-one would fancy-only when he was obliged, or when the (very rare) fit took him. He had a prodigious memory; but neither care nor accuracy was his strong point. Sir Adolphus Ward's method is the antithesis of that. His knowledge is perhaps not so universal-though one hesitates to say this when one finds in his fifth volume an amusing analysis of the very flower and chief glory of the Chinese Drama,' Pi-pa-ki or The Story of the Lute; but it is very much more accurate and exact. And, at the back of all this wide knowledge and these varied interests, clearly there lies the absorbing occupation of a great profession. Sir Adolphus Ward has been a leader of education in Manchester and at Cambridge, and the papers now collected represent no more than the by-ways to his walk in life.

We have said that the main subjects of these volumes are historical and literary; but this division is naturally capable of further subdivision. Sir Adolphus Ward was evidently at one time as competent a writer on Ancient as on Modern History. In one of his papers he pleads as vehemently as Freeman himself against an arbitrary line drawn between the two, be it at the Call of Abraham or the French Revolution. But it is impossible to avoid seeing in these volumes, what is shown by his more finished literary work, that in no study has he been so persistent as in that of German history. There, for fifty years at least, he has been a master, whether of the Reformation time or the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years' War or the days of Frederick the Great, the Revolution or the Rosicrucians, the struggles of '48 or the triumph of Prussian Militarism and the now extinct modern German Empire.

For Sir Adolphus Ward there has always been a peculiar fascination in the romantic story of Elizabeth of Bohemia, the unhappy daughter of James I, who was to Sir Henry Wotton 'th' Eclipse and Glory of her Kind.' He here again deals with it, and that of her children.

Many curious things emerge by the way: among them the tendency, alluded to, more than once, by Sir Adolphus, of German Protestant princes to bigamous unions, even so late as Frederick William II of Prussia. In Poland, too, Sir Adolphus discovers not a few eccentricities, at the time of the Second Partition. Here we may

remember what Carlyle said—that the attempted reconstruction under Stanislas Leszczynski was merely the creation of 'evening parties and a great deal of flirting,' and that the constitution as reformed was but a beautifully phosphorescent rot-heap.' The Master of Peterhouse takes no such severe a view. He utters a caveat to Disraeli's saying that if the partition of Poland was a great crime, it was a crime shared by the Polish people, as their national existence could not have been destroyed without some faults on their side'; and he looks (in 1916) on the unhappy country as 'a great nationality, with an unfathomable future.' The studies of Central Europe hang together, though the historical are in the earlier volumes and the literary studies in the later. Perhaps the most valuable of the former is the lengthy study of the Decline of Prussia under Frederick William II, which shows the writer at his best as a learned, judicious, and critical historian.

The German historical studies are concluded by a postscript, written in March 1919, which, after a graceful tribute to the work and the personality of the late Lord Bryce, the friend of many years, his junior by six months, and a summary of the article by Prof. Hans Delbrück in the 'Prussische Jahrbücher,' for December 1918, ends with words which give the memorable conclusion of studies which the learned and sympathetic writer has prolonged for so many years.

'For some of us, who, for many a year before the War, sought to contribute what we could to the preservation of friendship between two great and kindred nations, there remains a question which certainly has not been spared us, in a concrete form, during the last four years. "Could you foresee what has happened? or "Could you not foresee it?" The waning of international goodwill casts a very perceptible shadow on the wall, even if not written upon it in leadingarticle type. But, to say nothing of the state of feeling in our own country, has sufficient account been taken by those of us who have much occupied themselves with later German history, of the disintegrating elements in the new German Empire? Of particularism we have perhaps read enoughit is not only a picturesque, but a tenacious element in modern German life; but, for political purposes, it has virtually outlived itself. Of clericalism it is only a privileged

few who can quite follow the successive and yet more dis connected workings-these have not been altogether transparent during the War, and are almost occult at the present moment. Militarism, on the other hand, has for many a long day been the "blatant beast" of German life. The educational value of universal Conscription is by no means altogether fictitious; but the boon has been bought at a heavy cost the sacrifice of the habit of free judgment in men, women, and children—and has been accompanied by an intensification, instead of a mitigation, of class distinctions. What wonder that Social-democracy, stronger in Germany than in most countries, and conscious that some of the most important parts of its programme have there been put into practice by the State, should have succeeded in sapping the national military organisation on its most vital side, and in exploding it at the most critical moment? The actual catastrophe, and the collaboration of its elements as indicated by Delbrück, were not to be foretold; but these elements could not be ignored, nor, long before the fire was lit, could the danger of it be disregarded, or the impulse which would set it aflame be mistaken. Our friend-if we may still so call him-has pointed to the fury who applied that torch, and his meaning is the more impressive because it addresses itself to the historical experience of the ages:

"The primitive myth of Hybris, whom the gods punish, is to-day being verified after the most awful fashion in our own case. The nation has followed false prophets; but who is guilty-the false prophets, or the nation that put faith in them?"

May I, in anticipation of an argued reply, venture to cite a generous saying, which applies alike to absolute and Constitutional monarchies, and even to the broadest of democracies? "Les peuples ne sont jamais coupables," (II, 372).

Side by side with this, let us set a brief passage which, though it speaks primarily of the past, has, if we mistake not, the prophetic aspect also which appears in the work of all true students of history.

'Of all ecclesiastical creations known to the history of the world, that of the Greek Church is perhaps the most marvellous in the continuity of its influence upon the destinies of a nation. For, if we cast our eyes back over modern Greek history as a whole, we shall find it most true that the Greeks, denationalised by conquests, invasions, and immigrations, and afterwards crushed seemingly out of

Existence by long centuries of oppression, were destined to ind themselves (so to speak) again at last, by means of two nfluences which had never been extinguished, though of old they had bitterly conflicted with one another. These inluences were those of the Greek Church and of ancient Greek literature' (1, 60).

Let us turn from Greece and modern Germany to England, where the Master of Peterhouse is at home, in a double sense, though hardly more thoroughly, both in history and literature. Probably, when the achievements of his lifelong work for learning and education are summed up, their highest point will be found to be in German history or in the English literature of Elizabeth's day. In our national drama, as in all that concerns the ! greatest dramatist of all time, Sir Adolphus Ward is indeed a master. We may have the temerity sometimes to disagree with him, as when he considers that 'the theory that William Herbert was the "begetter" of the "Sonnets" may be regarded as extinct'; but of the extent and accuracy of his knowledge and the soundness of his judgment there can be no doubt at all. The introduction to the Three Parts of Henry VI' is an extremely valuable piece of work. So is the very interesting paper on Shakespeare and the Makers of Virginia. Here is the expression of a truth not even now quite generally recognised by critics :

'First and foremost, we should always remember that Shakespeare is the greatest of dramatic artists, and that whatever principle, maxim, or experience finds utterance in his plays should be read in the light of the dramatis personæ from whom it proceeds-be they Hamlet or Polonius or any less complex characters than either of these. It is they who speak—and think-in the first instance, and not the author of their being. In the second place, Shakespeare was an incomparable observer, not only of the ways of men and women, but of their thoughts and feelings, and of those that had found utterance in the speech or writings of his own and former generations of Englishmen, in which politics past and present always had a large share; and both for the cutting and for the setting of these “ gems (as our late ancestors and ancestresses loved to call them in the collections) his was a master-hand beyond that of any other English writer. Finally, however, let us allow that the very Vol. 237.-No. 471.

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nature of his art as a dramatist, doubled as it was with that of an actor, offered him constant opportunities of giving play to his personal beliefs and convictions, preferences and prejudices in this field, as well as in others, of comment or exemplification; and that, though we know him to have possessed the quality of reserve which is characteristic of all great minds, and which, moreover, the circumstances of his personal career imposed upon him, he was at the same time conspicuous for the freedom of speech which (we shall agree) is, likewise, at least a frequent sign of greatness. Thus, he was always patriotic, and always-not only when he wore scarlet as a member of King James's household-loyal; while the conditions of his profession made him dependent upon great nobles, whose ways and manners it was but natural for him to prefer to those of popular throngs. He was— could he help it?-an aristocrat by nature; but he was no follower of party, faction, or sect. The idea of an antithesis between moral duties and political principles had not occurred to him; and in his judgment of the course of public affairs, as in the conduct of his own manhood, he stood, one and whole, in Church and State, steadfastly on the side of Degree or Order, the dispensation of God to man, and, therefore, on the side of Ordered Freedom, as against that of the inevitable sequence of faction, tyranny, and mob-rule. Whether and in whatever proportions he and the Makers of Virginia had learnt these convictions from the same great teacher, they, like him, had derived them from the same everflowing Source' (III, 361-3).

The British Academy Lecture from which this comes deserves detailed study, and not the least important part of it is that which deals with the connexion between Hooker's political teaching and the Makers of Virginia, with its influence, too, upon Shakespeare.

As we pass from Shakespeare to the other dramatists of his day we find much happily said of Ben Jonson and Marlowe and, very delightfully indeed, of Thomas Heywood; yet perhaps nothing better than this on Shirley :

'Moreover, the chosen sphere of his poetic fancy was a world of sun and sweetness. Many other poets-and many English poets among them-have been at home with the flowers of the field and the birds of the greenwood; but none has loved them better than this playwright of the town; and, though other phenomena of the natural world