England from 1603 to 1656. In
the revised editions there are ten volumes called the "History of
England, from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil
War," and four volumes on the Great Civil War. Since this revision he
has published three volumes on the History of the Commonwealth and the
Protectorate. He was also the author of a number of smaller volumes, a
contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Dictionary of
National Biography, and for ten years editor-in-chief of the _English
Historical Review_.

I know not which is the more remarkable, the learning, accuracy, and
diligence of the man, or withal his modesty. With his great store of
knowledge, the very truthfulness of his soul impels him to be forward
in admitting his own mistakes. Lowell said in 1878 that Darwin was
"almost the only perfectly disinterested lover of truth" he had ever
encountered. Had Lowell known the historian as we know him, he would
have placed Gardiner upon the same elevation. In the preface to the
revised ten-volume edition he alludes to the "defects" of his work.
"Much material," he wrote, "has accumulated since the early volumes were
published, and my own point of view is not quite the same as it was when
I started with the first years of James I."[155] The most important
contribution to this portion of his period had been Spedding's edition
of Bacon's Letters and Life. In a note to page 208 of his second volume
he tells how Spedding's arguments have caused him to modify some of his
statements, although the two regard the history of the seventeenth
century differently. Writing this soon after the death of Spedding, to
which he refers as "the loss of one whose mind was so acute and whose
nature was so patient and kindly," he adds, "It was a true pleasure to
have one's statements and arguments exposed to the testing fire of his
hostile criticism." Having pointed out later some inaccuracies in the
work of Professor Masson, he accuses himself. "I have little doubt," he
writes, "that if my work were subjected to as careful a revision, it
would yield a far greater crop of errors."[156]

Gardiner was born in 1829. Soon after he was twenty-six years old he
conceived the idea of writing the history of England from the accession
of James I to the restoration of Charles II. It was a noble conception,
but his means were small. Having married, as his first wife, the
youngest daughter of Edward Irving, the enthusiastic founder o