Besides his History and his magazine, he found time for a stray lecture at odd times, and he could always reckon upon a good audience.

His discourse at the Royal Institution in February, 1864, on "The Science of History," for which he was "called an atheist," is in the main a criticism of Buckle, the one really scientific historian.

According to Buckle, the history of mankind was a natural growth, and it was only inadequate knowledge of the past that made the impossibility of predicting the future.

Great men were like small men, obeying the same natural laws, though a trifle more erratic in their behaviour.

Political economy was history in little, illustrating the regularity of human, like all other natural, forces.