It might be described as a brief for the Devil's advocate. From the choice of a frontispiece to the last page, nothing is left undone to depreciate the man and his work. He declared that his plan precluded him from dealing at length with Napoleon's campaigns, and by this artifice was enabled to leave out of account that side of his activity to which he could not have denied greatness. One cannot help thinking that a survival of the old English feeling against 'Boney' animated his pen, and gave the work a personal tone somewhat lacking elsewhere. Yet he gave for France in it a clearer account, in shorter compass, of the rise of her modern institutions than is to be found elsewhere.
Original as was his work on modern Germany and France, it was little less than epoch-making on modern England. By the earlier historians England was mainly regarded as a majestic mother of Parliaments. Seeley felt that from this point of view the interest of English history ceased with Macaulay's period, the English Revolution. He set himself to show that after this period England had taken up a far greater, a world-important task. He proved to conviction that the eighteenth century was for history memorable, as containing the conflict of England and France for world-empire. It was in vain that Mr. Morley attempted to prove that
