to a peaceful celebration of Shakespeare's tercentenary. For the rest of his term

'University and Historical Addresses,' p. 841.

he had to steer a wary course, and did so with unfailing tact; he had a free hand only in his short but very felicitous notices of deceased members. When he delivered his last official discourse in 1917 he took refuge in a wonderfully comprehensive review of the whole state of learning and the problems awaiting solution. As to his general attitude during the war, it might suffice to quote the preface to 'Essays and Addresses in War Time,' written when the issue was no longer doubtful: 'Happily that which we most desired has come to pass. This is a War of Principles, and the course of events has vindicated the principles of morality and humanity that were at stake.' But I will mention, for my own pleasure and that of some fellow-workers, that Bryce accepted the presidency of an association which, under the title of Fight for Right,' did some fairly good service until, towards the end of the war, it was absorbed in a grander scheme of official propaganda. Like many similar undertakings, it is now hardly remembered save by those who took an active part in it. Indeed, most men have almost forgotten the official committee which in the first year of the war, with Bryce as its chairman, reported on the conduct of the German troops in Belgium and the invaded districts of France. The weight of that report, to which no substantial answer has been or can be made, was largely due to Bryce's judicial temper; not that he could not feel, or thought it proper to conceal, just indignation at enormous crimes, but he made sure of justice first.

Bryce's latest contribution to the British Academy, after his term of office, was the Raleigh lecture delivered in 1919; the subject being World History, a title in itself too vast to convey any definite conception. The treatment, however, proceeded on the definite and fruitful lines of considering the transition from the earlier attempts at universal chronicles to systematic study of the divergent and convergent tendencies in human society. Original separation and isolation of individual groups, and the formation of distinct and estranged nations, are counter worked in later times by the improvement of of communications and the growth of cosmopolitan interests. After a survey of this field, in which there was no trace of failing power or skill,

Bryce put the question: What has World History to tell us about human progress? Does the experience of the Past encourage belief in a brighter Future?' There has been more lately a desultory controversy on this very question. Eminent persons took part in it, but the discussion failed even to lead to any better definition of the conflicting opinions. Bryce's answer was not cited, to the best of my remembrance, by any of the combatants. Having no thesis to support, he took the way of scholarly good sense, and pointed out that the question is unmeaning unless we distinguish the different kinds of progress or improvement. Progress at large is nothing; progress in what and towards what? Proceeding to the necessary distinctions, Bryce observes that as to the material enjoyment of life we have certainly gained much; as to knowledge and mastery of nature even more; but that in the quality of the best individual men, and the proportion of great thinkers or artists to the multitude, there is no visible advance within historic times.

'The great creative spirits, men like Archimedes and Newton, the men of wide vision and profound discernment, appear from time to time, but hardly more frequently than they did in the past. The Temple of Knowledge rises rapidly, but it rises by the co-operative toil of an increasing number of trained workers, who cut, raise, and lay the stones better than men knew how to do some centuries ago. But the architects who can design a noble building and the artists who can decorate it with inventive grace are as rare as ever.'

Finally, the average standard of moral judgment and conduct appeared to be rising in civilised countries before the Great War, but now much has happened to disturb the optimism bred in the 19th century. Still, we may possibly be now only passing through the trough of what meteorologists call a transitory depression.' Beyond that sober hope Bryce wisely declined to prophesy. When these things have been said, it is easy to persuade oneself that, after all, they are commonplaces. But the fact remains that Bryce gave a more rational account of the matter in two pages than several writers who handled it after him contrived among them all to give in considerably more than two score.

Limits of space and time are inexorable, and this attempt to give form to the impressions laid up during more than fifty years is only such as I could make it within those limits. Yet it should be enough to serve as provisional proof (for doubtless there is more to come) that Bryce's place is high and assured among those whom we now call eminent Victorians. That is a name which the fashion of the day couples with a shade of depreciation. Every generation tends to depreciate its immediate ancestors; the masters of Bryce's youth misunderstood and disparaged the works and the methods of the 18th century; they are disparaged in their turn by the rising generation of the 20th; the settled judgment of posterity will redress the balance.

So far as the accidents of date go, no man could be more Victorian than one who was born in the first year of Queen Victoria's reign, but posterity will judge, if I mistake not, that Bryce was singularly free from the besetting intellectual defects of his contemporaries. The root of those defects was insularity, not so much proceeding from any native British character as thrust upon British habits and learning by the long estrangement of these islands from the continent of Europe during the twenty years of all but incessant war that followed on the French Revolution. In the whole field of the political sciences English authors were, with few exceptions, engrossed by purely English preoccupations and interests, not to say prejudices. Bryce, on the contrary, was the least insular of our conspicuous writers since Gibbon. He thought and wrote as a citizen not only of his country but of the world, and thereby did the best possible service to his own countrymen. Our grandchildren will begin life with a wider outlook and more adequate instruction than we did; they can make no better use of their advantages than to emulate Bryce's example.

FREDERICK POLLOCK.