care of itself. Let me name a
historian who detested fine writing, and who never said to himself, 'Go
to, I will make a description,' and who yet was dominated by a love for
facts, whose one desire always was to know what happened, to dispel
illusion, and establish the true account--Dr. S. R. Maitland, of the
Lambeth Library, whose volumes entitled _The Dark Ages_ and _The
Reformation_ are to history what Milton's _Lycidas_ is said to be to
poetry: if they do not interest you, your tastes are not historical.

The difference, we repeat, is not of style, but of aim. Is history a
pageant or a philosophy? That eminent historian, Lord Macaulay, whose
passion for letters and for 'mere literature' ennobled his whole life,
has expressed himself in some places, I need scarcely add in a most
forcible manner, in the same sense as Mr. Morley. In his well-known
essay on history, contributed to the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1828, we find
him writing as follows: 'Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from
the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent amongst
them like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value.' And
again: 'No past event has any intrinsic importance. The knowledge of it
is valuable only as it leads us to form just calculations with respect to
the future.' These are strong passages; but Lord Macaulay was a royal
eclectic, and was quite out of sympathy with the majority of that
brotherhood who are content to tone down their contradictories to the
dull level of ineptitudes. Macaulay never toned down his
contradictories, but, heightening everything all round, went on his
sublime way, rejoicing like a strong man to run a race, and well knowing
that he could give anybody five yards in fifty and win easily. It is,
therefore, no surprise to find him, in the very essay in which he speaks
so contemptuously of facts, laying on with his vigorous brush a
celebrated purple patch I would gladly transfer to my own dull page were
it not too long and too well known. A line or two taken at random will
give its purport:

'A truly great historian would reclaim those materials the novelist has
appropriated. We should not then have to look for the wars and votes of
the Puritans in Clarendon and for their phraseology in _Old Mortality_,
for one half of King James in Hume and for the other half in the
_Fortunes of Nigel_. . . . Society would be shown from the highest to the
lowest, from the royal clo