of manuscript authorities would allow,
and a scarcely inferior knowledge of foreign European history during
the same period, with a less full but very sound knowledge down to the
middle of the sixteenth century, and with a thorough mastery of pretty
nearly all ancient history, his familiarity with later European
history, and with the history of such outlying regions as India or
America, was not much beyond that of the average educated man. He used
to say when questioned on these matters that "he had not come down to
that yet." But when he had occasion to refer to those periods or
countries, he hardly ever made a mistake. If he did not know, he did
not refer; if he referred, he had seized, as if by instinct, something
which was really important and serviceable for his purpose. The same
remark applies (speaking generally) to Gibbon and to Macaulay, and I
have heard Freeman make it of the writings of Mr. Goldwin Smith, for
whom he had a warm admiration.

Freeman's abstention from the use of manuscript sources was virtually
prescribed by his persistence in refusing to work out of his own
library, or, as he used to say, out of a room which he could
consider to be his library for the time being. As, however, the
original authorities for the times with which he chiefly dealt are,
with few or unimportant exceptions, all in print, this habit can
hardly be considered a defect in his historical qualifications. In
handling the sources he was a judicious critic and a sound scholar,
thoroughly at home in Greek and Latin, and sufficiently equipped in
Anglo-Saxon, or, as he called it, Old English. Of his breadth of
view, of the command he had of the whole sweep of his knowledge, of
his delight in bringing together things the most remote in place or
time, it is superfluous to speak. These merits are perhaps most
conspicuously seen in the plan of his treatise on Federal Government,
as well as in the execution of that one volume which unfortunately
was all he produced of what might have been, if completed, a book of
the utmost value. But one or two trifling illustrations of this habit
of living in an atmosphere in which the past was no less real to him
than the present may be forgiven. When careless friends directed
letters to him at "Somerleaze, Wookey, Somerset," Wookey being a
village a quarter of a mile from his house, but on the other side of
the river Axe, he would write back complaining that they were
"confusing the England and Wa