We greatly regret to record the death at Alicante, in
Spain, of Professor E. A. Freeman, the historian. He died there on Wednesday morning of small-pox, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. He was no doubt quite the first of English historical scholars, having given up his whole life to historical studies and investigations. He leaves, unfortunately, his History of Sicily, of which he had published only two volumes out of something like fourteen, a fragment. He and the present Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Stubbs, belonged to the same historical school, and generously appreciated and emulated each other's efforts; so that the late Mr. Thorold Rogers, sometime Pro- fessor of Political Economy at Oxford, who could never suppress a good joke, however much it might misrepresent the truth, spoke of their articles on each other in the Saturday Review as showing how, "ladling largely from alternate tubs, Stubbs butters Freeman, Freeman butters Stubbs." But it was really a wise and generous emulation which animated them, not the desire to flatter, of which Mr. Freeman was quite incapable. His only fault as a historian was a certain ten- dency to exaggerate a new and important aspect of history till it almost seemed to haunt him, and to bewilder his readers by eclipsing all the more ordinary aspects ; but his "Norman Conquest" will remain a very great monument of learning, insight, and force. In politics he was a great admirer of Federalism, as a policy which allows full scope to local genius and liberties ; but he was a sagacious Federalist, and nothing could exceed his hostility to the latest phase of the Irish Home-rule policy, which threatened us with Irish representa- tives in the Imperial Parliament as well as a local and subor- dinate Parliament in Dublin.
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