§ 1. I trust you will not think it inappropriate if I begin these lectures by paying my humble tribute of reverence and gratitude to the memory of the great historian who, since my appointment to this post of Ford’s Lecturer, has been taken from us. I believe that to him I am very largely indebted for the honour of appearing before you to-day[1]; and if that were so, it would only be of a piece with the many acts of kindness and encouragement which he showed me; encouragement sometimes couched in that humorous form which he loved, and which was occasionally misunderstood by those who had not, like himself, the saving gift of humour. It is not easy to measure the greatness of his loss. He was unquestionably one of the most learned men in Europe; one of the few who could venture to assert an historical negative. If he declared ‘there is no authority for such a view or statement,’ you knew that there was nothing more to be said. But even more wonderful than the extent of his learning was the way in which he could compress it, and bring it all to bear upon the particular point with which he was dealing. I daresay it has happened to you, as it has often happened to myself, to read other books and authorities, and to fancy that one had gained from them fresh facts and views, and then to go back to Stubbs and find that all our new facts and views were there already; only, until we had read more widely ourselves, we had not eyes to see all that was written there. § 2. But with all this, history was never to him mere erudition. It was, on the one hand, the record of human experience, a record ‘written for our learning,’ and rich with unheeded lessons; on the other, it was the gradual unfolding to human view of the purposes of God, working themselves out not only in spite of, but often by means of the weakness and waywardness of the human agents. And so he views the characters and the course of history, not, as so many historians do, merely from the outside, but, if I may so speak, from within. The characters of history are no mere puppets, to be dressed in picturesque costumes, and made to strut across the stage of the world; they ‘are men of like passions with’ us, tempted and sinning, and suffering, as we are tempted, sin, and suffer; aspiring and achieving, as we too might aspire and achieve. ‘History,’ he says, ‘cannot be well read as a chess problem, and the man who tries to read it so is not worthy to read it at all[2].’ And so we have in the Prefaces to Hoveden, Benedict of Peterborough, the Itinerarium Ricardi, and Walter of Coventry, those wonderful studies of the characters of Henry II, Richard I, and John, which must always remain as masterpieces of historical portraiture. In the same way the course of history at large is no mere complex of material and mechanical laws; it yields no countenance to that ingenious philosophy which is ‘so apt,’ as he contemptuously says, ‘to show that all things would have been