at the only literally true
history possible is the history which mind has left of itself in all the
changes through which it has passed.

Suetonius is to the full as extravagant and superstitious as Surius, and
Suetonius was most laborious and careful, and was the friend of Tacitus
and Pliny. Suetonius gives us prodigies, where Surius has miracles, but
that is all the difference; each follows the form of the supernatural
which belonged to the genius of his age. Plutarch writes a life of
Lycurgus, with details of his childhood, and of the trials and
vicissitudes of his age; and the existence of Lycurgus is now quite as
questionable as that of St. Patrick or of St. George of England.

No rectitude of intention will save us from mistakes. Sympathies and
antipathies are but synonyms of prejudice, and indifference is
impossible. Love is blind, and so is every other passion. Love believes
eagerly what it desires; it excuses or passes lightly over blemishes, it
dwells on what is beautiful; while dislike sees a tarnish on what is
brightest, and deepens faults into vices. Do we believe that all this is
a disease of unenlightened times, and that in our strong sunlight only
truth can get received?--then let us contrast the portrait, for
instance, of Sir Robert Peel as it is drawn in the Free Trade Hall at
Manchester,[Z] at the county meeting, and in the Oxford Common Room. It
is not so. Faithful and literal history is possible only to an impassive
spirit. Man will never write it, until perfect knowledge and perfect
faith in God shall enable him to see and endure every fact in its
reality; until perfect love shall kindle in him under its touch the one
just emotion which is in harmony with the eternal order of all things.

How far we are in these days from approximating to such a combination we
need not here insist. Criticism in the hands of men like Niebuhr seems
to have accomplished great intellectual triumphs; and in Germany and
France, and among ourselves, we have our new schools of the philosophy
of history: yet their real successes have hitherto only been
destructive. When philosophy reconstructs, it does nothing but project
its own idea; when it throws off tradition, it cannot work without a
theory: and what is a theory but an imperfect generalisation caught up
by a predisposition? What is Comte's great division of the eras but a
theory, and facts are but as clay in his hands, which he can mould to
illustrate it, as every c