s, the date of
the life of St. Antony; and to learn from Schwegler how this
analytical work began. More satisfying because more decisive has
been the critical treatment of the medieval writers, parallel
with the new editions, on which incredible labour has been
lavished, and of which we have no better examples than the
prefaces of Bishop Stubbs. An important event in this series was
the attack on Dino Compagni, which, for the sake of Dante, roused
the best Italian scholars to a not unequal contest. When we are
told that England is behind the Continent in critical faculty, we
must admit that this is true as to quantity, not as to quality of
work. As they are no longer living, I will say of two Cambridge
professors, Lightfoot and Hort, that they were critical scholars
whom neither Frenchman nor German has surpassed.

The third distinctive note of the generation of writers who dug
so deep a trench between history as known to our grandfathers and
as it appears to us, is their dogma of impartiality. To an
ordinary man the word means no more than justice. He considers
that he may proclaim the merits of his own religion, of his
prosperous and enlightened country, of his political persuasion,
whether democracy, or liberal monarchy, or historic conservatism,
without transgression or offence, so long as he is fair to the
relative, though inferior, merits of others, and never treats men
as saints or as rogues for the side they take. There is no
impartiality, he would say, like that of a hanging judge. The
men, who, with the compass of criticism in their hands, sailed
the uncharted sea of original research proposed a different view.
History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents,
not on opinions. They had their own notion of truthfulness,
based on the exceeding difficulty of finding truth, and the still
greater difficulty of impressing it when found. They thought it
possible to write, with so much scruple, and simplicity, and
insight, as to carry along with them every man of good will, and,
whatever his feelings, to compel its assent. Ideas which, in
religion and in politics, are truths, in history are forces. They
must be respected; they must not be affirmed. By dint of a
supreme reserve, by much self-control, by a timely and discreet
indifference, by secrecy in the matter of the black cap, history
might be lifted above contention, and made an accepted tribunal,
and the same for all #63. If men w