History was the joy as well as the labour of his life. But the conception he took of it was peculiar enough to deserve some remark. The keynote of his character was the extraordinary warmth of his interest in the persons, things, and places which he cared for, and the scarcely less conspicuous indifference to matters which lay outside the well-defined boundary line of his sympathies. If any branch of inquiry seemed to him directly connected with history, he threw himself heartily into it, and drew from it all it could be made to yield for his purpose. About other subjects he would neither read nor talk, no matter how completely they might for the time be filling the minds of others. While an undergraduate, and influenced, like most of the abler men among his Oxford contemporaries, by the Tractarian opinions and sentiments then in their full force and freshness,[38] he became interested in church architecture, discerned the value which architecture has as a handmaid to historical research, set to work to study mediæval buildings, and soon acquired a wonderfully full and exact knowledge of the most remarkable churches and castles all over England. He taught himself to sketch, not artistically, but sufficiently well to record characteristic points, and by the end of his life he had accumulated a collection of hundreds of drawings made by himself of notable buildings in France, Germany, Italy, and Dalmatia, as well as in the British Isles. Architecture was always thenceforward to him the prime external record and interpreter of history. But it was the only art in which he took the slightest interest. He cared nothing for pictures or statuary; was believed to have once only, when his friend J. R. Green dragged him thither, visited a picture-gallery in the course of his numerous journeys; and did not seem to perceive the significance which paintings have as revealing the thoughts and social condition of the time which produced them. Another branch of inquiry cognate to history which he prized was comparative philology. With no great turn for the refinements of classical scholarship, and indeed with some contempt for the practice of Latin and Greek verse-making which used to absorb much of the time and labour of undergraduates and their tutors at Oxford and Cambridge, he was extremely fond of tracing words through different languages so as to establish the relations of the peoples who spoke them, and, indeed, used to argue that all teaching of languages ought to begin with Grimm's law, and to base his advocacy of the retention of Greek as a _sine qua non_ for an Arts degree in the University on the importance of that law. But with this love for philology as an instrument in the historian's hands, he took little pleasure in languages simply as languages--that is to say, he did not care to master, and was not apt at mastering, the grammar and idioms of a tongue. French was the only foreign language he spoke with any approach to ease, though he could read freely German, Italian, and modern Greek, and on his tour in Greece made some vigorous speeches to the people in their own tongue. He had learnt to pronounce Greek in the modern fashion, which few Englishmen can do; but how much of his classically phrased discourses did the crowds that acclaimed the distinguished Philhellene understand? So too he was a keen and well-trained archæologist, but only because archæology was to him a priceless adjunct--one might almost say the most trustworthy source--of the study of early history. As evidence of his accomplishments as an antiquary I cannot do better than quote the words of a master of that subject, who was also one of his oldest friends. Mr. George T. Clark says:--