With habitual modesty Maitland disclaimed the possession of the gift of narration. He would say that he could not tell a story; and the character of his historical work was not adapted to exercise the story-telling gift. But if his narrative has not the liquid flow of some accredited masters of the art, it is entirely devoid of some common defects. It is never indefinite, flabby or verbose, on the contrary it is full of pith and fire, proceeding by a series of brief vivid touches which take root in the memory and ripen there. It would be easy to select from the chapter upon the Scottish Reformation and the Anglican settlement a _florilegium_ of passages which, for keenness of insight and terseness of expression, could not easily be surpassed. It is a style which gives the impression not only of clairvoyance and watchfulness as to small details, transient motives and ephemeral phases of opinion, but also of a sense of the fundamental significance of things and of their relevance in the general march of progress. Every stroke is made to tell. In general nothing is so tedious as a history constructed upon severe philosophical principles. The argument swallows up the life; the characters become faint and evanescent; the colour put upon one event is shaded by the reflection of events which follow, and an oft repeated major premise leads through an appropriate selection of devitalised incidents to a familiar conclusion. Maitland's fragment of Reformation history is philosophical in the best sense. It is alive to the ultimate principles of belief and conduct which governed men and women in the years when the Thirty-Nine Articles were in the making; but it is also very vivid and concrete. The tale has been told more fully, more comfortably, with a greater display of picturesque circumstance, but never with more intellect, or with so exact an appreciation of the chronological order in which successive phases of belief and opinion revealed themselves. Instead of history ready-made Maitland gave us history in the making, antedating nothing and excluding with a care no less scrupulous than Gardiner's the world's knowledge of to-morrow from the world's knowledge of to-day. More than one fairy story dissolved at his touch, among others the tale of a Convocation summoned in 1559 to consent to the Act of Uniformity. The parent of the legend, an Anglican Canon, with a comical misapprehension of his antagonist's resources, ventured to measure swords with Maitland who had exposed his shortcomings in a Magazine. The encounter was amusing and decisive. It was also characteristic of some English peculiarities. We are a nation of bold amateurs. A German pastor who had been corrected by Savigny upon some points of history would hardly have returned to the charge without betraying some suspicion that his enterprise was unpromising if not forlorn. IX.