MR LEEKY, A MODERN HISTORIAN.

Press, Volume XLVIII, Issue 7803, 5 March 1891, Page 6

MR LEEKY, A MODERN HISTORIAN.

What must be the frame of mind of a -writer who has finished such a Work as that which Mr Lecky, after nineteen years of toil, has just brought to completion ? He cannot; be tormented by the artistic yearning for ideal perfection, for within its limits this product of unerring analysis and patient research: is : perfect. But he must lack some, of the am*t's creative joy.. Take an historical work by an artist in literature, such as Carlyle's " French Revolution." Suppose its basis df fact to have crumbled away under the stress of fresh evidence, there would still remain a glorious imaginative creation, suspended, as it were, in mid-air, for many a generation to gaze on with wonder aud delight. But if Mr Lecky's facts were successfully assaied the edifice of his great history would disappear and "leave not a wrack behind." It would.be difficullt, however, observes the Pall Mall Gazette, to name any historical work less likely to meet with such a tate. Industry, accuracy and sympathy are all Mr Lecky's ; and as for impartiality, was there ever a more signal proof of that quality than the last two volumes which he haspublished? Here he has to' deal with grave historical questions, connected with political issues still uncloaed.and never so fiercely debated as at the present moment. With the merciless circumspection of a judge's charge, Mr Lecky review* these questions one by one, and on each pronounces a decision, clear and emphatic beyond all possibility of misrepresentation, in favour of the contentions of that party to which he is so Violently opposed that these very volumes. are seriously disfigured by his passionate denunciations of it. A more striking proof of an author's unalterable rectitude of judgment is probably not to be found in a written history. There, is.something Quakerlike in Mr Lecky's scrupulous precision, and one is not surprised to learn that his family has numbered many Friends among its ancestry. It was originally of Scotch origin, aud has been settled in the County Carlovrfor some 250 years. Mr Lecky -took his degree in the University of Dublin. His. career there was an undistinguished one. Honours and prizes had no attraction for him, but he read assiduously for the mere, love of learning, for his first book, " Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, was published in his 23rd year (1861). Strange to say, the one quality in which he did achieve public distinction was oratory—a power in which in these later days he has been painfully deficient. In the Historical Society, whose gold medal for oratory he won, David Flunket, Gibson (Lord Ashbourne) and Fitzgibbon were his contemporaries, and, in the opinion of competent judges, he excelled them all. He was intended for the church, and a family living in Cork was ready to receive him: when ordained. He did, in fact, pass through the Divinity School as well as the ordinary Arts course in Trinity College. But the Catholic controversy, to which Irish Protestants have to pay special attention, compelled him to investigate the general question of the origin of religion, and the investigation left him in an intellectual attitude far removed from that of a possible pastor of the Irish Church. He had come, he writes, "to believe that religious systems resemble those pictures, occasionally seen in the museums ot the curious, which appear at'first to be mere incongruous assemblages of unconnected and unmeaning figures,, till they are regarded from one particular point* of view, when these figures immediately mass themselves into a regular form, and the whole picture assumes a coherent and symmetrical appearance." His guide to that one illuminating point of view was the Muse of History, whom he has faithfully served and followed ever since.