DÖLLINGER'S I-IISTORICAL WORK 391
the best books for the history of the Reformation; Menzel and Buchholz I know; especially any exposing the characters of the leading reformers?" In the same frame of mind he asked him what pope there was whose good name had not been vindicated; and Döllinger's reply, that Boniface VIII. \vanted a friend, prompted both \Viseman's article and Tosti's book. In politics, as in religion, he made the past a law for the present, and res1sted doctrines \vhich are ready-made, and are not derived from experience. Consequently, he undervalued ,york \vhich \vould never have been done from disinterested motives; and there were three of his most eminent contemporaries whom he decidedly under- estimated. Having known Thiel's, and heard him speak, he felt profoundly the talent of the extraordinary man, before Lanfrey or Taine, Häusser and Bernhardi had so ruined his credit among Germans that Döllinger, disgusted by his advocacy, whether of the Revolution, of Napoleon, or of France, neglected his work. Stahl claims to be accounted an historian by his incomparably able book on the Church government of the Reformation. As a professor at :IVI unich, and afterwards as a parliamentary leader at Berlin, he was ahvays an avowed partisan. DöIlinger depreciated him accordingly, and he had the mortifica- tion that certain remarks on the sovereign dialectician of European conservatism were on the point of appearing when he died. He so far made it good in his preface that the thing was forgotten \vhen Gerlach came to see the assailant of his friend. But once, when I spoke of Stahl as the greatest man born of a Jewish mother since Titus, he thought me unjust to Disraeli. Most of all, he misjudged Macaulay, \vhose German admirers are not ahvays in the higher ranks of literature, and of whom Ranke even said that he could hardly be called an historian at all, tried by the stricter test. He had no doubt seen ho\v his unsuggestive fixity and assurance could cramp and close a mind; and he felt more beholden to the rivals \vho produced d' Adda, Barillon, and Bonnet, than to the author of so many pictures and so much
