An English historian and man of letters, born at Totnes, Devon; trained originally for the Church, he gave himself to literature, his chief work being the "History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada," in 12 vols., of which the first appeared in 1854 and the last in 1870, but it is with Carlyle and his "Life of Carlyle" that his name has of late been most intimately associated, and in connection with which he will ere long honorably figure in the history of the literature of England, though he has other claims to regard as the author of the "Nemesis of Faith," "Short Studies on Great Subjects," a "Life of Caesar," a "Life of Bunyan," "The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," and "English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century"; he ranks as one of the masters of English prose, and as a man of penetration, insight, and enlarged views, if somewhat careless about minor details (1818-1894).