4 JUNE 1927, Page 3

* * * * We much regret to record the

death of Professor J. B. Bury, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, who can be placed without hesitation among the great historians of our time. At Trinity College, Dublin, he won every classical prize and honour that was worth winning. Then, under the inspiration of Mahaffy, he turned to history and became famous with his Later Roman Empire. He was obviously the right man, when the time came, to succeed the learned Acton at Cambridge. He industriously applied the scientific method to history (so far as that can be done), though even so he would confess that moods, beyond his control, often determined his thought. He was deliberately precise and not easily moved, but he rendered immense services to the study of history by his erudition, his knowledge of languages, his love of accuracy and his extraordinarily acute faculty of criticism.