“For the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ, the one country which we know to have borne the name of Angeln or the Engleland lay in the district which we now call Sleswick, a district in the heart of the peninsula which parts the Baltic from the northern seas. Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships, looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless woodland, broken here and there by meadows which crept down to the marshes and the sea.” Could any historic novel, we may say could any _other_ historic romance, open more enticingly? Here is rich promise, promise of the picturesque, promise of the eloquent phrase, promise of a sympathetic history of a people who are delvers in the soil, dwellers in homesteads, and no mere pawns in the game of kings. This is to be a history of a people. We shall learn of their great common characteristics; we shall understand them as we understand a family, and every adventure from King Alfred’s burning of the cakes to Clive’s conquest of India will spring like the episodes in a great plot from the character of the English race. From Green’s History, as a whole, we shall learn what are the important things in the history of any people. His admirable sense of the relative values of events and persons informs his work with a philosophy of life that is just, wholesome, and salutary for a young person to be imbued with who must look out on the daily struggle about him, read the endless hodge-podge of newspaper chronicle, and weigh the day’s events wisely. Green fulfils the ideal which he sets forth in the preface: “It is the reproach of historians that they have too often turned history into a mere record of the butchery of men by their fellow men. But war plays a small part in the real history of European nations, and in that of England its part is smaller than in any.... If I have said little of the glories of Cressy, it is because I have dwelt much on the wrong and misery which prompted the verse of Longland and the preaching of Ball. But on the other hand, I have never shrunk from telling at length of the triumphs of peace. I have restored to their place among the achievements of Englishmen the ‘Faerie Queene’ and the ‘Novum Organum.’ I have set Shakespeare among the heroes of the Elizabethan age.... I have had to find a place for figures little heeded in common history--the figures of the missionary, the poet, the printer, the merchant, the philosopher.”