Millions of people ignoring Prez Refi advice...use our calculator to see new loan #'s & how much you'll save

Not able to read our Adver-tisement as pictures are blank? simply tap right here to fix.

Millions of people ignoring Prez Refi advice...use our calculator to see new loan #'s & how much you'll save

to the struggle for life or death which destroyed the house of Hohenstaufen and broke up the nation, his studious neutrality would have suffered a painful trial. His eminent qualities, moral and intellectual, obtained an extended acceptance not given to harder men like Waitz and Dümmler, whom scholars prefer and few but scholars read. Outside of his domain, beyond the two centuries which were essentially his own, he was an excellent teacher and adviser. Every office of literary trust was forced upon him, and the inevitable correspondence explains the prodigious fact that only six months ago he was patiently labouring at a bookbegun before the middle of the century. He had been one of Ranke's earliestpupils, and remained one of the most faithful and representative observers of the direction which his master gave. He did not entirely escape that habit of the seminary of Berlin to dwellso long on the literary preliminaries that, as in the instance of his friend Koepke, theanalysis of writers almost precluded touch with events. But, like his teacher, he wrote not for the school but the nation. Like him he believed that the true knot lay in the mingled fortunes of the Teuton and the Latin, of the race whose portion was the empire and the race that held the priesthood. And it was in the same [502] genuine spirit that he was a gracious and merciful judge of men, forgetful of himself, and deemed it his true function to describe events, committing ideas, institutions, and principles to those whom they professionally concern. His fame will rise or fall with the authority of the school which still reigns supreme. If, taking other examples and other methods into account, historians occupy themselves with all that goes to weave the web of social life, then the work of Giesebrecht, like the work of Ranke, will appear neither sufficient nor efficient, but characteristic of a phiing stage in the progress of science. But if politicsand history are one, so that the historian has only to record, in absolute purity, the actionof organised public forces, then he deserves to be remembered, among the best men of germany, as one who during his lifetime was unsurphied in mediæval narrative. [503] APPENDIX? By the kindness of Mrs. Creighton we are enabled to publish the following extracts from Acton's Letters to Creighton on the subject of the article on vols. iii. and iv. of the History of thePapacy contributed by Acton to the English Historical Review, reprinted herepp. 426-41. Acton's curiously naïve view of the situation is disclosed in the original covering letter to Creighton as Editor in which he describes the article as "the work of an enemy." We do not quote the letters in full but only such portions as serve to bring out more clearly perhaps than anything else which he wrote, the uncompromising rigidity of Acton's canons of judgment. Theymark the gulf which dividedhim alike from the sympathetic writer, who excuses everything by a facile reference to the moral atmosphere of the age he is representing, and on the other hand from the "scientific" historian, whose ideal is to state facts and observe causes, but never to pronounce sentence. After arguing, first, that the high absolutist theory of the Papacy was the real cause of the breach with Luther, and, secondly, that the Popes were individually and collectively responsible for the policy of persecution in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Acton goes on as follows:— The same thing is the case with Sixtus IV. and the Spanish Inquisition, .