IH.] CARIYLE'S FREDERICK. 69 and manner that made men read it; and that it was for the Carlyle not for the Frederick that they cared, whilst they wholly missed the prophet's lesson? Such as it is, however, Carlyle's Frederick stands alone in recent historic work. There may be good reasons for this. The accumulation of new material for German and Italian history is perplexing in itself; the Germans and Italians have scarcely begun to sort it. The materials for Spanish history are only a little more accessible than before, and accessible only to workers who are capable of great fatigue, as well as, what few can pretend to be, already well qualified to make the very utmost of scanty opportunities. But making allowance for everything that can be allowed for, it is, I think, no credit to us that since the republication of the old Universal History, a hundred years ago, we have had nothing like a general book of historic reference undertaken in England, and that, with the exception of Carlyle, we have had no first-class work on German history since Archdeacon Coxe wrote on the House of Austria. We have had sketches and essays, and lectures, and articles in encyclopaedias,—one of which at least, Lardner's Cyclopaedia, furnishes incidentally some very valuable helps,—but nothing like a comprehensive, wellconsidered design, such as for its day the old Universal History was. This I hope is a lacuna which will not exist much longer. Not that it can be filled up in a day ; but that we have in Heeren and Uckert a model which it will be no disgrace to us to copy, a great credit to equal or to surpass. And this leads me on to that further circle of European historic study towards which I have been looking at several points in both these lectures. We ought to be taking advantage of the great interest with which English history is now being read in Germany, and, more than that, we ought