ime went to
live in Monmouthshire, whence he migrated in 1860 to Somerleaze, a
pretty spot about a mile and a half to the north-west of Wells in
Somerset. Here he lived till 1884, when he was appointed (on the
recommendation of Mr. Gladstone) to the Regius Professorship of Modern
History at Oxford. Thenceforth he spent the winter and spring in the
University, returning for the long vacation to Somerleaze, a place he
dearly loved, not only in respect of the charm of the surrounding
scenery, but from its proximity to the beautiful churches of Wells and
to many places of historical interest. For the greater part of his
manhood his surroundings were those of a country gentleman, nor did he
ever reconcile himself to town life, for he loved the open sky, the
fields and hills, and all wild creatures, though he detested what are
called field sports, knew nothing of natural history, and had neither
taste nor talent for farming. As he began life with an income
sufficient to make a gainful profession unnecessary, he did not
prepare himself for any, but gave free scope from the first to his
taste for study and research. Thus the record of his life is, with the
exception of one or two incursions into the field of practical
politics, a record of his historical work and of the journeys he
undertook in connection with it.

History was the joy as well as the labour of his life. But the
conception he took of it was peculiar enough to deserve some remark.
The keynote of his character was the extraordinary warmth of his
interest in the persons, things, and places which he cared for, and the
scarcely less conspicuous indifference to matters which lay outside the
well-defined boundary line of his sympathies. If any branch of inquiry
seemed to him directly connected with history, he threw himself
heartily into it, and drew from it all it could be made to yield for his
purpose. About other subjects he would neither read nor talk, no
matter how completely they might for the time be filling the minds of
others. While an undergraduate, and influenced, like most of the abler
men among his Oxford contemporaries, by the Tractarian opinions and
sentiments then in their full force and freshness,[38] he became
interested in church architecture, discerned the value which
architecture has as a handmaid to historical research, set to work
to study mediaeval buildings, and soon acquired a wonderfully full and
exact knowledge of the most remarkable churche