The Chief Periods of European History: Six lectures read in the University of Oxford in Trinity term, 1885Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
The Chief Periods of European History: Six lectures read in the University of Oxford in Trinity term, 1885
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Europe -- History
I have done my desultory picture of our Romeless world, desultory
and imperfect as must be every picture attempted in lectures such
as these, the object of which is not the communication of minute
knowledge on any point. I am still at the threshold of my work. Some
solid work I think I have done in inner chambers with the small
and faithful band who follow me, who sometimes guide me, through
book after book of the historian of the Franks. But what I have as
yet preached, so to speak, on the house-tops has been in its own
nature general and desultory. I have not, strictly speaking, been
teaching; I have been purposely talking in a way which might call
up memories in some and might stir up to inquiry in others. But
through the general we make our way to the particular. Next term I
trust to make even these more public lectures of a more solid kind.
I have run with a swift pace through a general view of the Methods
of Historical Study, through a general view of the chief periods of
European history. This last series fills up for this year the tale of
forty-two lectures which the iron rule of our masters demands from
me. With such necessity laid upon me, I should think it savoured
of arrogancy and impiety if I ventured on such a voluntary work of
supererogation as a forty-third lecture. What the Commissioners deem
enough you doubtless deem enough; so to-day I bring my desultory
story to an end. In October I hope to begin a more regular course,
and to make a path, through a true understanding of the early history
of Gaul, to a true understanding of the early history of Britain. And
I have one word more to say. Since I came here I have learned several
things, I have learned one in particular. I have hitherto always
shrunk from crying my own wares, from advertising my own writings.
Whenever I have quoted myself or referred to myself, it has been with
a feeling of doing something that one should be ashamed of. But I
have learned in this place where I now stand, from a colleague who is
now no longer a colleague, how very silly such modesty is, and how
much better it is to quote oneself and talk of oneself as freely as
one quotes and talks about anybody else. I will tell you then that a
few years back I gave two courses of lectures on the other side of
the Ocean which, I venture to think, contain matter worth reading. I
think they contain matter specially worth reading by those who think
of following my roundabout course in company, first with the Vandal
who crosses the Rhine and afterwards with the Saxon who crosses the
sea. They were printed in America; some copies have, I know, found
their way into Britain. I must put a bold face on the matter, and
say that those who have followed me thus far and who purpose to
follow me again in October might spend their Long Vacation worse than
in giving some part of it to reading my two courses of Lectures to
American audiences, bound up in one not very big volume. You will
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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