Really great historian
Sir: Dr Rowse is not only our most eminent historian. He is also one of our most vivid stylists. Like all the really great historians — Gibbon, Carlyle, Macaulay — he is not concerned merely to spin out a string of incidents. He sees their significance, and he pulls no punches in his depictions of human folly.
Reflections on the Puritan Revolution is. one of the very best books of his later period. It does two things supremely well. One is to chronicle the almost incompre- hensible vandalism which, during the 17th century, destroyed so many churches, books, works of art, houses, and human lives. The other (not for nothing is Swift Dr Rowse's master) is to reveal the universal human tendency to prefer the bad to the good, the ugly to the beautiful, chaos to order. While giving us a well-informed guided tour of the ruined beauties of Charles I's England, he holds up a terrify- ing glass to the ruin of our England. Of the vandals then, and of the vandals now, he says, Si monumentum requiris, circum- spice.
I would have thought that the Spectator should have been on the side of sweetness and light, but Eric Christiansen's review (Books, 28 June) shows that I am wrong. It is a curious way in which to treat your oldest, and by far your most distinguished, contributor.
A. N. Wilson
16 Richmond Road, Oxford
Previous page
