A POPULAR HISTORY OF ENGLAND.* WHEN you hear it said

that such and such a book is written in a merely popular style, you generally accept the remark as a depreciatory criticism, and you imagine an account composed in a shallow, ad captandwn vein, an abbreviation which is not an epitome, a stringing together of such bits as are most prominent in the sense of being easiest plucked up and stuck in a book, without the intelligent labour which would choose and dig out the most representative traits. If the phrase is not a misnomer when so used, it ought to be. If anyone designs to write a " popular " account of any subject and is not prepared to make something like" Maxima debetur populo reverentia" his key-note, is not pre- pared to devote the whole energies of an able mind to rendering his account instinct with the true spirit and essence of the matter, whatever it may be, he had better let it alone.

What ought a Popular History of England to be ? In Baker's Chronicle—which is very pleasant reading, and in its time was, if we may use the phrase, a popular history for the rich when as yet "the million" were not much of readers—the old knight sets out to give "a chronicle of the Kings of England, contain- ing all passages of State and Church, with all other observations proper for a chronicle "; he makes a separate chapter of each reign, and, after conducting King and country from the king's coronation to his burial disposes of other matters under sub- chapters with such titles as "Of his Taxation;" "Of Laws and Ordinances in his time," "Affairs of the Church in his time," "Works of Piety by him and others in his time," "Of his person- age and conditions," never failing to chronicle in a chapter" Of Casualties happening in his time," famines, floods, rains of blood, "Prodigious Cocks," and other historical enormous gooseberries. In this day, it goes without saying that a history of England is not to be a mere chronicle of kings and reigns, but a history of the

* The Crown History of England. London: Bradbury, Evans, and Go. English nation and their country. A fortiori, a popular history ought to include every element in the condition of the uation,—to be a history, as cricketers would say, "all round." A reader above

the " popular " class may read any general history you like to give him, and if he wants to know something about, say the Constitutional

history, can go to Hallam, as the case may be, or more recondite sources ; but the popular book should be like a rope knit up of many strands, and should include every department. It ought to include a Constitutional history. It ought to give from time to, time some record of the progress of arts and crafts and sciences and letters, some pictures of the manner in which these ancestors of ours lived, their habits and condition, what bonds they liveti under towards maintenance of order and industry, or what. licence. Borrowing a hint from Baker, it seems to us that a popular history ought not to leave the laws untouched ; the his- tory of English land tenure, for example, and the gradual growth of the power of alienation, are surely historical ingredients which a popular history of England ought to contain ; and yet we cannot call to Mind any, popular or unpopular, which embraces

them. In all these matters most popular histories are merely blank, or at most convey merely a few ideas not always intelligible, and when intelligible not always accurate. It is of no use to mention "the feudal system," unless you give some tolerably good notion of what state of things that means. Still less is it of any use to palm off on "popular" readers anecdotic writing about Magna Charta and the Star Chamber, sumptuary laws and cucking-stools. Groasnesses like those committed by popular writers who inform their readers that King Alfred invented trial by jury are simply unpardonable ; they might as well say that. William the Conqueror invented the English nation.

Original research is not to be required of a popular historian;.

all we expect of hitn is that he shall present the people with a good epitome of what the best writers have produced, but we are entitled to demand that it shall be brought down to the latest performances in any and every department. Thus it will by no- means do to chronicle "The Reformation" opposite a particular date in Henry VIII.'s time, when Mr. Froude for one has ascer- tained and described so fully the accumulation in long antecedent. times of the floods which then burst out. And when Mr. Free- man has devoted so much research to bringing out the true effect and significance of what we call the Norman Conquest, his results. must not be left unappropriated by the popular writer.

Here is a tremendous field of materials which, as we think,. ought all to be represented ; but the handling of them in will be the task, a work needing immense labour, and not merely poring drudgery, but thoughtful 'pains. For the thing is not to be merely

an outline, nor even a mere shaded drawing ; a sketch in browns. and greys will not do ; it must be more akin to the artist's study, in which all the tints, the local colouring, and the aerial effects are rendered, by no means, indeed, minutely, but still faithfully. The work must be of manageable bulk, besides which refinements,

of criticism would be "caviare to the multitude," and ampli- tude of details embarrassing. But it must tell the truth, and though it cannot tell the whole truth, so far as detail is concerned, it must suggest, neither directly nor by omis- sion, nothing but the truth ; it must be the evolute of all the intricacies which make up the whole. The regular historians.

may explain doubts, sum up either way, or, after stating the evidence, leave the reader to form his own conclusion. All that can be done here will be to state undoubted matters, and now and then, where a question is too important to be passed over—Anne Bullen's guilt, for instance, or the Sir Edumudbury Godfrey

mysteries—to say shortly, "here there is such and such a doubt.' In smaller matters a careful writer can state the certain things.

without going into subordinate doubts. This Crown History sup- plies a good pattern for the handling of minor points in its short- treatment of ESL W Bacri)azi :— " Thero was at the time of the King's execution a book being printed,. which was to surround his life with the attributes of a saint, and to in- vest him in death with the glory of a martyr. Dr. Gauden, afterwards. Bishop of Exeter, published the Icon Basilik or Portraiture of his. Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings, as the work of the King ;. but after the Restoration he claimed the authorship himself."

To go into the controversy as to the authorship would have beers out of scale ; and this paragraph is happily constructed, as leaving. the matter open, consistent with either hypothesis, and withal flavouring strongest of the generally accepted solution of a much vexed question. The matter is a small one, but it happens to. supply a good illustration. We need hardly say that nothing can

excuse sentences like the following, too often found in books of the kind :—" At this time, Cromwell, as is well known, was aim-

lug at the regal dignity ;" or, "To be the founder of a race of kings had long been Cromwell's ambition." We have in our recollection at this moment a school history published by the Christian Knowledge Society, in which the latter sentence actually occurs. We condemn these two sentences, which we have chosen as illustrations, not because of any private belief in Cromwell which we may entertain, but simply because they go beyond proof. To say the least, the matter is open ; to treat it as admitted is therefore wrong. But thus it is that the compilers of manuals and ‘, popular " books rush into statements which abler men would have feared to make.

We believe that it is in some such manner as this that" popular" histories of England should be undertaken. Yet after all this, when matter and truth have been duly cared for, something remains behind to be secured. If your popular history of Eng- land is the History of England, good ; but it ought also to be able to be popular with the people. The regular historians can relieve weary disquisitions by episodes of stirring description. Something indeed of this may perhaps be done here, but not much ; space will forbid much of this, and besides, the " popular " readers might merely pick out these plums and leave the rest. If Mr. Froude were to give his mind to such a task he could make his work sparkle throughout. Of all living historians he, par 'excellence, has the faculty of distilling the essence of a matter in a pregnant sentence which compels an absorbed interest and burns itself in upon the memory. Who, for instance, that has read his account of the shameful attempt to poison Shane O'Neill can forget the epigrammatic sentence with which he sums up the posture of the matter :—" Refined chemical analysis was not required to detect the cause of the illness ; and Shane clamoured for redress with the energy of a man accustomed rather to do wrong than to suffer it." But the faculty is a dangerous one. A spirit so potent is apt to become a master instead of a slave ; and the truth suffers. If we were commissioned by Government to produce a popular history of England, with "compulsory powers" over all living writers, we should set Mr. Froude, Mr. Gardiner, Mr. Freeman, Mr. Seeley, and some others, to "get out" the first materials and digest them to scale ; we would then entrust Mr. Froude with the embodiment of the result in his own language, after which a committee of revision, of which perhaps he might be an individual member, should sit upon his result, and closely scrutinize every word of it.

Mr. Charles Knight's Crown History of England, the peg on which we have hung all this, is an abridgment of his Popular ,History, or rather a history modelled to a smaller scale from that work. It may be hardly fair, therefore, to criticize by our utopian standard of what a popular history ought to be that which professes to be no more than an epitome of one. The whole is compressed into one crown 12mo. volume of 928 pages, printed in small but clear type, and published at 7s. 6d., which is cer- tainly a "popular" price. Looking at the worth given for the money, we know no other book of the kind which will bear a comparison with it, but irrespective of price the book is really very good. The language is terse, in consequence of which there is room for a minuteness of detail which is wonderful, considering the size of the volume, and so far as it has to be an abstract or epitome, it is a happy and just representation of the whole. Yet in consequence of the great compression, it has the defect of not being pleasantly readable ; the sentences are short, abrupt, and jerky, and their very terseness, combined with this, produces a tiring and unpleasing effect on the reader. Any-one who has ever eaten portable soup made too strong will be able to form some notion of the kind of sensation produced by reading much of it. Perhaps this could hardly have been managed otherwise : its truth is a great thing, and for making it so faithfully repre- sentative, its sponsor has deserved well of his fellow-Englishmen. The book ought to be useful in schools.