w of history. Landor was
not one of our modern dressing-gown-and-slippers kind of authors. He
always took pains to be splendid, and preferred stately magnificence to
chatty familiarity. But, after allowing for this, is not the passage I
have quoted infused with a great deal of the true spirit which should
animate the historian, and does it not seem to take us by the hand and
lead us very far away from Professor Seeley's maxims and morals, his
theoretical studies, his political philosophy, his political economy, and
his desire to break the drowsy spell of narrative, and to set us all
problems? I ask this question in no spirit of enmity towards these
theoretical studies, nor do I doubt for one moment that the student of
history proper, who has a turn in their directions, will find his pursuit
made only the more fascinating the more he studies them--just as a little
botany is said to add to the charm of a country walk; but--and surely the
assertion is not necessarily paradoxical--these studies ought not to be
allowed to disfigure the free-flowing outline of the historical Muse, or
to thicken her clear utterance, which in her higher moods chants an epic,
and in her ordinary moods recites a narrative which need not be drowsy.

As for maxims, we all of us have our 'little hoard of maxims' wherewith
to preach down our hearts and justify anything shabby we may have done;
but the less we import their cheap wisdom into history the better. The
author of the _Expansion of England_ will probably agree with Burke in
thinking that 'a great empire and little minds go ill together,' and so,
surely, _a fortiori_, must a mighty universe and any possible maxim.
There have been plenty of brave historical maxims before Professor
Seeley's, though only Lord Bolingbroke's has had the good luck to become
itself historical. {189} And as for theories, Professor Flint, a very
learned writer, has been at the pains to enumerate fourteen French and
thirteen German philosophies of history current (though some, I expect,
never ran either fast or far) since the revival of learning.

We are (are we not?) in these days in no little danger of being
philosophy-ridden, and of losing our love for facts simply as facts. So
long as Carlyle lived the concrete had a representative, the strength of
whose epithets sufficed, if not to keep the philosophers in awe, at least
to supply their opponents with stones. But now it is different. Carlyle
is no more a m