Hardly any critics of the _Outline_ have objected to the idea of dealing with history as one whole, or challenged the possibility of teaching history in so comprehensive a fashion. That is all to the good. It was only to be expected that many reviewers would sneer a little at the idea of novelist turned historian, talk of superficiality and hint at inaccuracies and errors they had neither the industry nor the ability to detect. They would have done that if the _Outline_ had been absolutely faultless. As a matter of fact, and thanks very largely to the keen editorial eye of Mr. Ernest Barker—for the writer himself is sometimes a very careless writer—the number of positive inaccuracies and errors that appeared even in the earliest issue of the _Outline_ was very small; most of them were set right in a list of errata at the end of that edition, and there was another still closer pruning before the publication of the second, the book edition. But among the cultivated gentlemen who “do” the book notices in the provincial Press more particularly, there was a disposition to qualify their approval by a condescending reference to slips and mistakes which they imagined must be there. Within the limit set by the law of libel one can have no objection to this sort of thing, which gives a tone of leisured knowledge to the most hastily written review. Two or three critics will repay a rather fuller attention. One of these is Mr. A. W. Gomme, who teaches Greek in the University of Glasgow. He has published a little pamphlet called _Mr. Wells as Historian_,[1] and in this a considerable amount of the hostility against the _Outline_, that certainly smoulders and mutters among classical teachers in our schools, comes into the light and is available for examination. Then Mr. Belloc and Dr. Downey, the latter in a pamphlet called _Some Errors of Mr. Wells_, develop a case against the _Outline_ from the Roman Catholic point of view. That, too, calls for serious consideration. But with the Irish critics who complain that Ireland is not represented as a dominant force in the European civilisation of the early Middle Ages, and the Marxists who have detected heretical divergencies from the teachings of Marx (Engels) the First and the Last and the Only, the Wisdom of the Ages and the Source of all Light, I cannot deal now. The national consciousness of Ireland is too tragically inflamed to tolerate any drawing of Irish history to the scale of the world’s affairs, a scale which makes it a mere point of irritation in the hide of the present British Empire, itself the mushroom growth chiefly of the last hundred years. Some sentences and phrases in the _Outline_, coloured by the writer’s intense dislike for the extreme nationalism of Sinn Fein, are unjust to Ireland and will need modification. But the Marxist, like the Moslem, makes his prophet the criterion not only of truth but of moral intention. There is no compromise possible with him. Footnote 1: