I do not intend to do more than give one specimen of Mr. Fletcher’s style in this book, though I have read the whole of it with pleasure and amusement. The paragraph I am about to quote should live in the annals of the Oxford Historicides for ever. I imagine that in writing it, Mr. Fletcher had been slyly reading _Oceana_ in secret, and longed to emulate the vividness of that august prose. The volume of Froude was obviously out of the way when the purple passage was produced, but if it loses in style owing to this circumstance, it gains in interest as the unconnected revelation of a truly extraordinary mind. “As the ice-sheet advanced, the wild animals gradually moved southwards; the primitive Briton, unhindered by English Channel or Mediterranean Sea, walked after the mammoth and the hippopotamus, shooting at them with wooden arrows tipped with flints. And the grizzly bear and the sabre-toothed tiger walked after the primitive Briton.” We must bid farewell to Mr. Fletcher, the historian preferred to Froude by certain people! I do not wish to give pain to any one in the world, much less to one who has given me so much pleasure. But even at the cost of that, I would ask gentlemen who are reading history at Oxford, and gentlemen who are sending their sons to read history at Oxford, to pause and reflect before they entrust grave interests and momentous personal issues to the mercies of such writers as Mr. Fletcher, to the direction of the historian _manqué_. Let us leave the _mala gaudia mentis_ provided by Mr. Fletcher, and proceed to more considerable men. In his case we have a person, though ill-equipped by nature or temperament, engaged in an honest endeavour to write with vigour and picturesqueness. Grotesque as it may seem to us, the “Primitive Briton walking after the hippopotamus, and the sabre-toothed tiger walking after the primitive Briton” shows a genuine attempt at style. It is from the rude carvings of savage races that the Venus of Milo has been evolved, and from the mural decoration of the cave-dwellers has the perfected art of Velasquez or Murillo come. There are, however, other writers in Oxford to-day who merely chronicle facts. This is not writing history, of course, but a careful chronicle of _accurate_ fact is certainly valuable to the student, and may serve as a ladder by which he may mount into the realms of true history. Some one must do the spade work, dull and uninteresting as it may be, and all we ask of the gardener’s labourer is that his toil should be accomplished thoroughly and well. One of the books that is put into the hands of history students at Oxford as a useful work of reference is _European History_ 470-1871, by Mr. Arthur Hassall, a student and tutor of Christ Church, Oxford. Let me here explain for the general public that “a Student” of Christ Church is in the same position as the “Fellow” of another college.