Buckle then illustrates the tendency of the mind, noted by Bacon, to grasp prematurely at unity. This very fact, conjoined with the clearness and vigour of his style, was the reason of his popularity. When the inadequacy of his theories began to be perceived there came a reaction. But inevitably those theories will be replaced by others. To some extent they have been replaced already by the theories of two writers, Sir Henry Maine and Mr. W. E. Hartpole Lecky, of whom the latter belongs, however, rather to the period still current than to the Age of Tennyson. [Sidenote: Sir Henry Maine (1822-1888).] The majority of Maine's works too were published after the year 1870, but as his most awakening and original book, _Ancient Law_, appeared as early as 1861, we may fairly regard him as belonging to the period under consideration. Sir Henry Maine was a great teacher as well as a great writer, and he had already acquired a considerable reputation before the appearance of his _Ancient Law_. But it was that book which established his name as an original thinker. It has two great merits. It is written in a most lucid, pleasant style, and it is decidedly original in substance. Maine's design is far less ambitious than Buckle's; but for that very reason his performance is more adequate. The most conspicuous distinction between the two is that the later writer shows in far greater measure than his predecessor the modern sense of the importance of origins. It was this that gave his work importance. To a great extent the task of recent historians has been to trace institutions to their source, and explain their later development by means of the germs out of which they have grown. In this respect Maine was a pioneer, and his later work was just a fuller exposition of the principles at the root of _Ancient Law_. His _Village Communities_ (1871) and his _Early History of Institutions_ (1875) are both inspired by the same idea. In his _Popular Government_ (1885) he may be said to break new ground; but it is easy to see the influence on that book of the author's prolonged study of early forms of society. These later books are not perhaps intrinsically inferior to _Ancient Law_, but they are less suggestive, just because so much of the work had been already done by it.