The first volume of his introduction to the ’History of Civilization in England’ appeared in 1857, and aroused an extraordinary interest because of the novelty and audacity of its statements.  It was both bitterly attacked and enthusiastically praised, as it antagonized or attracted its readers.  Buckle became the intellectual hero of the hour.  The second volume appeared in May, 1861.  And now, worn out by overwork, his delicate nerves completely unstrung by the death of his mother, who had remained his first and only love, he left England for the East, in company with the two young sons of a friend.  In Palestine he was stricken with typhoid fever, and died at Damascus on May 29th, 1862.  His grave is marked by a marble tomb with the inscription from the Arabic:—­

     “The written word remains long after the writer;
     The writer is resting under the earth, but his works endure.”

Three volumes of ‘Miscellanies and Posthumous Works,’ edited by Helen Taylor, were published in 1872.  Among these are a lecture on ‘Woman,’ delivered before the Royal Institution,—­Buckle’s single and very successful attempt at public speaking,—­and a Review of Mill’s ‘Liberty,’ one of the finest contemporary appreciations of that thinker.  But he wrote little outside his ‘History,’ devoting himself with entire singleness of purpose to his life-work.

The introduction to the ‘History of Civilization in England’ has been aptly called the “fragment of a fragment.”  When as a mere youth he outlined his work, he overestimated the extremest accomplishment of a single mind, and did not clearly comprehend the vastness of the undertaking.  He had planned a general history of civilization; but as the material increased on his hands he was forced to limit his project, and finally decided to confine his work to a consideration of England from the middle of the sixteenth century.  In February, 1853, he wrote to a friend:—­

“I have been long convinced that the progress of every people is regulated by principles—­or as they are called, laws—­as regular and as certain as those which govern the physical world.  To discover these laws is the object of my work....  I propose to take a general survey of the moral, intellectual, and legislative peculiarities of the great countries of Europe; and I hope to point out the circumstances under which these peculiarities have arisen.  This will lead to a perception of certain relations between the various stages through which each people have progressively passed.  Of these general relations I intend to make a particular application; and by a careful analysis of the history of England, show how they have regulated our civilization, and how the successive and apparently the arbitrary forms of our opinions, our literature, our laws, and our manners, have naturally grown out of their antecedents.”

This general scheme was adhered to in the published history, and he supported his views by a vast array