Inventive as his mind was, it was also solvent and sceptical. Seldom is a strong imagination coupled with so unsparing a criticism as that which he applied to the materials on which the constructive faculty had to work. His later tendencies were rather towards scepticism, and towards what one may call a severe and ascetic view of history. While writing _The Making of England_ and _The Conquest of England_, he used to lament the scantiness of the data and the barren dryness which he feared the books would consequently show. "How am I to make anything of these meagre entries of marches and battles which are the only materials for the history of whole centuries? Here are the Norsemen and Danes ravaging and occupying the country; we learn hardly anything about them from English sources, and nothing at all from Danish. How can one conceive and describe them? how have any comprehension of what England was like in the districts the Northmen took and ruled?" I tried to get him to work at the Norse Sagas, and remember in particular to have entreated him when he came to the battle of Brunanburh to eke out the pitifully scanty records of that fight from the account given of it in the story of the Icelandic hero, Egil, son of Skallagrim. But he answered that the Saga was unhistorical, a bit of legend written down more than a century after the events, and that he could not, by using it in the text, appear to trust it, or to mix up authentic history with what was possibly fable. It was urged that he could guard himself in a note from being supposed to take it for more than what it was, a most picturesque embellishment of his tale. But he stood firm. Throughout these two last books, he steadily refrained from introducing any matter, however lively or romantic, which could not stand the test of his stringent criticism, and used laughingly to tell how Dean Stanley had long ago said to him, after reading one of his earliest pieces, "I see you are in danger of growing picturesque. Beware of it. I have suffered for it."
If in these later years he reined in his imagination more tightly, the change was due to no failing in his ingenuity. Nothing in his work shows higher constructive ability than _The Making of England_. He had to deal with a time which has left us scarcely any authentic records, and to piece together his narrative and his picture of the country out of these records, and the indications, faint and scattered, and often capable of several interpretations, which are supplied by the remains of Roman roads and villas, the names of places, the boundaries of local divisions, the casual statements of writers many centuries later. What he has given us remains an enduring witness to his historical power. For here it is not a question of mere brilliance of style. The result is due to patience, penetration, and the careful weighing of evidence, joined to that faculty of realising things in the concrete by which a picture is conjured up out of a mass of phenomena, everything falling into its place under laws which seem to prove themselves as soon as they are stated.