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292
Pelham :
Essays
ESSAYS BY HENRY FRANCIS PELHAM, Late President of Trinity College,
Oxford, and Camden Professor of Ancient History. Collected and
edited by F. Haverfield. Pp. xxiii, 328. With Map. 8vo. Oxford:
Clarendon Press. 1911. ios. 6d. nett.
THOSE who knew the late Professor Pelham will feel grateful to his
successor in the Camden Chair for the admirably balanced and finely
phrased appreciation which serves as introduction to this volume of collected
papers. Those who did not, will learn from it something of the singular
combination of qualities that enabled their possessor to exercise such an
influence in so many departments of University life at Oxford. Pelham
was a man of wide sympathies and of quite unusual charm and sincerity of
manner. He was a brilliant teacher, and a most capable administrator.
But he was also, perhaps above everything else, a scholar with a genuine
love of learning, a broad outlook over the field of knowledge, and an easy
mastery of the multitudinous mass of detail belonging to his own special
subject. He published only one book his brief but altogether excellent
Outlines of Roman History. That his output was not greater was doubtless
mainly due to the fact that when he was in the prime of his vigour he was
threatened with blindness. A successful operation averted the
calamity,
but for years afterwards he could not use his eyes with ordinary freedom.
The interruption to his work came just
as he was setting his hand in earnest
to what he hoped up to the very last to make the great achievement of his
History of the Roman Empire.' Only three or four chapters
even under the
would ever have been com-
out in his
life, a large *
had been written when his sight began to fail. Whether,
most favourable circumstances, the '
History '
pleted, is perhaps open to doubt. As Professor Haverfield points
biographical sketch, the task was one of immense and of rapidly increasing
difficulty ; Mommsen himself had turned aside from it deliberately. But
the present volume at all events shows clearly
that very few were so well
equipped for it attempting as Pelham.
The longest and most important of the papers the book contains deals
with the domestic policy of Augustus. Next to it we should rank the
description of the Roman Frontier in Southern Germany. The former, a
hitherto unpublished chapter of the c
is
History,'
well calculated to serve
as a specimen of the writer's quality.
It is a model of lucid exposition and
of sound and sane reasoning. There is no English discussion of the subject
at once so full and so informing. We doubt whether any so judicious has
appeared upon the Continent. The paper
on the German Limes was
originally printed in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.
It is
a really first-rate summary of the first fourteen years' work of the Limes-
Commission. As discovery progresses, it will tend to fall out of date, but it is
not likely to lose its value for many years to come. Professor Haverfield has
supplied a capital map, which enables the printed text to be easily followed.
The majority of the other essays are strictly and severely technical the
stern stuff of which history must be made if it is to be not merely readable,
but reliable. As such they will command the attention of specialists. The
remainder are of more general interest, and among these we should give the