"Eighteenth-century revisionists were puzzled to see Sir Lewis Namier, that fine though overrated historian, promoted to the status of bugbear by their seventeenth-century colleagues. Between Namier and the revisionists there are, perhaps, similarities of temperament; of scepticism about the autonomous force of ideas; of hostility to Whig sins of teleology and anachronism. Yet Namier was not, primarily, a narrative historian. His brief narratives, when he wrote them, were clever and highly selective sketches rather than detailed examinations. His relentlessly detailed researches were mainly in the structural analysis of the Commons, and were intended to dissolve Whig generalisations about the course of events at the centre by a series of constituency studies. One could argue that Everitt and Morrill more than Russell and Fletcher are Namier's heirs in the seventeenth century, Aydelotte and Davis rather than Cooke and Vincent in the nineteenth. It might be suggested that what Namier's critics really objected to is his caustic and exceedingly effective conservatism, not his historical method. Indeed, his legacy was divided: it did not descend intact."