His pictures of historical scenes are admirable, for with his interest in the study of character there went a large measure of dramatic power. Nothing can be better in its way than the description of the murder of St. Thomas of Canterbury given in the _Memorials of Canterbury_, which, after _Sinai and Palestine_ and the _Life of Arnold_, may be deemed the best of Stanley's books. Whether he could, with more leisure for careful thought and study, have become a great historian, was a question which those of us who were dazzled by his Public Lectures at Oxford used often to discuss. The leisure never came, for he was throughout life warmly interested in every current ecclesiastical question, and ready to bear a part in discussing it, either in the press--for he wrote in the _Edinburgh Review_, and often sent letters to the _Times_ under the signature of "Anglicanus"--or in Convocation, where he had a seat during the latter part of his career. These interruptions not only checked the progress of his studies, but gave to his compositions an air of haste, which made them seem to want system and finish. The habit of rapid writing for magazines or other ephemeral purposes is alleged to tell injuriously upon literary men: it told the more upon Stanley because he was also compelled to produce sermons rapidly. Now sermon-writing, while it breeds a tendency to the making of rhetorical points, subordinates the habit of dispassionate inquiry to the enforcement of a moral lesson. Stanley, who had a touch of the rhetorical temperament, and was always eager to improve an occasion, certainly suffered in this way. When he brings out a general truth he is not content with it as a truth, but seeks to turn it also to edification, or to make it illustrate and support some view for which he is contending at the time. When he is simply describing, he describes rather as a dramatic artist working for effect than as a historian solely anxious to represent men and events as they were. Yet if we consider how much a historian gains, not only from an intimate knowledge of his own time, but also, and even more largely, from playing an active part in the events of his own time, from swaying opinion by his writings and his speeches, from sitting in assemblies and organising schemes of attack and defence, we may hesitate to wish that Stanley's time had been more exclusively given to quiet investigation. The freshness of his historical portraits is notably due to the sense he carried about with him of moving in history and being a part of it. He never mounted his pulpit in the Abbey or walked into the Jerusalem Chamber when Convocation was sitting without feeling that he was about to do something which might possibly be recorded in the annals of his country. I remember his mentioning, to illustrate undergraduate ignorance, that once when he was going to give a lecture to his class, he suddenly recollected that Mr. Goldwin Smith, then Regius Professor of Modern History, was announced to deliver a public lecture at the same hour. Telling the class that they would be better employed in hearing Mr. Goldwin Smith than himself, he led them all there. The next time the class met, one of them, after making some acute comments on the lecture, asked who the lecturer was. "I was amazed," said Stanley, "that an intelligent man should ask such a question, and then it occurred to me that probably he did not know who I was either." There was nothing of personal vanity or self-importance in this. All the men of mark among whom he moved were to him historical personages, and he would describe to his friends some doing or saying of a contemporary statesman or ecclesiastic with the same eagerness, the same sense of its being a fact to be noted and remembered, as the rest of us feel about a personal anecdote relating to Oliver Cromwell or Cardinal Richelieu.