lever man will find facts to be, let his theory
be what it will? Intellect can destroy, but it cannot restore life; call
in the creative faculties--call in Love, Idea, Imagination, and we have
living figures, but we cannot tell whether they are figures which ever
lived before. The high faith in which Love and Intellect can alone
unite in their fulness, has not yet found utterance in modern
historians.

The greatest man who has as yet given himself to the recording of human
affairs is, beyond question, Cornelius Tacitus. Alone in Tacitus a
serene calmness of insight was compatible with intensity of feeling. He
took no side; he may have been Imperialist, he may have been Republican,
but he has left no sign whether he was either: he appears to have sifted
facts with scrupulous integrity; to administer his love, his scorn, his
hatred, according only to individual merit: and his sentiments are
rather felt by the reader in the life-like clearness of his portraits,
than expressed in words by himself. Yet such a power of seeing into
things was only possible to him, because there was no party left with
which he could determinedly side, and no wide spirit alive in Rome
through which he could feel. The spirit of Rome, the spirit of life had
gone away to seek other forms, and the world of Tacitus was a heap of
decaying institutions; a stage where men and women, as they themselves
were individually base or noble, played over their little parts. Life
indeed was come into the world, was working in it, and silently shaping
the old dead corpse into fresh and beautiful being. Tacitus alludes to
it once only, in one brief scornful chapter; and the most poorly gifted
of those forlorn biographers whose unreasoning credulity was piling up
the legends of St. Mary and the Apostles, which now drive the
ecclesiastical historian to despair, knew more, in his divine hope and
faith, of the real spirit which had gone out among mankind, than the
keenest and gravest intellect which ever set itself to contemplate them.

And now having in some degree cleared the ground of difficulties, let us
go back to the Lives of the Saints. If Bede tells us lies about St.
Cuthbert, we will disbelieve his stories; but we will not call Bede a
liar, even though he prefaces his life with a declaration that he has
set down nothing but what he has ascertained on the clearest evidence.
We are driven to no such alternative; our canons of criticism are
different from Bede's