most
an accident that he became professor of history in the University of his
native town. All through his life it was characteristic of him that
after a spell of creative work, when he had finished a book, he would
turn aside from the subject that had absorbed him and plunge into some
other subject or period, so that the books and articles in the eight
volumes of his collected works (with one more volume still to come)
cover a very wide range. As time went on he examined aspects of history
which at first he had passed over, and he acquired a clear insight into
the political and economic life of the past. It has been well said of
him that he never became either a pedant or a doctrinaire. During the
ten years that he spent as professor at Groningen, he found himself. He
was happily married, with a growing family, and the many elements of his
mind drew together into a unity. His sensitiveness to style and beauty
came to terms with his conscientious scholarship. He was rooted in the
traditional freedoms of his national and academic environment, but his
curiosity, like the historical adventures of his people and his
profession, was not limited by time or space or prejudice. He came more
and more definitely to find his central theme in civilization as a
realized ideal, something that men have created in an endless variety of
forms, but always in order to raise the level of their lives.

While this interior fulfilment was bringing Huizinga to his best, the
world about him changed completely. In 1914, Holland became a neutral
country surrounded by nations at war. In 1914, also, his wife died, and
it was as a lonely widower that he was appointed in the next year to the
chair of general history at Leyden, which he was to hold for the rest of
his academic life. Yet the year after the end of the war saw the
publication of his masterpiece, the book which gave him his high place
among historical writers and was translated as _The Waning of the Middle
Ages_. This is a study of the forms of life and thought in France and
the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the last
phase of one of the great European eras of civilization. In England,
where the Middle Ages had been idealized for generations, some of its
leading thoughts did not seem so novel as they did in Holland, where
many people regarded the Renaissance and more still regarded the
Reformation as a new beginning of a better world; but in England and
America, wh