finally discovered convincing proof that he had been wrong, that William III had been guilty of absolute falsity in his statements. He made public acknowledgment to Heer General Knoop, and it does not seem to me that his reputation as a scholar or a gentleman suffered at all in the transaction.

Toward the end of his life he drifted into studies on cities, writing much on Rotterdam and Leiden. In 1894 with his seventieth year he had to resign his professional career, according to the law of Holland. I have only been able to find references to his farewell address. There was apparently a note of sadness in it from the opening words: "I have had my time." But there was a note of loving reverence in the reception that followed. Several people who were present told me that it was delightful to see the grateful and surprised astonishment of the new emeritus-who did not feel himself old-at the affection in the greeting given him by his students and townspeople. According to the pretty European university custom, a group of his ex-pupils presented him with a collection of their own original studies on subjects relating to his work and theirs. The names of Blok, the Mullers, the younger De Vries, Beaufort, present minister of foreign affairs, and half a dozen more all bear witness to the impulse he gave them to turn their attention to Vaderlandsche Geschiedenis.

After his retirement from active teaching, Fruin passed the remaining years of his life in the pleasant, roomy house at Leiden, where he had lived his bachelor life with its quiet, uneventful routine of continuous work. In 1895 Queen Emma invited him to instruct Wilhelmina in the past of the land she was to govern. But he declined in favor of his successor, Professor Blok.

In addition to his state pension, the professor emeritus had a comfortable private income. No want ever troubled his scholar's calm, no money pressure ever led him to undue haste in his work. Thus in addition to the fullness of knowledge shown in his monographs, there is also a comfortable sense of leisure and of uniformity as though he had worked it all at a sitting and never been tired at all, as Kipling sings of the artist's dream. Nor did he work for money and certainly not for fame. The two hundred odd articles-I found between sixty and seventy in New York-are scattered in all

kinds of publications, almanacs, reports, and society proceedings, as well as in current periodicals. On my third and last visit to him he fished under the masses of papers in the corners of his delightful disorderly scholarly workroom and found a few of his essays taken in pages from the magazines which he presented to me. The others must be lost," he remarked placidly. His satisfaction had been in the work for its own sake purely.

At a Royal Society meeting in 1895 he had been asked to speak on "Historical method." When he arose, he said he found he had not enough method to give an exposition thereof. It could be put in a word-Research into sources friendly and unfriendly--a vivid picture in the writer's mind of the actors and their relation to the events, and then the history. Relata refero was not enough, source burrowing was not enough, insight and intuition must be added. He then gave a sketch of the campaign of 1572 as an illustration.

At subsequent meetings of the various societies he always had a word to say; in his study his pen was rarely at rest until January, 1899, when a brief illness silenced his voice and ended his activity.

I deeply regret that this Leiden teacher did not fulfill the ideal sketched by Mr. Adams for the work of a ripe scholar:

At last, throwing all his finished monographs, his preliminary studies and his matured judgments into the crucible, he will analyse, refine, and condense, in the end pouring out the concentrated result-not in thirty volumes, but in two.

I wish we had that masterpiece, compact, self centered, and philosophical, like Shakespeare's man looking before and after. Professor Fruin was the man to produce it for his fatherland, had he only added to his other qualities personal ambition, an excellent thing in an historian, especially to be desired in one so rich in characteristics of integrity, of sympathetic and scholarly insight, and of knowledge of his own national history, as was Robert Fruin.

XVI. SACRED AND PROFANE HISTORY.

By JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON, PROFESSOR, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK.

SACRED AND PROFANE HISTORY.

By JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON.

Our modern fondness for looking at well nigh everything historically, and the development of several new social sciences, notably economics, sociology, and comparative jurisprudence, have combined to foster so multiform an interest in the past, and have led to so vast and so varied an accumulation of historical knowledge, that the venerable term "history" seems no longer adequate to designate multitudinous and heterogeneous events and conditions, which often appear to have little more than their bygoneness in common. Like an overgrown empire, history threatens to be disrupted into its component parts. If the late Professor Seeley was right, it has already become only "the name of a mere residuum which has been left when one group of facts after another has been taken possession of by some science." This residuum, Professor Seeley believed, must go the way of the rest, the time being "not very distant when a science will take possession of the facts which are still the undisputed property of the historian."

That history will even thus softly and suddenly vanish away, like the baker who met a Boojum, we none of us really fear. But it is clear enough that should such a general dissolution take place, its results would be most unhappy all around. No one can fail, of course, to appreciate the advantages of specialization. It would be as preposterous to impeach it as it would be absurdly gratuitous to defend it. The scientific indispensableness of specialization is everywhere recognized, and many would claim a high educational value for it too. Without the continued productions of monographs like those of Stubbs, Hefele, Rashdall, Lea, Harnack, Voigt, Henry Adams, dealing with some one phase of human organization or interest, or some brief period, progress would cease. Yet this special

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