The Essays 'Thoughts on History,' 'Formative Influences,' 'Madame de Staël,' 'Israel among the Nations,' 'Old-age Pensions,' appeared originally in the American Review, the Forum —the first under the title of 'The Art of Writing History'; 'Ireland in the Light of History,' in the North American Review . Those on Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Henry Reeve, and Dean Milman were written for the Edinburgh Review . The Essay on 'Queen Victoria as a Moral Force' appeared first in the Pall Mall Magazine ; 'Carly

I do not propose in this paper to enter into any general inquiry about the best method of writing history. Such inquiries appear to me to be of no real value, for there are many different kinds of history which should be written in many different ways. A diplomatic, a military, or a parliamentary history, dealing with a short period or a particular episode, must evidently be treated in a very different spirit from an extended history where the object of the historian should be to describe the va