in English literature. It was he who organized an honours
school of history in Manchester on the lines later developed
by Thomas Frederick Tout, who succeeded him as professor
of history in 1890, and by James Tait, one of Ward's former
pupils, who had been appointed to a lectureship in 1887. Here
are some impressions gathered by a student who first entered
the college in 1896 at the age of seventeen, in Ward's last year
as Principal. He was duly "entered" by the Principal, a
remote, majestic figure, whose importance as a scholar only
very gradually became a reality in his mind. He spent most of
his time in the main block of the college buildings, where the
lecture theatres, class rooms and library were adjacent to each
other. The walls of one room, which was always locked after
classes and lectures, were filled from floor to ceiling with the
books of a man called Freeman. The student had read
Macaulay's history and Carlyle French Revolution and The
Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, but he had never
thought of history as a systematic study, and had never heard
of Freeman or Stubbs or Gardiner or Acton or any other
recent or living historian. He entered the history school, as it
were, by accident, and was provisionally accepted by a pro-
fessor called Tout. He attended lectures on history by Tout
and another man, a lecturer called James Tait, and classes in
Greek and Latin. He felt rather strange. Then in his second
term, something happened. He was being taken in Tait's
lectures, carefully and steadily, through ancient and medieval
history, and was introduced by him to Tudor England. He was
hearing Tout, in his exciting and discursive way, talking about
modern history, and, four or five times in each term, he was
learning how to write historical essays, and encouraged,
actually encouraged, to browse in big books as he did so. This
was history and these people were historians, and, as it and
they became alive to him, the world about him began to seem
more interesting and coherent. Then, in 1898 a new library,
the Christie library, was opened and a room in it was set apart
as a study and classroom, with Freeman's books all round it,
accessible. There, in that room, the student, now in his third
and last year, was guided into the mysteries of two special

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