bt, their history as well as man; but when a member,
however humble, of the human race speaks of history without any
explanatory context, he may be presumed to be alluding to his own family
records, to the story of humanity during its passage across the earth's
surface.

'A talent for history'--I am quoting from an author whose style, let
those mock at it who may, will reveal him--'may be said to be born with
us as our chief inheritance. History has been written with
quipo-threads, with feather pictures, with wampum belts, still oftener
with earth-mounds and monumental stone-heaps, whether as pyramid or
cairn; for the Celt and the Copt, the red man as well as the white, lives
between two eternities, and warring against oblivion, he would fain unite
himself in clear, conscious relation, as in dim, unconscious relation he
is already united, with the whole future and the whole past.'

To keep the past alive for us is the pious function of the historian. Our
curiosity is endless, his the task of gratifying it. We want to know
what happened long ago. Performance of this task is only proximately
possible; but none the less it must be attempted, for the demand for it
is born afresh with every infant's cry. History is a pageant, and not a
philosophy.

Poets, no less than professors, occasionally say good things even in
prose, and the following oracular utterance of Shelley is not pure
nonsense:--'History is the cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories
of men. The past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theatre of
everlasting generations with her harmony.'

If this be thought a little too fanciful, let me adorn these pages with a
passage from one of the great masters of English prose--Walter Savage
Landor. Would that the pious labour of transcription could confer the
tiniest measure of the gift! In that bundle of imaginary letters Landor
called _Pericles and Aspasia_, we find Aspasia writing to her friend
Cleone as follows:

'To-day there came to visit us a writer who is not yet an author; his
name is Thucydides. We understand that he has been these several
years engaged in preparation for a history. Pericles invited him to
meet Herodotus, when that wonderful man had returned to our country,
and was about to sail from Athens. Until then it was believed by the
intimate friends of Thucydides that he would devote his life to
poetry, and, such is his vigour both of thought and expressio