The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two.
§ 45. W. E. Collins; J. H. Overton; W. R. Stephens; T. G. Law
A younger author in the same field of historical research, but more especially in earlier periods, which he was acknowledged ledged to have mastered with wholly exceptional completeness, was William Edward Collins, during the last seven years of his life bishop of Gibraltar. A writer on English church history of a different type was John Henry Overton, who died as canon of Peterborough and had long been a Lincolnshire rector. His and Charles J. Abbey’s history of The English Church in the Eighteenth Century (1878) is a useful book, which has helped to remove prejudices; while his William Law, Non-juror and Mystic (1881) is, perhaps, the most attractive among his many large-hearted and well-written contributions to our later religious history. William Richard Stephens, who died as dean of Winchester, was author of various contributions to church history and joint editor, with William Hunt, of The History of the English Church, to which he contributed the second volume (from the Norman conquest to the accession of Edward I); and he wrote the lives of his father-in-law, dean Hook, and of Freeman. Thomas Graves Law, who, in his later years, was librarian of the Signet library at Edinburgh, by some of his writings threw light on interesting passages in the history of English catholicism in the later Elizabethan period, more especially on the conflicts between Jesuits and seculars (1889) and on the archpriest controversy. He was a man of high ability, and distinguished by broad-mindedness as well as by learning.