find it too easy for him. The equipment of the ideal historian consists
of the attributes of practical and poetic man, the desire to gain some
present benefit, to learn some urgent lesson, and the desire to perfect
the spirit by contemplation of the past.

History, indeed, is the record of the actions of individual men, and
these men, like ourselves, had arms, legs and stomachs, and suffered the
workings of the same fears and passions that we suffer. To derive any
practical or spiritual benefit from the study of history, we must
understand, as far as possible, by analogy from our own experience, how
the events of which we read came about: we must see them as personal
events, originated by the actions, and influencing the lives of human
beings like ourselves.

We have expressed sufficiently in the previous chapter an opinion on the
value of Mr. Belloc's historical conclusions: we must now examine more
closely the method by means of which he presents these conclusions and
its effect on the reader.

His method, it goes without saying, is more lively. In the whole of the
_Cambridge Modern History_ (sixteen volumes of unbelievable dimensions)
you will not find one living character or one paragraph of exhilarating
prose.[9] Mr. Belloc's work, on the other hand, is full of both. But
this must not be taken, without further inquiry, to be an unqualified
merit.

The lively writer is, by an ever-living commonplace, considered to be
inaccurate: the donnish historian may, by his plodding want of
imagination, give us only the strict facts. The lively writer, perhaps,
in the desire to round out a character of a man concerning whom little
is known or to perfect the rhythm of a paragraph, will consult his
convenient fancy rather than the difficult document. In academic
circles, it is rather a reproach to say that a man writes in an
interesting way: they remember Macaulay and would, if they could, forget
Gibbon.

Mr. Belloc's writing, nevertheless, is not affected by the desire either
to impress or to startle his readers, any more than the writing of a
good poet springs from an aiming at effect: it is like all true
literature, in the first place, the outcome of a strong and personal
passion, the passion for the past. He says himself[10]:

To study something of great age until one grows familiar with it
and almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a
curiosity or to establish aimless truths: it is rather t