o have occasionally
purchased vividity at the price of exactitude. Of mistakes, strictly
so called--_i.e._ statements demonstrably incorrect and therefore
ascribable to haste or carelessness--there are enough to make a show
under the hands of a hostile critic, yet not more than one is prepared
to expect from any but the most careful scholars. The book falls far
short of the accuracy of Thirlwall or Ranke or Stubbs, short even of
the accuracy of Gibbon or Carlyle; but it is not greatly below the
standard of Grote or Macaulay or Robertson, it is equal to the
standard of Milman, above that of David Hume. I take famous names, and
could put a better face on the matter by choosing for comparison
divers contemporary writers whose literary eminence is higher than
their historical. And Green's mistakes, although pretty numerous, were
(for they have been corrected in later editions) nearly all in small
matters. He puts an event, let us say, in 1340 which happened in the
November of 1339; he calls a man John whose name was William. These
are mistakes to the eye of a civil service examiner, but they seldom
make any difference to the general reader, for they do not affect the
doctrines and pictures which the book contains, and in which lies its
permanent value as well as its literary charm. As Bishop Stubbs says,
"Like other people, Green makes mistakes sometimes; but scarcely ever
does the correction of his mistakes affect either the essence of the
picture or the force of the argument.... All his work was real and
original work; few people besides those who knew him well would see
under the charming ease and vivacity of his style the deep research
and sustained industry of the laborious student." It may be added that
Green's later and more detailed works, _The Making of England_ and
_The Conquest of England_, though they contain plenty of debatable
matter, as in the paucity of authentic data any such book must do,
have been charged with few errors in matters of fact.

In considering his critical gift, it is well to distinguish those two
elements of acute perception and sober judgment which I have already
specified, for he possessed the former in larger measure than the
latter. The same activity of mind which made him notice everything
while travelling or entering a company of strangers, played
incessantly upon the historical data of his work, and supplied him
with endless theories as to the meaning of a statement, the source it
ca