'restoration' carried out in the spirit of fifty years ago would find few apologists. There is a familiar saying that every nation gets the government it deserves; and perhaps this same saw will apply to architecture. It is certain that we shall wait in vain for any general improvement in the aspect of our streets, so long as men may build in the fashion which pleases them best, and so long as there is no articulate public voice to approve the good and condemn the bad. But there are indications that things are partially on the mend. In spite of many conspicuous lapses, and of lost opportunities, the writer of a new 'Trivia' might discern certain signs of improvement. Our streets are being rebuilt in more ambitious fashion, on a scale which reveals more clearly the faults or the merits of the design; and fewer bad elevations are now being built than were built forty years ago, while some are really good. But no one now alive will ever know London architecturally as aught but a jumble of good and bad. In old times, when the triumphs of the builder's art were raised, men desired beautiful houses for habitation and stately fanes for prayer; but in this age of rush and luxury they yearn chiefly after hotels and restaurants of Sardanapalian splendour for temporary rest and refection, and for steamboats and motors, still more elaborate, to whirl them from one scene of revelry to another. It is upon work of this sort that the ingenuity of the constructor of to-day is chiefly engaged; and, if the results of his labour fail to rival those of the masterbuilders of the fourteenth century in artistic merit, it will not be because he has spent less money upon them. W. G. WATERS. Art. 8.-LORD ACTON'S HISTORICAL WORK. 1. Lectures on Modern History. The History of Freedom, and other Essays. Historical Essays and Studies. Lectures on the French Revolution. By Lord Acton. Edited by J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence. Four vols. London: Macmillan, 1906-1910. 2. Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone. Edited by Herbert Paul. London: George Allen, 1904. 3. Lord Acton and his Circle. By Abbot Gasquet. London: George Allen, 1906. 4. The French Revolution: a Political History, 1789-1804. By A. Aulard. Translated from the French by Bernard Miall. Four vols. London: Unwin, 1910. It was a natural idea to collect the writings of Lord Acton, for, though many men of his time were more famous, few left behind them a larger legacy of unsatisfied curiosity. Though he was a man of the world and polished and pleasant in society, there was always something remote and mysterious about him. He did not fall into any of the received types who are to be found in London clubs or in country-houses and college halls; and it was not easy to give him a label. His religion-for he was a member of the Roman Communion-cut him off from the pleasant but somewhat narrow convention of English public-school and university life. His education had been lonely, peculiar, and exotic. Descent and marriage made him half a foreigner; much of his life was spent abroad at Tegernsee or at Cannes; and he did a thing which must always be very rare among Englishmen of ample means and high station-he devoted the devouring industry of his days and nights to the single-minded pursuit of knowledge. A good deal of pleasant antiquarian erudition has come out of English country-houses, as Sir William Dugdale's monumental folios may testify; but Lord Acton's learning was not the product of these old-fashioned pieties of the soil. He was a savant not of the English but of the newest and most scientific German type, and yet with none of the narrowness which marks much learned work in Germany, for he was a specialist, not only in one, but in many periods of history. Possessing the tastes and equipment of a great continental professor, he moved in the world of fashion and affairs, and stood near, though not very near, to the wheels of government. He was the stepson of Lord Granville, whom he accompanied on a mission to Moscow, the friend and confidant of Gladstone, and a Lord-inWaiting to Queen Victoria. Like Gibbon, he had sat in Parliament. He had known many makers of continental history; and, being a complete master of colloquial French, German, and Italian, he was able to converse with them freely and on even terms. It was often said that Lord Acton's memoirs, if memoirs he wrote, would furnish a banquet of rich and curious miscellanies which could not easily be matched. Nobody, it was reputed, was more fond or retentive of gossip, not only by reason of the natural curiosity of his mind, but from a rooted conviction that the historian must be prepared to take his meals in the scullery,' uniting the appetite for small things with the appetite for big ones, and carrying his trained and rigorous habit of thoroughness into the observation of passing events and living people. And yet this ravenous devourer of historical and contemporary knowledge died on June 19, 1902, having published during a long and busy life a few articles and reviews, some of them anonymous, most of them hidden away in obscure and half-forgotten periodicals, a preface to Machiavelli's 'Prince,' and an inaugural lecture delivered at Cambridge upon his appointment to the Regius Chair of Modern History. Such was the literary output of a man who, in the opinion of competent judges, was more original than Seeley and as learned as Döllinger or Stubbs. We have now more work by which to appraise him. The essays and papers prove, as is so often the case, to weigh heavier than was at first surmised, and fill two handsome octavo volumes. A course of lectures upon Modern European History delivered from the Cambridge Chair was published in 1906; and now, eight years after Lord Acton's death, Dr Figgis and Mr Laurence, two Cambridge scholars who have borne the pious labour of editing their master's literary remains, give to the world his Lectures upon the French Revolution. We have two volumes of Essays, two volumes of Lectures, and two volumes of Correspondence. The lectures are without annotation, and lack the refining touches of an author's revision. The two volumes of correspondence are not the winnowing of the whole mass, but special fragments illustrative of two disjointed episodes and friendships. In time other letters, the letters to Gladstone, for instance, may be printed; for the present, six volumes constitute the accessible sum of Lord Acton's published writing. It is not a great mass of literature, and yet it is sufficient to exhibit not only a mind of extraordinary range and power, but also a very rare and exalted nature. There is a mournful French saying, tout savant est à moitié cadavre; and the pedestrian qualities which form the necessary groundwork of the learned life-the acquisition and arrangement of material-are too often developed at the expense of the human qualities of insight and appreciation which are the soul of history. Now Lord Acton had all the mechanism of the professional historian. He read exhaustively upon each successive topic which he took in hand, annotated his reading, and collected and tabulated his annotations. His immense magazine of exact knowledge was so disposed that every part of it was ready for use when occasion demanded. If you asked him a question about books, his mind seemed to be constituted in bibliographies. He told you what were the best books to read, what parts of them were most valuable, from what sources the author had drawn, to what extent he was credible. He could mention having seen such and such a pamphlet on such and such a shelf at a Paris bookseller's ten years before. The visitor to the noble library which is now the possession of the University of Cambridge will find everywhere, as he prowls round the shelves, the same marks of meticulous annotation, tokens of a mind in which myriads of facts garnered from every quarter of the spacious realm of knowledge were bound together into an organised and intelligible whole. A man would be hardly human if, with this great business capacity for the arrangement of knowledge, he did not sometimes err in assuming a corresponding quality in his readers. In some of Lord Acton's historical articles the knowledge is so recondite, so closely packed, so overwhelming in weight and quality that the mind of the reader recoils. In others the author is submerged in his own quotations. But, however difficult and abstruse Lord Acton may be, he is never dry. His work is exciting even when it baffles, like the music of a new composer who has cut himself loose from the conventions and evolved a technique of his own. Great learning has its own dangers. One of the most common is that it leads to a paralysis of the judgment. There are so many authorities, so much has been written on every side (of every question, that men who have fully mastered the literature of a subject are generally the least ready with a confident award. That failing, if it be a failing, was not Lord Acton's. Those who knew him only by report as the man whose golden harvests were never reaped will be surprised when they come to close quarters with his literary remains. They will learn that, if he published little, it was not because he was deficient in deep feeling or strong opinion, not because he was overmastered by his accumulations, or lacking in powers of literary expression. They will discover no traces of the scholar's diffidence, no delicate blends of light and shade, nothing of the temper which led Renan to declare that truth was a matter of nuances. Lord Acton can wield the sledgehammer as well as the rapier. He abounds in superlatives, the supreme reward of an exhaustive induction, and moves in a world of his own values. His verdicts are for the most part confident and magisterial; and this not only from the force of settled conviction, but because he conceives it to be part of the historian's duty to distribute censure and praise to the dead-strong censure to the sinners and high praise to the saints. Thus Solon is the most profound political genius of antiquity,' Sixtus V the ablest of modern Popes,' Napoleon 'the most splendid genius that has appeared on earth,' Alexander Hamilton 'the most scientific of conservative thinkers,' Sieyès 'the most original of the revolutionary statesmen.' The Persians, the Greeks, and the Teutons are the only makers of history, the only authors of advancement'; and the religious standpoint of the author is revealed in the view that the history of the Middle Ages is 'the history of the gradual emancipation of man from every species of servitude in · |