o marking its
divisions as to concentrate attention on successive epochs without
dropping the thread that runs through the whole. The earlier portions of
his work are naturally the most instructive and the fullest of interest.
The last volume, indeed, which covers the ground from the Revolution to
the battle of Waterloo, besides including the index to the whole work,
gives far too rapid a survey of momentous and familiar events to afford
profit or satisfaction. One feels that, while the style retains its
fluency, the tone has lost its warmth, and that much of the writing must
have been perfunctory: the reading, at all events, cannot but be so. But
scarcely any one, however well acquainted with the ground, can follow
without pleasure and an enlargement of view Mr. Green's account of
"Early England," "England under Foreign Kings," "The Charter" and "The
Parliament" (from 1307 to 1461), which form the subjects of the first
four books; while the next four, occupying the second and third volumes,
and entitled "The Monarchy," "The Reformation," "Puritan England" and
"The Revolution," are marked by a grasp of thought, a fine sense of
proportion, a thorough knowledge and well-balanced judgment of men and
events, and not unfrequently a dramatic force, which sustain the
interest throughout, and which make them a valuable addition, and
sometimes a necessary corrective, to the fuller and more brilliant
narratives in which the same periods and subjects have been separately
treated.

Mr. Green does not appear to have gone deeply into the study of original
sources, but it is only in his incidental treatment of continental
history that his deficiencies in this respect become palpable. Here he
is often inaccurate, and even when his facts are correct his mode of
stating them shows that he is not master of the whole field, and has
little appreciation of mingled motives and attendant circumstances. Such
a sentence as this: "The restoration of the towns on the Somme to
Burgundy, the cession of Normandy to the king's brother, Francis, the
hostility of Brittany, not only detached the whole western coast from
the hold of Lewis, but forced its possessors to look for aid to the
English king who lay in their rear," could not have been written with
any clear ideas of either the political or the geographical relations
of the places mentioned. What is meant by the "western coast"? Not,
certainly, the towns on the Somme, which lie in the north-east,