gone; and, in accordance with our usage, I shall presently call upon members of the Society to offer appreciations of each of those I have named. First, of our Resident Member. Born in Dedham, August 28, 1826, Mr. Monroe was already approaching the seventy-second milestone of life when, at our April meeting of 1898, he was chosen into the Society. When a man joins such a body as this at so late a period of life, he rarely, so to speak, becomes thoroughly habituated to it or actively concerns himself in it. It was so with Mr. Monroe. A frequent and interested attendant at our meetings, though heard at them less than we would have desired, he never served in the Council or upon any committee, or contributed a paper or memoir to our Proceedings. Well read historically, especially in our American annals, thought and observation with him bore fruit in that modern substitute for Homer's winged words, incessant and longcontinued contributions to the journalistic press; but here he was a silent spectator and listener. In his case, as in other cases I might easily mention, the fault, as well as the loss, was He should have been elected twenty years earlier.

Of Edward McCrady little can be said in connection with this Society. A most careful and painstaking student and writer, he was chosen a Corresponding Member at our meeting of May, 1902, and at the date of his death his name had stood on our rolls seventeen months only. After his election he never chanced to be in Massachusetts, and accordingly he was known personally to but few of our associates. The same might be said of both Professor Mommsen and Mr. Lecky; indeed, I question whether either of these last two was ever even in America. Their names stood at the time of their deaths second and third on our Honorary Roll, Dr. Mommsen having been chosen at the October meeting, 1880, while Mr. Lecky followed in September, 1882. I am not aware that either of them made any contribution to our Proceedings. It is sufficient that their names graced our rolls.

Here perhaps I might stop, my function fulfilled. But I feel that in the case of one of these two I owe something more to the occasion and to myself. When, in 1794, Edward Gibbon died, this Society was in its earliest infancy. Indeed, though already three years an organization, its legislative act of incorporation bears date a few days more than one month after

the historian's death. James Sullivan, subsequently Governor of the Commonwealth, was its President, its first President. To me at least it would now be curiously interesting could I turn back one hundred and ten years in the records of the Society and there find a characterization of Gibbon and an estimate of his historical work, as they appeared to him who then filled the chair I now occupy. I do not need to be told that Gibbon and his work were, at the time of his death, looked upon askance here in New England. I have already, on another occasion, called attention to the fact that in 1791 President Willard of Harvard College felt it incumbent upon him publicly to deny in the columns of the Boston" Centinel" a statement that "an abridgment of Gibbon's history" constituted "a part of the studies of the young gentlemen at our University." 1 He added that "it was never thought of for the purpose." Probably this view of the pernicious character of Gibbon's work was shared to the full by my first predecessor. Unfortunately, his judgment is not recorded, and in this case we do not know how Gibbon looked in the eyes of that particular one of his contemporaries. His death here passed unnoticed. I do not propose that it shall be so with him whom I am disposed to regard as the greatest and most noteworthy historical investigator and writer whose death has been recorded since 1794. Contemporaneous estimates of books, as of men, are apt to be wrong, and almost invariably the verdict, if not actually reversed, is greatly and variously modified. Will it be so with Mommsen? Time only can

show.

1 Proceedings, 2d series, vol xiii. p. 84.

This card of President Willard is now so curious that, as a matter of record, it is here given in full. It was printed in the issue of the "Columbian Centinel" for November 16, 1791, two days after it was written :

Mr. RUSSELL,

For the Centinel.

A writer in the Centinel of the last Saturday, under the signature of Christianus, says, "that an abridgment of GIBBON's history (if his information be true) is directed to make a part of the studies of the young gentlemen at our University." I now beg leave, through the channel of your paper, to acquaint that writer, as also the publick, that his information is not true. The system taught is Millot's Elements of General History, ancient and modern, and GIBBON's history was never thought of for the purpose. JOSEPH WILLARD, President.

Cambridge, Nov. 14, 1791.

Having occasion elsewhere, three years ago,1 to refer to Mommsen and his History of Rome, I confessed to judging of him by recollection only; for even then more than thirty years had passed since I had read his great work except in parts. I have since hardly more than looked into it, and for special purposes only. My impression of it, and of him as a writer for the man himself I never saw is, however, curiously fresh. It is the impression of something at once massive and individual. A writer of prodigious learning and Germanic self-poise, he seemed, as I remember, to pour forth. the results of his investigations and thought with a disregard of conventionalities, traditions and accepted theories at once aggressive, dogmatic and contemptuous; yet all the time you felt the man knew that whereof he spoke. I do not propose to institute any comparison between him and Gibbon. Except in learning, iconoclasm and historical instinct the two were as different as writers well can be, - different in method, in temperament and in style. The one was sceptical, a philosopher with a dash of the cynic; the other a dogmatist: but both built on a solid foundation of knowledge, and neither respected any fact or theory simply because all previous writers had agreed to accept it, or because it had ossified into an article of faith. They questioned everything. The result was that those two have between them re-written twenty centuries of history, covering the slow rise and yet slower fall of the greatest Empire our world has yet seen; and from their hands the story came forth transmuted. Of what others can this be said? Indeed, scanning the whole field from Herodotus down, I am in all soberness of judgment disposed to say that Edward Gibbon and Theodor Mommsen constitute a class by themselves. So to-day we note the passing of an historical luminary than which none has shed a more widely diffused or more penetrating light.

Mr. FRANKLIN B. SANBORN, having been called on first, read a tribute to Mr. Monroe as follows: :

Mr. President and Gentlemen,- Our good friend and late associate George H. Monroe was born in Dedham in August,

1 Address at the Dedication of the Building of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin at Madison, October 19, 1900, p. 38.

1826, within a few days of the birth of another member, Senator Hoar, and also quite as near the birthday of Judge Francis Wayland, of New Haven. Of the three, Mr. Monroe was the first to depart, dying in October last, after a brief illness, at the age of a little more than seventy-seven years, a long and useful but laborious life, and of late in much impaired health. Ten years ago last June, his lifelong friend Francis William Bird called at his editorial room in the " Herald" office, and then wrote to Monroe in these characteristic words: "I found it locked, as I have too frequently of late, and you reported to be at home sick. The old story! I have lectured and scolded you about your health, until I find it does you no more good than other people's lectures do me."

Mr. Bird died within a year, and Mr. Monroe had gone abroad in the intervening winter, to improve his own health by a season of rest and the diversions of European travel. Returning to his daily editorial duties, he continued them, with occasional vacations, usually from ill-health, until a few weeks before his death. The last time I saw him was near Park Street, early in October, slowly making his way towards the Subway train which was to take him to his comfortable Brookline home, and when I saw him next he was in his coffin.

Mild and bland as our friend was in his character and manners, he was a descendant of those formidable fighting Monros of Rossshire in northern Scotland, who were captured by Cromwell at one or more of his Scotch battles and sent in considerable numbers to New England and Virginia. Eleven of this name are said to have been under arms at the Lexington fight in 1775, and of one of the eleven I believe George Monroe was the grandson. Colonel Monroe, of Virginia, who passed through all the grades of public service, ending with eight years in the Presidency, and who has given his name to a much disputed and much varying doctrine, was descended, according to tradition, from Hector Monro, an officer in the regiment of which the Lexington Monroe was a member.

Born to no fortune, George Monroe learned the printer's trade, and passed through all the grades of that art and its post-graduate courses of editorial work. He was successively apprentice, journeyman, proof-reader, country editor of a weekly sheet, correspondent of great dailies, editor of a Bos

ton weekly, several of them, indeed, and leader-writer in the most influential of our Boston dailies. He thus became an historian; for what is the newspaper but "the history of the world for a day," as a witty New York editor said? And I am inclined to think that a careful daily historian like Monroe is at once more laborious, more exact, and on the whole more useful to mankind, than any but the greatest authors of well-bound histories. It is common for orators, in pulpits and on platforms, to denounce “the sensational press" with a fine warm scorn, and accuse it of mendacity, malignity, and every sort of inconvenient publicity. But when I turn to the pages of sober history (so called) I find that to be also, in the opinion of later authors, mendacious, malignant, sensational, and every way unworthy of serious confidence. "What is history?" said Napoleon, that illustrious maker and falsifier of it," what is history but a fable agreed upon?" This is what one able editor says to another in the newspaper world, as in the world of printed volumes that can stand alone. Prejudice and party bitterness rage among grave historians with quite as much force, though with slightly different results, whether the subject be the conspiracy of Catiline, the assassination of Cæsar, the character of Cromwell, or the victory of Tammany in New York, and the exact number of hours a revolution must have been wound up to strike and succeed before (as Mr. Gladstone said of the handiwork of Jefferson Davis) a nation has been created.

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Mrs. Oliphant, in her life of Principal Tulloch, having occasion to mention his friend James Hannay, editor of the Edinburgh Courant," went on to describe him as "one of the many men of considerable gifts who sink in the sea of journalism and leave but small record of themselves, not much more than a little wreckage upon the pitiless shore. He was, I believe, a good scholar and keen critic." On the other hand, Sir Leslie Stephen, in a recent magazine article, lets us know that, because he could not "come to terms with the XXXIX Articles," he had to accept the only practicable alternative, and exchange the pulpit for the press; adding that the profession of journalism was becoming respectable." Nor was this wholly because young Leslie Stephen went into it, when his scruples excluded him from the pulpit; long be

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