It may be doubted
whether even the most dispassionate scholar can write the history of
contemporary events. We may be thankful for the great mass of facts he has
collated, but his work is tinctured with his high Tory principles; his
material is not well digested, and his style is clumsy.
_Agnes Strickland_, born 1806: after several early attempts Miss
Strickland began her great task, which she executed nobly--_The Queens of
England_. Accurate, philosophic, anecdotal, and entertaining, this work
ranks among the most valuable histories in English. If the style is not so
nervous as that of masculine writers, there is a ready intuition as to the
rights and the motives of the queens, and a great delicacy combined with
entire lack of prudery in her treatment of their crimes. The library of
English history would be singularly incomplete without Miss Strickland's
work. She also wrote _The Queens of Scotland_, and _The Bachelor Kings of
England_.
_Henry Hallam_, 1778-1859: the principal works of this judicious and
learned writer are _A View of Europe during the Middle Ages_, _The
Constitutional History of England_, and _An Introduction to the Literature
of Europe_ in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.
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