‘Alas!’ murmured the Quaker lady, ‘alas for the Bruisers of England! How are they fallen!’ When one thinks of the historical writers of modern England, we sympathise with Borrow's Quaker lady. ‘How are they fallen!’ the historical writers of England, or perhaps we should say, ‘How are they risen!’ out of human ken. Certain it is that, for one reason or another, our living historical writers are not much read. The world does not welcome them as it welcomed Hume, Macaulay, Froude, or even Mr J. R. Green, who, but for evil fate, might still be competing with our most popular novelists. A readable historian might still hold his own, but our historians do not usually permit themselves to be read without too extreme labour.

That history, composed in our own day, is unpopular, does not seem wholly the fault of a public sunken in sloth. Many most applauded and popular novels demand, from the natural man, a laborious patience, such as is not called for even by the author of ‘Feudal England,’ who does not aim at attracting the volatile or stooping to the herd. The style and touch of Professor Maitland, as in ‘Domesday Book and Beyond,’ are charming and buoyantly light in comparison with those of certain authors of modern romance. The public, in short, can undertake very hard and heavy reading, where some applauded novels are concerned, yet history, as now written, is neglected. People who care for history fall back on Froude and Macaulay, though their works, in every sense, are not ‘up to date,’ and would benefit by notae variorum, correcting the errors and adding new material. The truth is that the books of Macaulay and Froude, nay, even of Mommsen, are literature, while the new schools of historians ‘despise literature,’ and insist on producing what they call ‘science.’ Thus, though in our universities historical study is infinitely more popular than ever it was; though our young men pore over charters, and our young women (according to Mr Frederic Harrison) peruse medieval washing-bills, none the less we have scarcely a historian whom the public reads.