[144] _Ibid._, I, 40. [145] Autobiography, pp. 151, 239. [146] Letters, I, 41. [147] Letters, I, 81. In 1790 Madame de Stael, then at Coppet, wrote: "Nous possedons dans ce chateau M. Gibbon, l'ancien amoreux de ma mere, celui qui voulait l'epouser. Quand je le vois, je me demande si je serais nee de son union avec ma mere: je me reponds que non et qu'il suffisait de mon pere seul pour que je vinsse au monde."--Hill's ed., 107, n. 2. [148] Letters, II, 143. [149] Birkbeck Hill's ed., 127. [150] p. 235. [151] Smith's ed., I, vii. [152] Autobiography, 343, 346. SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER A paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the March meeting of 1902, and printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_, May, 1902. SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER It is my purpose to say a word of Samuel Rawson Gardiner, the English historian, who died February 23, 1902, and who in his research and manner of statement represents fitly the scientific school of historical writers. He was thorough in his investigation, sparing neither labor nor pains to get at the truth. It may well enough be true that the designedly untruthful historian, like the undevout astronomer, is an anomaly, for inaccuracy comes not from purpose, but from neglect. Now Gardiner went to the bottom of things, and was not satisfied until he had compassed all the material within his reach. As a matter of course he read many languages. Whether his facts were in Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch, Swedish, or English made apparently no difference. Nor did he stop at what was in plain language. He read a diary written chiefly in symbols, and many letters in cipher. A large part of his material was in manuscript, which entailed greater labor than if it had been in print. As one reads the prefaces to his various volumes and his footnotes, amazement is the word to express the feeling that a man could have accomplished so much in forty-seven years. One feels that there is no one-sided use of any material. The Spanish, the Venetian, the French, the Dutch nowhere displaces the English. In Froude's Elizabeth one gets the impression that the Simancas manuscripts furnish a disproportionate basis of the narrative; in Ranke's England, that the story is made up too much from the Venetian archives. Gardiner himself copied many Simancas manuscripts in Spain, and he studied the archives in Venice, Paris, Brussels, and Rome, but these, and all the other great mass of foreign material, are kept adjunctive to that found in his own land. My impression from a study of his volumes is that more than half of his material is in manuscript, but because he has matter which no one else had ever used, he does not neglect the printed pages open to every one. To form "a judgment on the character and aims of Cromwell," he writes, "it is absolutely necessary to take Carlyle's monumental work as a starting point;"[153] yet, distrusting Carlyle's