h the utilitarian theory of morals is no longer
of value, and that it lacks the consistency of either the orthodox or
the agnostic, that there is no new historical light, and that much of
the treatise is commonplace, nevertheless the historical illustrations
and disquisitions, the fresh combination of well-known facts are
valuable for instruction and for a new point of view. His analysis of
the causes of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is drawn, of
course, from Gibbon, but I have met those who prefer the interesting
story of Lecky to the majestic sweep of the great master. Much less
brilliant than Buckle's "History of Civilization," the first volume of
which appeared twelve years earlier, the Morals has stood better the
test of time.

The intellectual biography of so precocious a writer is interesting, and
fortunately it has been related by Lecky himself. When he entered
Trinity College, Dublin, in 1856, "Mill was in the zenith of his fame
and influence"; Hugh Miller was attempting to reconcile the recent
discoveries of geology with the Mosaic cosmogony. "In poetry," wrote
Lecky, "Tennyson and Longfellow reigned, I think with an approach to
equality which has not continued." In government the orthodox political
economists furnished the theory and the Manchester school the practice.
All this intellectual fermentation affected this inquiring young
student; but at first Bishop Butler's Analogy and sermons, which were
then much studied at Dublin, had the paramount influence. Of the living
men, Archbishop Whately, then at Dublin, held sway. Other writers whom
he mastered were Coleridge, Newman, and Emerson, Pascal, Bossuet,
Rousseau, and Voltaire, Dugald Stewart, and Mill. In 1857 Buckle burst
upon the world, and proved a stimulus to Lecky as well as to most
serious historical students. The result of these studies, Lecky relates,
was his History of Rationalism, published in the early part of 1865.

The claim made by many of Lecky's admirers, that he was a philosophic
historian, as distinct from literary historians like Carlyle and
Macaulay, and scientific like Stubbs and Gardiner, has injured him in
the eyes of many historical students who believe that if there be such a
thing as the philosophy of history the narrative ought to carry it
naturally. To interrupt the relation of events or the delineation of
character with parading of trite reflections or with rashly broad
generalizations is neither science nor art. Le