It was his ambition to be the Stow of nineteenthcentury London; and he projected a vast scheme in which he was to have the help of experts, retaining for his own share the general history of London from the earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century. This he seems ever to have regarded as his magnum opus, and to it he devoted the continuous labour of five years. To this plan, unfinished at his death, belonged the pleasant volumes on Westminster, London, South London, and East London (written by him with some assistance), and the more ambitious work on London in the Eighteenth Century, thoroughly characteristic of the man, and published in 1902. From the

Autobiography published in the same year it appeared that he had completed a history of London from the beginning as far as the end of the eighteenth century. His attitude towards religious and theological problems was frankly expounded in the same book, and was by no means conservative. His relations with Mr Rice (who, it should be added, wrote a well-known history of the British Turf)

money Mortiboy was dramatised by the author. As We are and as We may be was a collection of miscellanies, posthumously published in 1903.

Thomas Hill Green (1836-82) was born at the rectory of Birkin in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and educated at Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first in classics, and later a third in law and modern history. He was elected and re-elected a Balliol Fellow, became the first

he had explained in a preface to the library edition of Ready-money Mortiboy in 1887.

As secretary of the Palestine Exploration Fund Besant edited or wrote works on Jerusalem, Palestine, and the survey; and as first chairman of the Society of Authors he laboured strenuously to secure, especially to inexperienced writers for the press, as full a share as possible of the profits accruing from their labours. His zeal in their behalf, testified to by a great expenditure of time and work, led him ultimately to be unduly suspicious and not a little unfair to one of the two partners in the business of publishing books.

Further French studies were a work on the French humourists (1873) and small works on Rabelais, Montaigne, and Coligny; he wrote also Lives of Professor Palmer and Richard Jefferies; and there were opuscules from his hand on Whittington, Captain Cook, and King Alfred. Ready

lay tutor of the college, and, under Jowett, the main influence in Balliol. He married a sister of J. A. Symonds in 1871, and became in 1877 Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy. Green's noble character, contagious enthusiasm, philosophical independence and profundity, and strong interest in social questions gathered around him many of the best men at Oxford. Popular education and temperance lay near his heart, and he gave himself with great earnestness to School-Board work and political reform. He was the Mr Gray' of Robert Elsmere. In 1874 he contributed his masterly intro

duction to the Clarendon Press edition of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, subjecting Hume's philosophy in detail to searching and hostile analysis from an idealist point of view. His own philosophy, which sprang from the sympathetic study of Kant and Hegel, was largely a polemic against current empiricism as stultifying philosophy and rendering the ethical standard nugatory; he was a trenchant critic of British empirical philosophy, whether that of Hume or of Lewes or of Herbert Spencer. His Prolegomena to Ethics, left incomplete at his death, was edited in the following year by Mr A. C. Bradley; and two addresses or lay-sermons to his pupils were issued with an unfinished preface by Arnold Toynbee. His condemnation of Hume and scattered essays in Mind and elsewhere were edited by R. L. Nettleship (1885-88), the third volume containing a Memoir.

John Richard Green (1837-83) was the son of an Oxford tradesman, and was educated at Magdalen College School till the age of fifteen, when he was sent to complete his education under the charge of a private tutor. In 1854 he competed successfully for an open scholarship at Jesus College, Oxford, and was matriculated at the end of 1855. The choice of a college was probably unfortunate; the members of Jesus College were mostly Welshmen, and they were rather isolated from the rest of the university. Green made few intimate friends during his undergraduate days, refused to throw himself into the normal current of Oxford studies, and was content with a pass degree in 1859. That his time had not been wholly wasted, and that his early taste for reading had led him into the direction of his later work, is proved by some brilliant papers on the history of Oxford which he contributed during his last year of residence to the Oxford Chronicle. In 1860 he took orders and accepted a curacy in London at St Barnabas, Goswell Road. For a few months in 1863 he had charge of a parish in Hoxton, but was compelled by ill-health to resign it. After another short period as a curate at Notting Hill, he received from Bishop Tait the curacy-in-charge of St Philip's, Stepney, which he held for five years. He discharged his clerical duties with rare fidelity and devotion; but his sympathies were always with the Broad Church party, and as time went on he became more and more reluctant to bind himself to any definite religious dogmas. He had always been delicate, and the arduous labour of a clergyman in the east end of London overtaxed his strength. When he resigned his charge at Stepney in 1869, he gave up all active clerical work.

During his life in London Green had managed to find time for literary work. Whenever he could get away from his parish, he spent his time in the British Museum studying the authorities for early English history. He had plans for a history of Somersetshire, and a history of the English Church in connection with the lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury; but his favourite scheme was a history of England under the Angevin kings, a task which has since been performed by his disciple, Miss Kate Norgate. A paper which Green read before the Somersetshire Archæological Society led to an intimate friendship with Freeman, by whom he was induced to become a contributor, and after a time a frequent contributor, to the Saturday Review. Through Freeman he became acquainted with Stubbs, who was at the time Lambeth Librarian, an office in which Green succeeded him, and was also engaged in editing some of the most important volumes in the Rolls Series. The encouragement which he received from these two older students was of immense value to Green, and he recognised his obligation when in 1878 he dedicated his History of the English People 'to two dear friends, my masters in the study of

English History, Edward Augustus Freeman and William Stubbs.'

Green's intention, when he abandoned the Church, was to earn a living by writing for the Saturday, but to devote almost the whole of his energy and time to the Angevin period. It was a great blow to him to discover in 1869 that his lungs were affected, and that he would have to curtail his work and to live the life of an invalid. For three successive winters he was compelled to go to the South. Under these unwelcome and unexpected conditions he was induced to alter his plans, to abandon or postpone the unremunerative task of writing a lengthy book on a special period, and to undertake for Macmillan a Short History of the English People. To the writing of this book he gave five years of such strenuous work as he could put into the limited hours allowed by medical advice. It was published in 1874, and Green suddenly found himself famous. This was the more startling and gratifying, because the experts who had read the proof-sheets were by no means unanimous in prophesying success. But the verdict of readers was as decisive as in the case of Macaulay's first two volumes a quarter of a century before. It was not merely the vividness of the narrative and the picturesqueness of the style that secured such a notable triumph: Green had presented the social side of English history in its connection with political life and constitutional progress as nobody had presented it before. His life in the east end had been a more valuable training to him than Gibbon's experience as a militia officer had been to the writer of the Decline and Fall. Green's intention was clearly stated in his Preface: The aim of the following work is defined by its title; it is a history, not of English Kings or English Conquests, but of the English People. At the risk of sacrificing much that was interesting and attractive in itself, and which the constant usage of our historians has made familiar to English readers, I have preferred to pass lightly and briefly over the details of foreign wars and diplomacies, the personal adventures of kings and nobles, the pomp of courts, or the intrigues of favourites, and to dwell at length on the incidents of that constitutional, intellectual, and social advance in which we read the history of the nation itself. It was with this purpose that I have devoted more space to Chaucer than to Cressy, to Caxton than the petty strife of Yorkist and Lancastrian, to the Poor Law of Elizabeth than to her victory at Cadiz, to the Methodist revival than to the escape of the young Pretender. Whatever the worth of the present work may be, I have striven throughout that it should never sink into a "drum and trumpet history,"1 The mere abandonment of the time-honoured division into reigns was in itself a revolution. No other European country had at that time found such a historian as Green, and though foreigners have since tried to emulate his methods, none have succeeded in equalling their

model. The Short History remains unique in historical literature.

For nine more years Green was engaged in a heroic struggle to do as much work as increasing ill-health would allow. His opportunities for research were seriously curtailed by the necessity of always wintering abroad. In 1877 he married Miss Alice Stopford, whose invaluable assistance made the remaining years of his life happier and more fruitful than they could otherwise have been. He never returned to his project of Angevin history, but set himself to work out the general history of England on an ever-increasing scale. In 1878-80 he published in four volumes his History of the English People, in which he ex

JOHN RICHARD GREEN. By permission of Messrs Macmillan & Co.

panded the Short History, and rewrote those periods of it which had been defectively treated in the former book. Then he began from the beginning to utilise on a large scale the authorities which he had been studying for so many years. One volume, The Making of England, which brought the history down to 828, was published in January 1882. With feverish activity he went on dictating another volume to his wife, but it was still unfinished when he died at Mentone on 7th March 1883; it appeared as a posthumous work under the name of The Conquest of England. It is to these last two books that we must look to estimate the immense labour which it had cost Green to draw his brilliant picture of the nation's progress; and it is in these books that we see most clearly the extraordinary imaginative power which enabled Green to throw himself into the life of the

distant past. This is his supreme merit as a historian, and in this quality he has never been surpassed.

Oxford in the Middle Ages.

At the time of the arrival of Vacarius, Oxford stood in the first rank among English towns. Its town church of St Martin rose from the midst of a huddled group of houses, girt in with massive walls, that lay along the dry upper ground of a low peninsula between the streams of Cherwell and the upper Thames. The ground fell gently on either side, eastward and westward, to these rivers, while on the south a sharper descent led down across swampy meadows to the city bridge. Around lay a wild forest, the moors of Cowley and Bullingdon fringing the course of Thames, the great woods of Shotover and Bagley closing the horizon to the south and east. Though the two huge towers of its Norman castle marked the strategic importance of Oxford as commanding the river valley along which the commerce of southern England mainly flowed, its walls formed, perhaps, the least element in its military strength, for on every side but the north the town was guarded by the swampy meadows along Cherwell, or by the intricate channels into which the Thames breaks among the meadows of Osney. From the midst of these meadows rose a mitred abbey of Austin canons, which, with the older priory of St Frides wide, gave the town some ecclesiastical dignity. The residence of the Norman house of the D'Oillis within its castle, the frequent visits of English kings to a palace without its walls, the presence again and again of important councils, marked its political weight within the realm. The settlement of one of the wealthiest among the English Jewries in the very heart of the town indicated, while it promoted, the activity of its trade. No place better illustrates the transformation of the land in the hands of its Norman masters, the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden expansion of commerce and accumulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. To the west of the town rose one of the stateliest of English castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly less stately abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the Norman kings raised his palace of Beaumont. The canons of St Frideswide reared the church which still exists as the diocesan cathedral, while the piety of the Norman Castellans rebuilt almost all the parish churches of the city, and founded within their new castle walls the church of the Canons of St George. We know nothing of the causes which drew students and teachers within the walls of Oxford. It is possible that here as elsewhere a new teacher had quickened older educational foundations, and that the cloisters of Osney and St Frideswide already possessed schools which burst into a larger life under the impulse of Vacarius. As yet, however, the fortunes of the University were obscured by the glories of Paris. English scholars gathered in thousands round the chairs of William of Champeaux or Abelard. The English took their place as one of the 'nations' of the French University. John of Salisbury became famous as one of the Parisian teachers. wandered to Paris from his school at Merton. But through the peaceful reign of Henry the Second Oxford was quietly increasing in numbers and repute. years after the visit of Vacarius its educational position was fully established. When Gerald of Wales read his amusing Topography of Ireland to its students, the most

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Forty

learned and famous of the English clergy were, he tells us, to be found within its walls. At the opening of the thirteenth century Oxford was without a rival in its own country, while in European celebrity it took rank with the greatest schools of the Western world. But to realise this Oxford of the past we must dismiss from our minds all recollections of the Oxford of the present. In the outer aspect of the University there was nothing of the pomp that overawes the freshman as he first paces the 'High,' or looks down from the gallery of St Mary's. In the stead of long fronts of venerable colleges, of stately walks beneath immemorial elms, history plunges us into the mean and filthy lanes of a medieval town. Thousands of boys, huddled in bare lodging-houses, clustering round teachers as poor as themselves in church porch and house porch, drinking, quarrelling, dicing, begging at the corners of the streets, take the place of the brightlycoloured train of doctors and Heads. Mayor and Chancellor struggled in vain to enforce order or peace on this seething mass of turbulent life. The retainers who followed their young lords to the University fought out the feuds of their houses in the streets. Scholars from Kent and scholars from Scotland waged the bitter struggle of North and South. At nightfall roisterer and reveller roamed with torches through the narrow lanes, defying bailiffs and cutting down burghers at their doors. Now a mob of clerks plunged into the Jewry, and wiped off the memory of bills and bonds by sacking a Hebrew house or two. Now a tavern row between scholar and townsman widened into a general broil, and the academical bell of St Mary's vied with the town bell of St Martin's in clanging to arms. Every phase of ecclesiastical controversy or political strife was preluded by some fierce outbreak in this turbulent, surging mob. When England growled at the exactions of the Papacy, the students besieged a legate in the abbot's house at Osney. A murderous town and gown row preceded the opening of the Barons' War. 'When Oxford draws knife,' ran the old rhyme, England's soon at strife.'

Tudor Architecture.

A transformation of an even more striking kind marked the extinction of the feudal character of the noblesse. Gloomy walls and serried battlements disappeared from the dwellings of the gentry. The strength of the mediæval fortress gave way to the pomp and grace of the Elizabethan Hall. Knole, Longleat, Burleigh and Hatfield, Hardwick and Audley End, are familiar instances of a social as well as an architectural change which covered England with buildings where the thought of defence was abandoned for that of domestic comfort and refinement. We still gaze with pleasure on their picturesque line of gables, their fretted fronts, their gilded turrets and fanciful vanes, their castellated gateways, the jutting oriels from which the great noble looked down on his new Italian garden, on its stately terraces and broad flights of steps, its vases and fountains, its quaint mazes, its formal walks, its lines of yews cut into grotesque shapes in hopeless rivalry of the cypress avenues of the south. Nor was the change less within than without. The life of the Middle Ages concentrated itself in the vast castle hall, where the baron looked from his upper dais on the retainers who gathered at his board. But the great households were fast breaking up; and the whole feudal economy disappeared when the lord of the household withdrew with his family into his

'parlour' or 'withdrawing-room' and left the hall to his dependants. The Italian refinement of life which told on pleasance and garden told on the remodelling of the house within, raised the principal apartments to an upper floor-a change to which we owe the grand staircases of the time-surrounded the quiet courts by 'long galleries of the presence,' crowned the rude hearth with huge chimney-pieces adorned with fauns and cupids, with quaintly interlaced monograms and fantastic arabesques, hung tapestries on the walls, and crowded each chamber with quaintly carved chairs and costly cabinets. The prodigal use of glass became a marked feature in the domestic architecture of the time, and one whose influence on the general health of the people can hardly be overrated. Long lines of windows stretched over the fronts of the new manor halls. Every merchant's house had its oriel. You shall have sometimes,' Lord Bacon grumbled, 'your houses so full of glass that we cannot tell where to come to be out of the sun or the cold.'

The Letters of John Richard Green, edited by Leslie Stephen (London, 1901), gives the best account of his life. A short Memoir to 1874 was prefixed by Mrs Green to the illustrated edition of the Short History in 1892. There are also valuable articles by Mr James Bryce in Macmillan's Magazine (May 1883; republished in Studies in Contemporary Biography, 1903), by Mr P. Lyttelton Gell in the Fortnightly Review (May 1883), and by the Rev. H. R. Haweis in the Contemporary Review (May 1885). RICHARD LODGE.

James Thomson (1834-82), poet, was the son of James Thomson, officer in the merchant service, and his wife Sarah Kennedy, and was born at Port-Glasgow. Reared at the Royal Caledonian Asylum and trained at Chelsea for an army teacher, he got an assistant's post in 1851 at Ballincollig, near Cork. Here he met Charles Bradlaugh and loved Matilda Weller, whose death in 1853 left him desolate. After holding various positions as teacher, Thomson was in 1862 discharged from the army for an irregularity. He had meanwhile greatly extended his scholarship and become specially expert in his knowledge of modern languages. Through Bradlaugh's influence he now became a London clerk, presently contributing freely to the National Reformer. His signature was 'B.V.,' the initials representing Bysshe Vanolis, and indicating the writer's reverence for Shelley and Novalis. Unfortunately Thomson lacked moral fibre, and his lonely sensitiveness, terribly strained by the extravagance of his free-thinking, made him a gloomy if energetic pessimist. Relieving his solitude with drink, he soon became hopelessly besotted. In 1872 he visited Colorado as a mining agent, and for a month or two in 1873 he was a war correspondent in Spain. Apart from these variations, he lived miserably in London. After 1875 he deserted the National Reformer for The Secularist and Copè's Tobacco Plant. He died in University College Hospital, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Thomson's highest achievement is the pessimistic view of the world in The City of Dreadful Night. Originally contributed to the National Reformer, this was published with other poems in 1880. Despite its wayward philosophy and persistently

gloomy atmosphere, the poem reveals a distinct personality, and has engaging nimbleness and grace of artistic form. In the same volume the lyric To our Ladies of Death,' prompted by De Quincey's Suspiria, is very strikingly conceived and daintily elaborated. Thomson further illustrates his sovereign quality in Vane's Story and the attractive Oriental tale, Weddah and Om-elBonain, published with other poems in 1881. In his first two volumes appeared the author's best work. They include, besides the poems named, 'Sunday at Hampstead,' 'Sunday up the River,' and various other short pieces that evince a winning love of natural beauty and rare energy of lyrical rapture. In 1881 Thomson issued Essays and Phantasies, which are curious if not important. Posthumous works are A Voice from the Nile, and other Poems, and Satires and Profanities, both published in 1884; Shelley, a Poem, published in 1885; and Poems, Essays, and Fragments, issued in 1892. The collected Poems appeared in two volumes in 1895, and a volume of Prose was published in 1896. Mr Bertram Dobell prefixed a Life of Thomson to the volume entitled A Voice from the Nile, and other Poems; and in 1889 Mr H. S. Salt published a work which, as revised in 1898, has become the standard biography of the poet.

From The City of Dreadful Night.'

Of all things human which are strange and wild This is perchance the wildest and most strange, And showeth man most utterly beguiled,

To those who haunt that sunless City's range; That he bemoans himself for aye, repeating How Time is deadly swift, how life is fleeting, How naught is constant on the earth but change.

The hours are heavy on him and the days;

The burden of the months he scarce can bear; And often in his secret soul he prays

To sleep through barren periods unaware, Arousing at some longed-for date of pleasure; Which having passed and yielded him small treasure, He would outsleep another term of care.

Yet in his marvellous fancy he must make

Quick wings for Time, and see it fly from us; This Time which crawleth like a monstrous snake, Wounded and slow and very venomous; Which creeps blindwormlike round the earth and ocean, Distilling poison at each painful motion,

And seems condemned to circle ever thus.

And since he cannot spend and use aright
The little time here given him in trust,
But wasteth it in weary undelight

Of foolish toil and trouble, strife and lust,
He naturally claimeth to inherit
The everlasting Future, that his merit
May have full scope; as surely is most just.

O length of the intolerable hours,

O nights that are as æons of slow pain, O Time, too ample for our vital powers, O Life, whose woeful vanities remain

in Glasgow. The son was educated at Glasgow High School and University, where his closest friend was the short-lived David Gray (page 657). In the year 1860 the two set out for London to set the Thames on fire; but gloom and poverty hung over their steps, and fame did not come until too late for the elder of the pair. Buchanan's first work, Undertones, a volume of verse, published in 1863, was well received. The Idylls and Legends of Inverburn followed in 1865, and next year came London Poems, his first distinct success -a rare combination of lyrical vigour and insight into humble life, lightened up with humour and sweetened with pathos. Later volumes of verse were a translation of Danish ballads and Wayside Posies (1866); North Coast Poems (1867); Napoleon Fallen, a Lyrical Drama, and The Drama of Kings (1871), two rhapsodies suggested by the