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own exertions, and the gradual awakening of the public mind to greater requirements in that branch of human science, and better understanding of its great models, that this advance is due. Meanwhile there have not been wanting writers who have devoted themselves to its history and exposition, with great knowledge of the subject and much devotion to it. Henry Fothergill Chorley (1800-72), though a journalist, and to some extent writer on general subjects, was especially known as a musical critic, and deeply engaged in the exposition and furtherance of everything connected with this art. He was a songwriter esteemed in his day, though that species of literature is more than usually ephemeral ; but his chief works were one on German Music, which increased the acquaintance of the British public with the productions of the most musical of nations, and Thirty Years' Musical Recollections, which is chiefly concerned with the great singers of this and the previous generations. John Hullah, himself an eminent musician, and the author of the system which has spread an elementary knowledge of music to a very large extent over the face of the country, has also written a History of Music, published in 1861, which has done still better work, and furnishes an interesting study of the progress of the art especially in in this country. The Dictionary

of Music and Musicians, edited by Sir George Grove, is in its way a monumental work, and contains admirable biographies of all the chief musicians, thus supplying in the best and most interesting way a history of music in all its schools and developments, with which nothing at least in our language can compete. Music, however, is of its nature independent of literature, and somewhat scornful of its expositions.

CHAPTER VII

OF THE LATER HISTORIANS, BIOGRAPHERS, ESSAYISTS, ETC., AND OF THE PRESENT CONDITION OF LITERATURE

IT is by no means so easy a task to deal with writers who are either living, or, at any rate, have only lately gone from among us, as with those whose work belongs to a past generation. The immense increase in the number of the writers of the present day is alone sufficient to render the work more difficult, and we do not pretend to include all the books on any of the subjects we are dealing with. At the same time, it would be a most invidious duty were we called upon to measure out applause or censure to even the most eminent of living authors as we are able to do with those whose career is already closed and whose works can be reviewed as a whole. It will therefore be found that we have spoken at length only of dead writers, giving to the living

such notice as is necessary to give a general idea of the scope and purpose of their work.

The most eminent historical writers of our own time are for the most part still among us. Yet there are gaps, where some have been taken from the world in the fulness of years, and others while yet in the prime of life. It is not many years since we had to lament the early death of one of the most brilliant historical writers of the time. John Richard Green was born in the year of Her Majesty's accession, and educated at Magdalen College School and Jesus College, Oxford. From his earliest youth he had delighted chiefly in historical studies, and showed his characteristic spirit of critical independence in an essay upon Charles I., whom the young writer, in spite of careful training in the straitest sect of middle-class Toryism, felt himself bound to pronounce against. Fortunately for himself, however, Green was no infant prodigy, and the only marked characteristic of his university life was his devotion to the works of the early chroniclers. After taking his degree in 1859 he was ordained and became a curate in a poor district of London. He afterwards held two livings in succession under similar conditions, and did much hard and conscientious work as a parish priest, but his health finally broke down under the strain of his clerical duties, increased by intense application to historical studies. Archbishop Tait,

who had long had his eye upon Green, appointed him to the pleasant and suitable post of librarian at Lambeth, and he gave up his more onerous clerical work to devote himself entirely to literature. As yet he had written little; some sketches of Oxford in the Eighteenth Century, published in his youth in an Oxford paper, had pleased a limited public, and at a later period some pungent essays of social criticism in the Saturday Review gave to the initiated a suggestion of much satirical power; but his name was yet almost unknown when the Short History of the English People, published in 1874, took the world by storm. The animated and poetical style, the independent and original judgments, as well as the novel conception of the whole, at once attracted the admiration of the great majority of its readers. It is not perhaps a work of faultless accuracy, but that is hardly to be expected from a book which is written up to a theory; for facts, as looked upon by the spectator whose mind is already made up on the subject, show the most obliging readiness to assume any form he chooses. The literary power of Green is undeniable; in some passages, as in his account of the last uprising of Wales before its conquest by Edward I., his naturally picturesque style develops into genuine poetry, while his narrative is usually spirited and his delineation of character striking,

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