could, I believe, be shown equally in other parts of the story either that he did not present at all the new evidence which has since been brought forward to justify Hastings, or that he presented it so badly that Macaulay had at least an excuse for overlooking its importance. Mr. Gleig in fact wrote a very bad book, confused, irrelevant, and ill-proportioned; he does not make his points clear, and he succeeds in making a most exciting story very dull. Sir John Strachey in his " Hastings and the Rohilla War" (p. 176) declines to blame Macaulay severely and even suggests that he may have found it " impossible to wade through the most tedious and confused and unsatisfactory of biographies."

I shall speak much more shortly of the other two claims which I wish to make for Macaulay's famous essay. It may seem a paradox to assert that it justifies for him the epithet of" impartial"; but surely it was nothing less than impartiality when the devout follower of Burke, the devoted member of the Whig party, broke from the Whig tradition and ventured to represent the muchabused Viceroy not as a "wild beast, who groans in a corner over the dead," as a captain-general of iniquity, thief, tyrant, robber, cheat," as a spider of hell," but as a statesman of genius, an administrator who had triumphed over the greatest difficulties, as one of "the most remarkable men in our history."

Burke's unfairness had drawn from Hastings the famous epigram:

Oft have I wondered that on Irish ground
No poisonous reptiles ever yet were found;
Revealed the secret stands of Nature's work,
She saved her venom to create a Burke.

The bitterness of this may be justified by the bitterness of Burke, and it at least shows how furious was the conflict. Yet Macaulay, who was steeped in all that Burke had declaimed against Hastings, who describes with the keenest insight and the warmest appreciation Burke's attitude to India, who speaks of him as “having in the highest degree that noble faculty whereby man is able to live in the past and in the future, in the distant and the unreal," who ends one of his most purple passages with Burke's famous peroration,† gives a portrait of Hastings, not as a monster but as a man of genius, able, lovable, superior to all the buffets of fortune.

*For specimens of Burke's vocabulary of abuse cf. Strachey u.s. p. xii.

Which, it may be added, Mr. Gleig mangles severely. How Macaulay must have raged as he read the version!

In fact, I venture to claim with confidence that Macaulay's essay is the main cause of the great reputation which Hastings so deservedly holds in popular estimation to-day. This is not only due to the fact that Macaulay has been the only man who could make the history of British India (outside the story of the Mutiny) generally popular, so that his Essays on Clive and on Hastings are the only two pieces of Indian history which the ordinary man knows; but because he writes with enthusiasm about Hastings when he lets himself go. After the famous description of Westminster Hall at the trial of 1788, comes the paragraph beginning: "The culprit indeed was not unworthy of that great presence." Hastings is deservedly made a part of all that is greatest in the history of our country. If posthumous fame is worth anything, Hastings owes his to Macaulay who, like Balaam of old, may have set out to curse, but certainly remained to bless. There have been a long succession of English heroes and statesmen in India; too many of them are forgotten,

Illacrimabiles

urgentur, ignotique longa
nocte, carent quia vate sacro.

Macaulay is Hastings' “vates sacer." In saying this I write from my own experience, and I believe it is that of many. I read the essay as a small boy at school; I was swept away by the picture of the great Englishman holding his own position and his country's position against faction at home and foreign enemies, and I had no time or inclination to notice the shades which only threw the high lights into relief. And the same impression was made on me, when, years after, I set as subject for a special history prize at a famous school, Macaulay's Essay on Hastings and Sir Alfred Lyall's Life of him; the good workmanlike narrative of the very able Indian administrator failed altogether to impress the candidates in comparison with the genius of the man of letters.

It is hard to give proof how far any individual book or essay affects popular feeling, but the accounts of Hastings in the Encyclopædia Britannica give some indication of the effect produced by Macaulay's Essay. In the eleventh volume of the seventh edition, which appeared in 1842, there is a long and very poorly written account of Hastings, which follows to the full the Whig tradition, and not only says that Nuncomar was "illegally

condemned," but actually accepts him as a trustworthy witness, one who was revealing the corruption of Hastings. In the next edition, in 1856, the account is very much cut down; Nuncomar is not even mentioned, and the summing-up of Hastings' character is borrowed verbally from Macaulay. In the ninth edition, in 1880, Mr. J. S. Cotton, a well-known authority, acquits Impey, though he still maintains that no one doubts that Hastings set the prosecution in motion. He sums up: "Macaulay's Life will not easily be superseded."

Macaulay has had to pay the penalty for his great success in his lifetime. As Buckle wrote at the time of his death :* "Every little critic was ready to revile." But he has suffered still more from his position between the great English parties. He was with all his heart an imperialist and an individualist; and hence he is attacked by the superior persons of the Manchester School (John Morley may be taken as an example) and by all Socialists. He has also drawn on himself the wrath of some of the most important sections of the Conservative party, who cannot forgive his attacks on the Church (too often based on ignorance) and on many of their heroes. He is blamed as having "no teaching in him"; his mistakes (there are many of them) are exaggerated; his style is censured as lacking dignity. But he remains the greatest example in English literature of a man who can tell a story; and his fame as an historian may be left to the judgments of Ranke and of Lord Acton, who, knowing all his faults, put him in the very first rank.

J. WELLS

*Life of Buckle, II., 28.

I.

2.

BRITAIN: ROME: ENGLAND

A History of England. By HILAIRE BELLOC. Vol. I. To 1066.
Methuen.

1925.

The Roman Occupation of Britain. By the late F. HAVERFIELD. Revised by GEORGE MACDONALD. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1924.

3. The Romanization of Roman Britain.

Publisher. 4th Edition. 1923.

Same Author, Reviser, and

4. The Origin of the English Nation. By H. MUNRO CHADWICK. Cambridge University Press. 1907. Reprinted without alteration, 1924.

5.

The Conquests of Ceawlin. By P. T. GODSAL. John Murray. 1924. 6. The Archæology of the Anglo-Saxon Settlements. By E. T. LEEDS. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1913.

No reader would expect that the new " History of England."

by Mr. Hilaire Belloc would follow accustomed lines. It is chiefly interesting as a curious revelation of mental processes-a piece of ecclesiastical propaganda masquerading as history. The book teems with the marks of the propagandist-the manipulation of evidence to suit a particular view, the silent suppression of inconvenient facts, the shout of triumph over any trifling error of an opponent, bold and unqualified assertion where there is no vestige of fact to support it, assumption of unqualified rectitude for the Church, holy, catholic, infallible and so forth, opprobrious epithets for all others, especially barbarians.

It is a pity that this should be so, because Mr. Belloc possesses many of the qualities of an historian; he could be a worthy successor of the great writers of the nineteenth century whom he despises so deeply. Nobody will need to be told that the style is always perspicuous and often eloquent, the dating clear and exact, the arrangement of the matter admirable. Above all he has in full measure that primary attribute of the historian-the power to tell a story and other qualifications that historians often lack through the excessive cultivation of a necessary bookishness. Everybody remembers that "the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire"; and nobody can forget that Mr. Belloc's theoretical and practical military knowledge made his weekly article during the war the most potent moulder of educated opinion in England. Again he is a man of the open-air, equally at home upon the hills

and upon the seas, a walker and one with an eye for country; a sailor and not such a one as would allow the rudder to get mixed with the bowsprit sometimes. If anyone doubts it let him read or re-read that joyous essay, "The North Sea."

There is a minus sign for every plus, and the "History of England" is disfigured by regrettable defects. It is distinguished by the uncharitableness of a theological apologist, or a German professor of the blatant type, rather than by the urbanity that should mark a man "full of Europe." "Affected and absurd," stupidest example," " modern balderdash,"" modern itch," and "sceptical itch" are specimens of the language that Mr. Belloc uses towards writers from whom he differs upon points of scholarship. Many of his admirers will regret to learn that Sir Charles Oman has been afflicted with the last-named irritating complaint, and all because he suggested in a footnote that the site of the battle of Aclea might be Church Oakley, in Hampshire, instead of Ockley, in Surrey.

Mr. Belloc seldom gives any references (he appears to be incapable of giving an exact one), and excuses himself from doing so because of the scale of the book. It is highly convenient to be absolved from the necessity of quoting authorities when most of the quotable sources do not support one's views, but room can always be found for a spiteful footnote, especially about historians of the Oxford School. One example may be given. On the subject of the name "Senlac," Mr. Belloc writes (p. 354, n.): “This common error is due to the authority of Freeman working (without acknowledgment) on the great Lingard, the quarry of all our modern historians. Lingard made an error by adopting without criticism a term in Odericus. Freeman, imagining Senlac to be an English word, pompously brought it out as a special discovery of his own."

The substance of Freeman's note (" Norm. Conq.” Vol. III, App. NN, p. 758) is as follows:

The name of Senlac for the hill on which Harold encamped rests, as far as I know, solely on the authority of Oderic, who seems to take a kind of pleasure in repeating it. . . . I do not profess to know the etymology of the name, and Oderic's form may possibly be corrupt. But he cannot have invented the word, which evidently survives in "Santlaches," Saintlakes," etc. (in various spellings), "the Lake," Battle Lake," and so forth, the local names for the south-eastern part of the town. "Sanglac" or "Sanguelac " I take to be simply

66