66 MOLESWORTH AND KINGLAKE. [III. T o come down to smaller works of a more distinctly educational character ; whilst we may regret perhaps that the good example set by Mr. Kitchin and myself in the Clarendon Press Series has not yet been more widely followed, we cannot but regard the competition among the great publishers in producing manuals of history for schools as a most significant mark of growth. Mr. Longman's Epochs, Mr. Freeman's Manuals, Mr. Green's Primers, Messrs. Rivington's Handbooks, all have in common the mark of a purpose to secure skilled labour of the best sort ; boys are not to be taught any longer by book-makers. May the omen be fully borne out by the result ! So far, however, I have mentioned no book except those in which we here have a direct and personal interest. We should be ungrateful indeed to leave out of ever so general review Mr. Kinglake's great work on the Crimean War, or Mr. Molesworth's on the History of the Period of Parliamentary Reform ; these stand at the head of a list of laborious and able publications, the interest of which depends on the incidents of our own time : to some extent they are attempts to forestall the opinion of posterity, but they are books which, if such books ever are to be written, if the contemporary knowledge and opinion are to be applied to the record of the events to which they are devoted, should be written now before the actors are dead or the public sympathy chilled. So rapid is the progress of political life and opinion that even these great subjects are becoming quickly extinct or lost influences among the crowds of new ones. The Reform History has come to be regarded no longer as a grand revolution, of which its chief agents could predicate perfection and finality, but merely as a single stage in a progress the present velocity of which would have made the projectors dizzy. What shall we say of the Crimean War itself? begun as it was by the wisest men of the nation with the greatest