entries, exceeding nine hundred in number, attest the splendid fruits of forty-four years of toil. Misfortunes, such as might have shaken the patience of ordinary men, left him unscathed. The calamitous destruction of his library by fire gave his friends an opportunity of respectfully contributing towards the mitigation of the trouble caused by its loss. The vigorous old man still sent forth his endless stream of articles and short papers. When earlier tasks neared their completion he plunged with unabated ardour into new ones.

The last years of Mommsen's life were largely devoted to work which is of special interest to British readers. The Monumenta Germaniæ,' the great collection of chronicles, laws, and charters, and other illustrations of early and medieval German History, which Pertz began to publish in 1826, and which is still incomplete, now had the good luck to claim him as one of its editors. His special sphere, as was natural, was with the section Auctores Antiquissimi,' and in these his most particular charge was the lesser chronicles of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Three stout quartos of these writers were published between 1892 and 1898, and besides these he edited, in the same series, the Variæ' of Cassiodorus, and Jordanes's 'Romana et Getica,' and the early part of the Liber Pontificalis.' Some of these works do not seem to be very directly monuments of German history, but science is only to be congratulated on the liberal interpretation which the directors have put upon that phrase. In these editions Mommsen gradually advanced his sphere of work from the age of Diocletian and Constantine to the years of Barbaric invasion and the beginnings of the union of Roman and German, out of which all modern history was to grow. Of particular importance to us are his editions of Gildas, Nennius, and some of Bede's minor writings; and it is characteristic that the old man complained of the ungrateful task’ of having to edit the monk of Jarrow's lesser works, when the scope of the series excluded the Ecclesiastical History.' In the same strain Mommsen regretted that, having found nothing hitherto unknown, he was reduced to giving better editions of texts already the common property of the world of scholars. A conspicuous example of what could be done in this direction is to be found in his edition of the curious compilation which has long been ascribed to the Welsh monk Nennius. And we must not forget that it was in answer to Mommsen's request that the most brilliant of Celtic specialists, Heinrich Zimmer, drew up his remarkable analysis and examination of a work that had excited little but despair and

contempt in earlier scholars. Zimmer's 'Nennius Vindicatus' is a work carried out, on thoroughly Mommsenian lines, with something of Mommsen's thoroughness and imagination, ingenuity, rashness, and perverseness. To have evoked a book of such originality is real compensation for the rather cavalier treatment meted out to things Celtic in the fifth volume of the 'Roman History.'

Mommsen kept at work to the last. An elaborate and painful piece of compilation, like the list of Consuls from B.C. 44 to A.D. 613, added by his own hands to the volume of 'Chronica Minora,' published in 1898, showed that even the severest drudgery did not appal the man of eighty. If we take up at random the periodicals of the last half of 1903, we shall find notes or articles from his pen in Hermes,' in the 'Sitzungsberichte' of the Berlin Academy, in the 'Byzantinische Zeitschrift,' in 'Die Nation,' in the 'Independent Review,' and, we doubt not, in others also. Death came to him just as he was beginning to be conscious of failing forces, but before he was compelled to cease writing.

A German professor has more leisure than most of his English brothers, and he is expected to add to knowledge as his first duty, and only to teach, examine, and attend meetings as subsidiary obligations. But Mommsen, far from shirking the duties of his chair, took them very seriously. Until a few years ago his lectures and Seminar were a continued preoccupation, though of late years he ceased altogether to teach. Up to about ten years ago he had, as one of the secretaries of the Berlin Academy, numerous formal duties, including the reception of new members and the eulogies of departed men of learning. But the greatest of Mommsen's tasks as a professor was the drilling in historical method of the numerous brood of Diadochi who were to conquer such realms of knowledge as the great Alexander still left for them to acquire.

It is for those whom Mommsen trained, to speak with authority on Mommsen's life work. But one striking characteristic of the great scholar is apparent even to those who have not enjoyed that privilege; and it is one which needs to be emphasised in England more perhaps than in his own land. There is a feeling not yet extinct that the drudgery of scholarship is unworthy of finer intellects. With us that feeling has remained so strong, that, combined with the lack of professional careers for trained experts, it has done much towards making our best known school of history a nursery of journalists and politicians, of lecturers and popularisers, rather than a training ground for men whose life is consecrated to the advancement of historical science. We have still

not quite outgrown the type of the promising young scholar who thinks that it is his business to write history,' while another class of dull plodders laboriously collect the material for such a gifted being to employ his intellect and literary skill upon. Of any such as these Mommsen's career affords the best condemnation. We see in it a man of commanding intellectual strength, of vivid insight, with the mind of an artist, and the style of a real writer, consciously turning aside from work demanding all those rare gifts, to devote himself exclusively to the hardest, dullest, most technical of details, to the work of quarrying and delving, of editing and commenting, such as we in our insolence think only fit for Dryasdusts. A German admirer has compared Mommsen's mind to the trunk of an elephant, equally adapted to pick up pins or uproot mighty oaks. The great mass of detail, the unending series of taskwork end by revolutionising our whole conception of the Roman world. The great lesson of Mommsen's life is that the drudgery of the 'Corpus,' and of the 'Staatsrecht,' is the necessary preliminary for the training of a real historian. It was only by many years of this laborious process that the prince of specialists obtained that unique grasp which made him the boldest and most stimulating of teachers to the great world of educated men. He who spent his life amidst the details of the infinitely little had no illusions as to the value of facts as such, and cared for them only because his skill enabled him to weld them into a general picture, and to reconstruct by their happy combination the life of the long-vanished past. Mommsen did this for sixty fruitful years, and yet never lost that vivid interest in the world around him which some would regard as almost incompatible with profound specialisation. We cannot better conclude than with the wise words with which Mommsen once defined the relation of men of his craft to matters beyond their province :

We must (he once wrote) specialise ourselves in a branch of knowledge. We ought not, however, to shut ourselves up in our special work. On the contrary, we ought through our special branch to arrive at knowledge of all subjects. How petty and miserable is the world to the eyes of the man who only sees in it Greek and Latin authors, or geological strata, or mathematical problems!

We in England are not, as a rule, in danger of shutting ourselves up in our science; but British learning would hold a far higher rank than it does if we but followed Mommsen's pregnant counsel of making ourselves masters of our subject before we venture to survey the whole world of knowledge and reality.

T. F. TOUT.

PROVINCIAL LETTERS.

XIV. FROM BEACONSFIELD.

THE railway from Baker Street to Verney Junction has brought the tonic air of the Chiltern Hundreds (with which politicians, weary of Westminster, have long been accustomed to refresh themselves) within reach of the ordinary citizen, who now finds it possible to spend his day under the canopy of London smoke, and his night in the free air of Chorley Wood or Chesham, some four hundred feet above the sea. Even those whose tenuity of means forbids such a daily change of elevation find it possible on a Saturday afternoon to fill their lungs with the fresh breezes of this pleasant region, made still fresher and breezier by the rapid motion of the bicycle; and so week by week as the train passes Rickmansworth, Amersham, and Wendover, there descends upon the quiet Buckinghamshire villages a crowd of youths and maidens frenetic to be free,' and eager to cast eyes upon whatever objects of curiosity the neighbourhood may contain. On a recent Saturday I formed one of a party of simple people, members of a club, whom the fortunate contiguity of political and poetical shrines in this favoured district had united in a common pilgrimage. Among us were some economical spirits who held dumping to be the chief cause of the present discontents, and these were bound to Beaconsfield and Hughenden to breathe an aspiration at the tombs of Burke and Disraeli; others of a more literary turn, filled with disgust at the want of public interest in the manuscript of a book of Paradise Lost' which had just come into the market, were bent on performing a solemn act of veneration to the manes of the poet, at the cottage where he had completed that immortal work. I, who had a further object of my own in undertaking the journey, had persuaded them to combine their enthusiasms, pointing out that Milton was a politician as well as a poet, and that Burke, if no poet himself, was the friend and patron of poets. It had been determined, therefore, to alight at Chalfont Road Station, and to visit the sacred places in order as a united party.

We came first to the 'pretty box' in Chalfont St. Giles which

the Quaker Thomas Ellwood found for the aged poet when the plague was raging in London,' and where he prepared Paradise Lost' for the press. It belongs now to a body of local trustees and is fitted up as a museum, like Shakespeare's birthplace at Stratford; but, for reasons which need not be dwelt upon, it figures less in the public eye than that hotly contested building. The relics preserved here are of the usual miscellaneous character, and some of them have little enough to do with the poet, but that is hardly to be helped. The real relic is the house itself. Before we got into Beaconsfield I suggested a halt at Hall Barn. Oh, to see where the King stayed?' said one of the party; 'if you like a little loyalty won't hurt any of us.' 'Well, not for that reason,' I replied; we can show our loyalty in better ways. My interest is not in the present owner of the property, but in a poet, a contemporary of Milton's, who once lived there, and was a great man in his day, and even now is not quite forgotten, Edmund Waller.'"Go, lovely Rose"?' queried a songster. 'Yes,' I said, and also "That which her slender waist confined." The house is not the same house, and I believe all the Waller relics have long been dispersed: but we can catch a glimpse of the gardens, and offer our pinch of incense to the genius loci; and then we shall look with more interest at the poet's monument in the churchyard at Beaconsfield.' As we roamed about, I told them what little I knew of Waller: that the first syllable of his name was pronounced like the word wall; that the family bore for crest a walnut tree, and suspended from it the shield of France, in memory of the exploits of an ancestor at Agincourt who took the Duke of Orleans prisoner; that the poet himself served in many parliaments as member for Amersham, or Wycombe, or Ilchester, being remarkable always for the eloquence and wit of his speeches and for the moderation, not to say time-servingness, of his policy; that in the bad year 1643 he got into trouble for a plot to seize London for Charles, but saved his life by proposing as an alternative a fine of 10,000l. and banishment; that after the Restoration he occupied a position of honour among both wits and politicians, until in 1687, at eighty years old, he died in his house at Hall Barn. Being called upon for anecdotes, I could remember only

1 'Some little time before I went to Aylesbury Prison, I was desired by my quondam master Milton to take a house for him in the neighbourhood where I dwelt, that he might go out of the city for the safety of himself and his family, the pestilence then growing hot in London. I took a pretty box for him in Giles Chalfont, a mile from me.'-The History of Thomas Ellwood.