It will soon be half a century since the Cambridge Modern History was planned: the first entry relating to it in the minutes of the Syndics of the University Press is dated 13 March 1896. It is forty-three years since the first volume was published, and throughout that time the history has held its own as one of the indispensable books. It was the parent of all the other Cambridge Histories, of which there are eight series down to the present time. No other modern general history on anything like the same scale has been written or even projected in the English language, and this is a testimony not only to its usefulness but also to the efficiency of those who produced it. The time from the publication of the first volume to that of the last, the Atlas, was only ten years; and perhaps only those who have been concerned in similar enterprises can tell what energy and competence that implies. There were 160 contributors. Some of them, though it seems not so many as twenty, are happily still living and working; but they would probably agree that the Cambridge Modern History, taken as a whole, is a monument of a stage in English historical studies which may now be regarded not unfairly as a past stage.

The editor of the portion of D'Ewes's Journal that covers the period from the first recess of the Long Parliament to the withdrawal of the King from London has added one more tribute to the historical work of S. R. Gardiner. Fresh from the study of the sources for the four months with which he is concerned, he declares, ‘Gardiner's narrative for this period is on the whole unassailable.’ In noting, however, that the biographers of Pym and of Hyde have neglected the analysis of their parliamentary tactics, Professor Coates suggests that ‘such an investigation would reveal in Hyde a statesmanship, albeit unavailing, somewhat superior to that with which Gardiner credits him’. In making the suggestion, he defines Hyde's aim as follows: ‘to mould Royalist sentiment out of the conservative spirit which emerged in Parliament after ten months of unremitting activity and a few weeks of religious disorders’. It is clear, therefore, that, though he thinks Gardiner has underestimated Hyde's political ability, he does not question Gardiner's interpretation of his political objectives.

In ‘The Sentiments of a Church of England Man’, written in 1708, Swift offered to the whig party (then entering into power thanks to the exigencies of the Spanish Succession war) a piece of advice which they would have been well advised to regard despite the suspected allegiance of the writer.