Lecky

Lecky, WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE, a historian and philosopher, was born near Dublin, March 26, 1838, and educated there at Trinity College, where he graduated B.A. in 1859 and M.A. in 1863. Already in 1861 he had published anonymously The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, four brilliant essays on Swift, Flood, Grattan, and O'Connell. Later works were his learned, luminous, and dispassionate History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (2 vols. 1865), History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (2 vols. 1869), and History of England in the Eighteenth Century (8 vols. 1878–90). The last is not a history in strict chronological form, but rather a philosophical study of events and their causes, relieved by an admirable series of finished historical portraits. Perhaps the ablest and most original portion of the work is the treatment of the American war of independence; the pages on Ireland are very valuable. A volume of poems (1891) hardly raised his reputation. Democracy and Liberty (1896) is anti-Radical in tone. Lecky, who throughout the Home-Rule controversy was a decided Unionist, was elected M.P. for Dublin University in 1895.