"In my first year [at Cambridge] Seeley was still alive, as Regius Professor. He was dying, but stuck manfully to his work. In the small history school of the day it was possible for the Professor to see personally the score of history freshmen who came up each year. I was sent to see him in his house, and the old man gave me, in a stern voice, a lecture on the theme that history was a science and had nothing to do with literature; he told me that Carlyle and Macaulay were charlatans. Though I had not much sense in those days, I had just enough not to reply; but I went away boiling with rage. And I still resent his words, because he himself had not won his position in life by writing scientific history, but precisely by writing literary history, on subjects about which he knew far less than Carlyle knew about Cromwell, or Macaulay about the English Revolution. Seeley's Ecce Homo, whatever its merits and its use, was one of the least "scientific" books ever written on an historical subject, and his Expansion of England, however important, was merely a clever and timely essay. It was on those works that his fame rested, not on his Stein, which may have been a "scientific" history for all I know."