portioned to their
real importance. All this requires a powerful and original intellect
quite different from that of a mere compiler. It requires too, in a
high degree, the kind of imagination which enables a man to reproduce
not only the acts but the feelings, the ideals, the modes of thought
and life of a distant past, and pierce through the actions and
professions of men to their real characters. Insight into character is
one of the first requisites of a historian. It is therefore, much to
be desired that he should possess a wide knowledge of the world, the
knowledge of different types of character, foreign as well as English,
which travel and society and practical experience of business can
give, and it will also be of no small advantage to him if he has
passed through more than one intellectual or religious phase, widening
the area of his appreciation and realisations. He should also have
enough of the dramatic element to enable him to throw himself into
ways of reasoning or feeling very different from his own. One of the
most valuable of all forms of historical imagination is that which
enables a writer to place himself in the point of view of the best men
on different sides, and to bring out the full sense of opposing
arguments. All these gifts or qualities are never in a high degree
united, but they are all essential to a great historian, and a true
school of history should widen instead of narrowing our conception of
it.

The supreme virtue of the historian is truthfulness, and it may be
violated in many different degrees. The worst form is when a writer
deliberately falsifies facts or deliberately excludes from his picture
qualifying circumstances. But there are other and much more subtle
ways in which party spirit continually and often quite unconsciously
distorts history. All history is necessarily a selection of facts, and
a writer who is animated by a strong sympathy with one side of a
question or a strong desire to prove some special point will be much
tempted in his selection to give an undue prominence to those that
support his view, or, even where neither facts nor arguments are
suppressed, to give a party character to his work by an unfair
distribution of lights and shades. The strong and vivid epithets are
chiefly reserved for the good or bad deeds on one side, the vague,
general and comparatively colourless epithets for the corresponding
deeds on the other side; and in this way very similar facts a