[Footnote 5: _Histoire de la littérature anglaise_, 1863.]
[Footnote 6: But a Wilde who wrote no _De Profundis_ and no _Ballad of Reading Gaol_.]
[Footnote 7: _La Forge_: dedicated to Gaston Paris, the greatest _forgeron_ of his generation in the love of Old French.]
[Footnote 8: _Rime Nuove_: Classicismo e Romantismo.]
[Footnote 11: For this and the other verse-translations the writer is responsible.]
[Footnote 12: Even the 'music' was far removed from the simplicity of pure song. The song of these poets was an incantation. Nay, painting itself witnessed a corresponding revolt against the 'eloquence' of the pseudo-realists--the 'far away dirty reasonableness', as Manet dubbed it, which missed the essential vision by using the worn-down accepted phrases of the public.]
[Footnote 13: _Au jardin de l'Infante: Veillée_.]
[Footnote 14: To some types of Irish imagination French Naturalism, it is true, was no less congenial; hence the rift between the realist and the spiritual Irishmen delightfully played on in Max Beerbaum's cartoon of Yeats presenting the _Faery Queene_ to George Moore.]
[Footnote 15: Aliotta, _The Idealistic Revolt_, p. 116. Cf. the account of the analogous views of Boutroux and Renouvier in the same chapter.]
[Footnote 16: Keats, no doubt, also aspired to the life of action. But in him the two moods were disparate, even in conflict; in Brooke they were seemingly fused.]
[Footnote 17: Eighteenth-century observation, in the person of Goldsmith, had found no worthier epithet for the great Flemish river than 'lazy', and the modern tourist is likely to find this by far the more 'characteristic'. But which had the best chance of seeing truly, the life-long companion and lover, or the stranger, sad, lonely, and longing for home?]
[Footnote 19: Cf. for instance the situation of Signe, in the grip of the brutal _préfet_, with that of Beatrice, in _The Changeling_, in the hands of De Flores.]
The scientific study of history began a hundred years ago in the University of Berlin. Preparatory work of the highest importance had been accomplished by laborious collectors like Baronius and Muratori, keen-sighted critics such as Mabillon and Wolf, and brilliant narrators like Gibbon and Voltaire. But it was not till Niebuhr, Böckh, and above all Ranke preached and practised the critical use of authorities and documentary material that historical scholarship entered on the path which it has pursued with ever-increasing success for the last three generations. It is my task to-day to direct your attention to some of its main achievements during the last half-century.