JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

In Memoriam.

F John Richard Green, the author of "A Short History of the English People," it is not easy for me to speak. And yet it is impossible for me not to speak.

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From 1863 to about 1872, I was perhaps his most intimate friend; and although the paths by which we twain did go were destined to run in different directions from about the time that he formally withdrew from his career as a clergyman in the Church of England, our friendly intercourse was never interrupted, except by those spells of severe illness, and enforced absence from England, the last of which closed his brief but brilliant life at Mentone, in March last, at the early age of forty-five.

I saw my poor friend for the last time in the autumn of 1882, at his house in Kensington Square. He then had before him my proofsheets of "Footprints in Rome, I.: Peter, Paul, and Nero," which appeared in Good Words, April, 1883.

I went down hoping to drive him out and chat over my proofs; but I was shocked at the change, and had no heart even to refer to the subject. His vivacity wore him out. The stream of callers seemed incessant. I left him with a feeling of intense depression. His vitality was amazing; for some time one lung had been entirely gone, and the other was badly affected. He soon afterwards left England. I felt no hope; and though inexpressibly shocked, was not surprised at his death in the following spring.

Before the publication of Mr. Green's "Short History,” 86,000 copies of which have been sold in England alone, Mr. Green, although a voluminous essayist in the Saturday Review, was absolutely unknown by name to the general public. It is not true, as was asserted in a

leading journal, that the success of his book surprised his friends. In 1863, the clergyman whom he followed at Holy Trinity, Hoxton, said to me, "I think we have a giant amongst us in Johnny Green." "I made up my mind about that," I replied, "the very first night I saw and spoke to him." Mr. Freeman, Professor Stubbs, Dr. Stanley, and, I may say, Archbishop Tait, all knew of his powers before he became famous at a leap, and I venture to say not one of them was surprised at his success. I think he was more surprised himself.

He was filled with a great love of historical study, but was generally diffident about his own work. "I read it over," he said to me in the old days, when I was favoured with copious extracts; " and I write and re-write, and wonder after all whether it is worth muchwhether any one else will read it!"

His own standard was so high, his knowledge so great, and his critical friends, Freeman, Stubbs, Brewer, &c., so accomplished, that he was inclined to be generally very modest about his own rank as an historian, and at times even wavered in his general design.

When I first knew Mr. Green, he was revolving a work which should deal, I believe, with the Plantagenet period, illustrate the story of the Great Charter, and the making of the English political constitution. The first fragment he put into my hand in type was Stephen's Ride to London.

At the instance of Mr. Macmillan, the publisher, he abandoned the magnum opus for a season, and taking, in one wide sweep, the whole of English history, produced that unique and popular narrative which raised him immediately into the very first rank of historians.

I remember his anxiety to bring the book within the reach of the masses, to make it a cheap book, his battle with the publisher on that ground, and his final victory.

"They will not see," he said, " that by this horror of dead stock and constant issue of dear books, which means small profits and quick returns to them, they miss the bulk of the middle classes, who are the real readers-the upper classes and the very poor don't read-and you make your new books so dear, that your middle class, who do, can't buy. Look at America; you ought to bring literature to people's doors. If I were a publisher, I would have a vast hawkingsystem, and send round my travellers with cheap books to every alley and suburban district within ten miles of London."

This intense sympathy with the people, no doubt, had to do with those innate democratic and republican tendencies in Mr. Green which so alarmed the Quarterly Review, but they were immensely quickened by his many-sided experiences in the East End of London.

In those Hoxton and Stepney districts, where he was my fellowcurate, and my constant friend and companion for two years, he was learning to know the English people. He had read about them in books. In Stepney he rubbed elbows with them. He had a

student's acquaintance with popular movements; but the people are their own best interpreter; and if you want to understand their ways in the past, you cannot do better than study our present poor-law guardian, navvy, artisan, Éast-end weaver, parish Bumble, clerk, publican, and City tradesman, in the nineteenth-century flesh.

Mr. Green never worked more vigorously at his History than when he was busy reading its turbulent popular movements, and mixed social influences, secular and religious, in the light of mechanics' institutes, poor-law difficulties, parochial squabbles, and dissenting jealousies. The postponement of his History until the harvest of this precious experience had been fully reaped, gave him that insight into the secret springs of popular enthusiasm, suffering, and achievement which makes his History alive with the heart-beats of our common humanity, instead of mouldy with the smell of moth. eaten MSS. and dead men's bones.

That slight nervous figure, below the medium height; that tall forehead, with the head prematurely bald; the quick but small eyes, rather close together; the thin mouth, with lips seldom at rest, but often closed tightly as though the teeth were clenched with an odd kind of latent energy beneath them; the slight, almost feminine hands; the little stoop; the quick alert step; the flashing exuberance of spirits; the sunny smile; the torrent of quick invective, scorn, or badinage, exchanged in a moment for a burst of sympathy or a delightful and prolonged flow of narrative-all this comes back to me, vividly! And what narrative, what anecdote, what glancing wit! What a talker! A man who shrank from society, and yet was so fitted to adorn and instruct every company he approached, from a parochial assembly to a statesman's reception !

But how enchanting were my walks with him in the Victoria Park, that one outlet of Stepney and Bethnal Green! I never in my life so lost count of time with any one before or since.

Emmanuel Deutsch was delightful; but he was more, with me at least, in flashes; versatile, but averse to any very prolonged discussion; always off at a tangent, and ready to end in a laugh.

Green would live through a period. Two hours on the Venetian Republic, with every conceivable branch of allied history, literature, and politics thrown in, yet willing to listen and gather up at any moment; infinite speculations at other times on theology, philosophy; schemes for the regeneration of mankind; minute plans for the management of our East-end districts; anecdotes of the poor; rarer veins of sentiment and personal criticism.

I have sometimes, after spending the evening with him at my lodgings, walked back to St. Philip's Parsonage, Stepney, towards midnight, talking; then he has walked back with me in the summer

night, talking; and when the dawn broke it has found us belated somewhere in the lonely Mile End Road, still unexhausted, and still talking. At such times we have neither of us undressed all night-that was so especially in the cholera times-but I would go back to St. Philip's and sleep on a sofa till breakfast-time.

In those days we were both feeling our way, through similar experiences, to conclusions of a somewhat different nature; but the memory of many precious hours of soul-communion remain with me, as something sacred and beautiful beyond words. I think at such times we grow in mind and develop in character in days and nights, more than in months and years of slower vitality and lessened intensity.

I find by an old handbill that, on May 5, 1863, there was a periodical gathering, under my direction, at St. Peter's schoolrooms, Bethnal Green.

After tea, speeches were to be made, and a sort of informal debate was to be encouraged. "Preaching in Theatres" was the subject, and a worthy linendraper got up and spoke against it. A neighbouring clergyman had walked over with a friend, and I asked him if he could reply to the linendraper.

"I have a friend here," he said, "who can, if he will." And he introduced a thin, spare, quick-eyed, and, I thought, rather supercilious little man, as Mr. Green. We shook hands, and that moment an understanding seemed established. I asked him to reply to what he had heard, as I did not want to do all the talking; I urged him; and most good-naturedly, without more ado, he got on the platform, and in about ten minutes convinced me that I was in the presence of one of the most remarkable men and gifted speakers I had ever met. With an almost negligent facility, but perfect finish and force of language, he met the objections to clergymen of the Established Church preaching in theatres, and kindled into real eloquence as he alluded to Paul preaching on Mars' Hill and even in a theatre. He wound up by proclaiming all places equally sacred to one who was filled with the Master's spirit and was about the Master's work.

It was a short, glowing, unimportant impromptu, but it was enough. From that time Green became my daily companion and intimate friend. If I did not walk over to Holy Trinity, Hoxton, where he had a sole charge, he was sure to walk over to St. Peter's, Bethnal Green, where I was curate.

He was even then in delicate health. I was much with him during an attack of pleurisy just before he left Hoxton. He was studying St. John's Gospel, and could not make up his mind about the date or authorship; but at "any rate, old boy," he said to me one day,

"you and I both believe that whoever wrote it spoke the truth, and that He of whom he speaks is Divine"-a conclusion in which he was not destined so implicitly to rest.

Nothing so struck me as my friend's disposition to find half-way houses in feelings, and then set fire to one after another with logic. His mind was extremely sensitive and open to impressions-at that time to religious and affectional impressions; but the Green of the intellect or the pure reason was always sure to waylay the Green of feeling, and between the two, perhaps, down to the close the battle waged was doubtful. It is not difficult to trace the two tendencies throughout the "Short History," especially in Mr. Green's pathetic description of the struggles of Christianity with Paganism in the early pages, and in his brilliant account of the Reformers and Puritans in the later ones.

At this time we had all our schemes in common. I think we were the first to give a vogue to penny readings, entertainments, and social mixed gatherings, in the East of London.

In May, 1863, Mr. Green spoke for me at one of these social gatherings; and in October, 1863, he gave a lecture to my people on "Our ancient Godfathers and Godmothers." It was one of those delightful pages, spoken extempore, which afterwards appeared in the "Short History," on the missions of Cuthbert and Columba.

In March, 1864, he had left Hoxton, and is described on my parochial handbills as "Missionary Curate of Stepney."

I find that in 1865, being then in the full swing of parish work at Stepney, he preached for me on Good Friday, at St. James-theLess, Westminster (whither I had migrated), on "The Cross of Christ." I recollect the sermon-very characteristic of him at that time. It was delivered, without the aid of notes, in that earnest and rather monotonous tone-so different from his platform speaking, which was always close, serried and full of popular points, along with the merriest touch of the hustings. In preaching he had but little action, usually only the raised hand, and the forefiuger, and a stoop forward.

In that sermon, on "the Cross of Christ," without anger or sarcasm he deplored the current doctrine of the Atonement, which represented Jesus as the substitute for, rather than the representative of, man; traced the old theory to the true source in the sacrificial conception of the carnal Jew. He vindicated the justice and love of God, as manifested in His acceptance of the perfect submission of the human will, and the perfect obedience of man in Christ, their representative; and ended with a most touching comparison between the selfishness of man and the self-sacrifice of Christ, in which the hearer was melted and shamed, rather than terrified, into a nobler life. Mr. Green might have been a great preacher, and certainly in