were deprived of their rights or swept out of existence, and liberty was sacrificed to national consolidation and unity.  Whence this difference came need hardly be pointed out.  The Angles, Saxons and Jutes were neither freer nor more enterprising than the Franks and other Teutonic families; but the fortune which carried them to Britain saved them from inheriting any onerous share of the great legacy of the Roman Empire—­with the task of absorbing and transmitting its language and civilization—­secured them against the risk of being either merged in a more numerous race or submerged by a new influx, and thus preserved an identity and continuity which link their latest achievements with their earliest exploits, and stamp their whole career with the same character.

With such a subject, Mr. Green has had no difficulty in so marking its divisions as to concentrate attention on successive epochs without dropping the thread that runs through the whole.  The earlier portions of his work are naturally the most instructive and the fullest of interest.  The last volume, indeed, which covers the ground from the Revolution to the battle of Waterloo, besides including the index to the whole work, gives far too rapid a survey of momentous and familiar events to afford profit or satisfaction.  One feels that, while the style retains its fluency, the tone has lost its warmth, and that much of the writing must have been perfunctory:  the reading, at all events, cannot but be so.  But scarcely any one, however well acquainted with the ground, can follow without pleasure and an enlargement of view Mr. Green’s account of “Early England,” “England under Foreign Kings,” “The Charter” and “The Parliament” (from 1307 to 1461), which form the subjects of the first four books; while the next four, occupying the second and third volumes, and entitled “The Monarchy,” “The Reformation,” “Puritan England” and “The Revolution,” are marked by a grasp of thought, a fine sense of proportion, a thorough knowledge and well-balanced judgment of men and events, and not unfrequently a dramatic force, which sustain the interest throughout, and which make them a valuable addition, and sometimes a necessary corrective, to the fuller and more brilliant narratives in which the same periods and subjects have been separately treated.

Mr. Green does not appear to have gone deeply into the study of original sources, but it is only in his incidental treatment of continental history that his deficiencies in this respect become palpable.  Here he is often inaccurate, and even when his facts are correct his mode of stating them shows that he is not master of the whole field, and has little appreciation of mingled motives and attendant circumstances.  Such a sentence as this:  “The restoration of the towns on the Somme to Burgundy, the cession of Normandy to the king’s brother, Francis, the hostility of Brittany, not only detached the whole western coast from the hold of Lewis, but forced its