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An intelligent foreigner has in truth some advantages over Englishman, in detailing the events of our earliest times. For a very long period England was not the isolated land which she became after the loss of her continental dependencies forced her, as it were, to enter upon her career of self-development. For many generations, Normandy and Brittany, Anjou and Maine, Gascony and Poitou, stood nearer to her than Scotland or Ireland. An Irish sept might extirpate another, a Welsh robberprince-incertum an latro aut imperator-might dethrone or murder half-a-dozen competitors, with less notice at the court of the first Plantagenets, than was given to the feuds of the smallest baron in Picardy. The great and representative families whose names alone furnished subjects for the pen of the chronicler, were not English, but French; the history of England was in a great measure the history of France, and might be treated accordingly. Nor were its relations to Germany of less importance, during several generations: sought alliances with the princely houses of Saxony and Suabia, as the shifting ground of policy towards France rendered these expedient; so that the current of events in England runs often parallel or in

it

termingled with their course in the Empire. Only after long struggles and many losses, which flung back our energies upon their own proper sphere of activity, could that spirit find for itself a way into light, which gave to our institutions their peculiar character and development. Till we arrive at that moment, there is nothing to prevent either a Frenchman or a German from being our chronicler. In some respects, indeed, their very national peculi arities are advantageous conditions for the task, inasmuch as they enable them to take a more impartial view of many facts than we ourselves can do. For it cannot be denied that the Englishman of to-day, educated in every detail under the altered state of things, and fully alive to all that is essentially English in the institutions under which he lives, and which are his pride and glory, is rather too apt to forget how different are the principles by which those remoter events are to be judged, and to apply an unfair canon of criticism to them. On the other hand, no doubt any one but an Englishman runs some danger of not clearly discovering the working of those very national instincts which revealed themselves, though but partially and fitfully, long before they succeeded in stamping their own peculiar character upon our whole polity; and thus caused elements which in their original form were common to nearly all European lands, to coalesce into so distinct a combination in our own.

From this fault however Dr. Pauli, the continuator of Dr. Lappenberg's History of England, is remarkably free. He is fortunate enough to bring to a task of by no means easy character, most of the qualifications necessary to success. Formed in the accurate and laborious school of Leopold Ranke, among fellow labourers like Waitz and Abel and Dönniges, he commenced his work already in the possession. of all that mental training which is the first and most indispensable

requisite for the historian. The mode of sifting and weighing evidence, of co-ordinating and comparing materials, the tests of chronology; in short, the whole apparatus criticus, without which the historian cannot take one secure step, were familiar to him before he entered upon his labours, instead of having to be learnt empirically during their progress; an advantage which will be readily appreciated by all who may have attempted the arduous walks of history without these preliminary accomplishments. Moreover, Dr. Pauli is profoundly versed in the history of his own fatherland, and familiar with its authors: no one knows better than himself in what works to look for the explanation of, it may be, isolated groups of events, whose importance or interest has obtained for them the advantage of distinct and separate treatment by very competent scholars. He is thus able to avail himself of the stores of knowledge heaped up by his continental fellow-labourers, which, we need hardly say, have never yet been fairly brought to bear upon the history of England, and are indeed known to very few Englishmen even by name. How many of our countrymen, we might ask, for example, are acquainted with the late Dr. Abel's careful Biography of Philip of Hohenstauffen, or with Lappenberg's admirable Account of the Hanseatic Steelyard in London, or Champollion's Collection of Letters, or Dr. Sudendorf's Records, or Dr. Havemann's History of the Downfall of the Templars? Yet there is not one of these books but what contains matter of the most valuable description, and not one, we believe, which our author has not duly consulted when the occasion required it.

Dr. Pauli has however an inesti. mable advantage still, without which, it may safely be said, he would have fallen far short of the success which he has achieved, he is intimately acquainted with England and English institutions. He has lived for several years among us, moving in various grades of life, and brought in contact with various classes of society. He has enjoyed rare opportunities of becoming perfectly familiar with our ways both

of thinking and acting, with our measures and our men, with our books and records, and our language in all its stages, from the AngloSaxon down to our own time. He knows England better than most foreigners whom we have met with, and it is no discredit to him or to ourselves that he likes and respects it. It is not for him the bugbear that it is at Berlin; nor does he believe that a free press and a free trade will drive us into the chaos of revolution, or plunge us in the abysses of national bankruptcy. Though a good North German, he has found it possible to be by no means a bad Englishman. To his native sound judgment and untiring industry he joins a generous and enlightened admiration of the country in which he has for so long a period been at home; and the result is that he has given us a History of England such as we would have it written-clear, readable, exhaustive; above all, sound and just, free from exaggeration, and as free also from the one-sidedness of sect and party. It may readily be imagined that he takes a different view from that generally entertained with respect to many leading events in our early history; but it is due to him to say that he has carefully studied and calmly weighed what his predecessors have delivered as the true doctrine, and that where he differs from them, he has reason to give for the faith that is in him. He has no nationality to seduce him, no prejudice to flatter, no false idea of patriotism to lead him either to accuse or excuse, otherwise than truth may warrant. He writes neither as an Englishman nor a Scotchman, nor a Whig nor a Tory, but like a calm and genial judge, ready to proclaim and honour good, to denounce and expose evil, from whatever quarter they may come. He is a man of progress, too, though not of party: full of honest admiration for constitutional freedom, full of warm and generous sympathy for the men by whose efforts and sufferings it was slowly but securely obtained. Nevertheless, he has a heart large enough to take in all that is noble and brave on every side: if he respects Robert of Winchelsea, he does not fail to ad

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mire Edward Longshanks: if he reprobates the mean and cowardly fatuity of John, he has no excuses for the treacherous astuteness of Philip Augustus. He can celebrate triumphantly the military virtues of Edward the Third and the Black Prince, without forgetting that the first would, if he could, have been as despotic a sovereign as any of his predecessors, or that the second was a bad administrator and mischievous governor in the continental principalities with which he was invested.

Dr. Pauli's history commences with the reign of Henry the Second in 1154, and is continued to the end of Richard the Second's in 1399, embracing a period of two hundred and forty-five years, than which none are more full of important results for the history of constitutional development in England. It was pre-eminently during that period that the old principles and methods of rule which are the normal characteristics of the Norman kingdom gave way, and were modified by a continued succession of extraneous influences, until they assumed a form incomparably more favourable to popular liberty-not however without stern resistance and severe struggles, nor without at times producing convulsions which seemed as though they would rend the whole nation in sunder. But there was all along one deep and firm foundation, which though long lost sight of and buried under a new political stratum, was ever there to give firmness and consistency to what had been superinduced upon it by the wave of foreign conquest. It may be affirmed that during the whole of those two hundred and fifty years, the Anglo-Saxon element which had been struck down at Hastings, was slowly but surely recovering its vitality, and taking the place which it could fill harmoniously in the renewed nationality of England. The student of our law who reads its history in a large and enlightened spirit, will confess that to this sturdy Saxondom we are indebted for the general introduction of trial by jury, instead of the ordeal by fire or battle; of responsible ministers, instead of tyrannical officers of the king's ex

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chequer; of sheriffs, yearly elected in counties, instead of being nominated for indefinite periods by the Crown; above all, of parliaments containing the representatives of the wealth and intelligence of the whole nation, and no longer only the great barons of the royal court, or the most dignified members of the clerical body. But with it all, it was a great and manly contest, with vigorous athletes on either side. The prizes at stake were worth a life to win; and nobly, bravely were they contended for, till that magnificent compromise, which we call the English constitution, was firmly established by the efforts and the sufferings of struggling giants.

'Great men have been among us!' Braver and wiser princes than Henry the Second, Edward the First, and Edward the Third, have rarely reigned in any land; and to their firmness and instincts of rule, the Crown owes much of that power and influence in our polity which gives so much dignity, strength, and security to our institutions. Weaker or worse kings than John, Henry the Third, Edward the Second, and Richard the Second, have seldom mounted a throne; and it is to their weakness or their vices that the popular element in our constitution owed its triumph and its gradual extension, and owes now its actual power. Had we not in good time forfeited Guienne and Gascony and Normandy, we might have ended in being a province of France, though ruled by a descendant of the Plantagenets. We have lived to become the lords of India, the founders of America and Australia and New Zealand; and to know that the English tongue is spoken, and the English law administered, over a wider expanse of land and sea than ever were subjected to one ruling people since the beginning of the world. Through good and ill, now by means of wise, now of foolish rulers, Providence has led and trained this nation to do great deeds, and to support and bear witness to great truths. We have been encouraged by manifold successes, we have been chastened in due season by adversity, and strengthened by suffering. All along we have been wonderfully preserved and up

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held, till we have become one of the most powerful and wealthiest empires that the world has ever seen. May we never forget the steps by which we have attained this great and perilous eminence, or Him whose hand has mercifully guided us, while we struggled up to the height on which we stand.

Our readers will see that it is impossible for us to enter into any very detailed account of the contents of these volumes. The nature of a continuous history, as well as the great extent of the work itself, -filling nearly eighteen hundred closely printed German pagespreclude any attempt to follow the author step by step, unless indeed the review of the book were to become as voluminous as the book itself. We therefore think we shall best do our author justice by pointing out the manner in which he deals with certain prominent events which are capable of, and have indeed received, very different interpretations.

Such a case is that of Thomas à Becket, which even from his own time to this in which we live, has unavoidably been treated with sectarian bitterness or political partiality. No doubt it is a great romance, a tragedy full of moving incidents, of sudden and unexpected turns of fortune; kings, nobles, heroes of the faith, canonized saints and martyrs, move before us upon the scene.

A good man, manfully suffering for right against might, goes before our wondering eyes, till having crowned his great contest with death, he triumphs in the strength of the truth for which he yielded up his life. Gorgeous, no doubt, and grand, but the hardhearted historian-who has an ingrained dislike to acting and scenepainting-asks, Is all this true? And Dr. Pauli gives him an answer which will not be very pleasing to those who seek for sentiment instead of truth in history. With a firm and skilful hand, ever with the scalpel of documentary evidence in his grasp, he not only reduces to their true value the exaggerated accounts bequeathed to us by Becket's contemporaries, and those later writers for whose cause St. Thomas died; but by pointing out the real

significance of Becket's career, and its place in the universal history of Europe, he destroys for ever the erroneous theories which more than one modern author has put forward, on grounds even less tenable than those of the 'universal' Church. Dr. Pauli knows well enough what the cause of quarrel with Henry the Second was; he does not suffer himself to be misled by the pious special pleading of Catholics, any more than by the wild dualistic doctrines of modern French historians, deeply imbued with Sir Walter Scott's theory of England in the thirteenth century-to which we heartily wish Mr. Macaulay had not given fresh currency, if it was only to prevent our respectable cousins on the other side of the Atlantic from talking nonsense about the Anglo-Saxon' race. Had our author done nothing more in this matter, he would have done good service by breaking the neck of the absurd fancy that Becket, in his opposition to Henry the Second, was the representative of Saxon nationality, as opposed to Norman oppression. The claims which the Church of Rome has naturally always put forwards for one of the most distinguished of its πρόμαχοι, are intelligible, and not by any means to be blamed; but we really must enter our protest against the Ivanhoe theory, although M. Thierry tells us that it produced his Conquest of the Normans, a work which we remember to have been received with great glee by all 'philosophical radicals,' but which, nevertheless, has the disadvantage of being founded on the novel of a Tory Scotch gentleman, not particularly well versed in history, or particular in his use of it.

Having given ourselves some pains to learn what the AngloSaxons were before and at the time of the Conquest, and what they became after it, we are glad to find that Dr. Pauli coincides in all essential points with us, not only as to the condition of England at the period, and the character of Becket, but also as to the real importance of the Constitutions of Clarendon-in a wide European sense-and the opposition made to them in England by the archbishop, and that fraction of

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the Church which adopted him as

their head.

Apart from the mere church question, which in truth Becket pressed much more earnestly than it was on many occasions agreeable for the Pope to support, he had no standing in England whatever. Of the two men, considered in their nationality (and after all Becket was in all probability a Norman), Henry was by far the more popular. He was, in fact, the Saxon' king: he was looked upon by the Saxon race-if any such existed apart to any great extent-as one of themselves in blood. Many changes took place in his reign which must have conciliated the great mass of the people, who no doubt had been much oppressed, at first by the introduction of Norman laws, and afterwards by the lawless tyranny consequent upon the internal struggles of a disputed succession. It was not then forgotten, and it never should be forgotten, that to Henry's firmness and conduct the country owed its relief from the terrible sufferings which the poorer classes (mixed as they were) had undergone during the weak reign of Stephen. There was, in truth, no people, in our sense of the word, comprising as it does a vast variety of classes, upper ten thousands' as well as lower ten thousands,' and ten-pound householders besides. There were great nobles and landowners, dependents and serfs, and a few-probably very few-of the sort called bauer in Germany, and statesmen in Cumberland. The Civil War, or War of Successioncall it what you will-had filled the land with those majestic, massive castles of which the types are yet found at Rochester and Newcastle; and in them, as a contemporary Saxon author says, there housed, not men, but demons. Here, if you please, you may realize the scenes so skilfully introduced in M. Thierry's authority, Ivanhoe ; only with this condition, that you infinitely increase the horrors of these dens, and that you place them before and not after the reign of Henry the Second. At that time, there being no people, the king had to do with a fractious and powerful nobility, and with adventurers from

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all lands, who sought out of our troubles to cut a road to fortune. It was a good thing then that the king was strong, and a real blessing for England that he used his strength as he did-in short, as he must, for his own sake.

History, even when written by clergymen, has hardly words enough to praise Rudolph of Hapsburg for extirpating the nests of castled thieves in Germany: the layman, who does not care whether Rudolph did or did not deserve a place in the calendar, claims for à much earlier and wiser prince a praise at least as great. Henry set about doing the same thing, but he did it much more completely. He broke down and destroyed the strongholds of the robber-nobility, of which so horrible an account remains in one of the latest entries in the Saxon Chronicle. Of these abominable abodes of every wickedness, we are told that he razed nearly fourteen hundred, which number, if we consider the counties of England alone, will give a pretty clear idea of what his services were to the country and the land, and the poor folk that dwelt on it. He was believed to be favourable to a system of law founded upon that which popular tradition attributed to Edward the Confessor; that is, to an assize, with open plaint and compurgators on oath, with witnesses, and what is, in fact, a kind of jury, rather than the barbarous Frankish and Norman trial by battle, or suits eternally crossed by dilatory pleas; and by putting an end to the castellans, he put an end also to the issue of false and unjust money, which every one of those people had claimed a regal right to coin, and beyond a doubt had claimed a regal right to make current in their neighbourhood, sub pœna of their horrible dungeons, their catastas, and more tortures than are even mentioned in Ivanhoe.