Historical Essays

Augustodunum; but I trust that what work there is in them is real work as far as it goes. At any rate I was amused with a saying of one of those newspaper critics whose odd remarks often open to us new views of human nature. The paper on Périgueux and Cahors was pronounced to be too learned for a holiday article.' I am not sure that I quite grasp the definition of a 'holiday article'; but I learned that there are minds which cannot understand that the tracing out of the features and history of a city may be as truly a scientific business to one man as the study of the surrounding flora and fauna is to another.

To these more or less local pieces the paper on English and French Towns' seemed to make a good introduction. I also grouped with them a few others, as 'Alter Orbis,' and 'Points in the History of Portugal and Brazil.' The latter, as I have explained, was an Oxford lecture, written under somewhat peculiar circumstances. Both were suggested, but only suggested, by passing occasions. Pieces bearing wholly on immediate political questions or other temporary subjects I have carefully shut out. But at the end comes one piece which is political in a more general sense. The essay on the House of Lords was, as I have explained in the note to it, put together with some toil out of several temporary pieces, each of which seemed to contain some permanent matter. I have done the work as well as I could; but I fear that the result may be some repetition and some inequality of style. A grave article in the Encyclopædia Britannica and a paper suggested by an immediate political occasion have their necessary differences of treatment. To the 'House of Lords' the essay on 'Nobility' was a natural introduction, and the 'Growth of Commonwealths' did not seem out of place in the same company. But I may add that it is only by accident that the paper on the 'Constitution of the German Empire'

appears as a separate essay. It was meant to be a mere note to that on the 'Growth of Commonwealths.'

Between these two, as I hope, fairly solid masses at each end, I have ventured to throw in a few slighter pieces from the Saturday Review, a few out of many contributed to that paper from its beginning to the year 1878. I put them forth as a kind of experiment, hardly knowing whether they are really worth preserving as separate pieces; I have used several already as notes to longer essays in other volumes. No one will look for full treatment of any subject on so small a scale; but it has sometimes struck me that a short paper of that kind now and then brings out a particular thought or point of view more forcibly than a longer one.

I have as usual to thank several editors and publishers for leave to reprint the pieces in which they have an interest. And I have further to thank Mr. C. W. C. Oman of All Souls College for valuable help in revising the essays on 'English Civil Wars' and the 'Battle of Wakefield.'

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