talents, and these
talents are never altogether combined. The power of vividly realising
and portraying men, or societies or modes of thought that have long
since passed away; the power of arranging and combining great
multitudes of various facts; the power of judging with discrimination,
accuracy, and impartiality conflicting arguments or evidence; the
power of tracing through the long course of events the true chain of
cause and effect, selecting the facts that are most valuable and
significant and explaining the relation between general causes and
particular effects, are all very different and belong to different
types of mind. It is idle to expect a writer with the gifts of a
Clarendon, a Kinglake, or a Froude to write history in the spirit of a
Hallam or a Grote. Writers who are eminently distinguished for wide,
patient, and accurate research have sometimes little power either of
describing or interpreting the facts which they collect. All that can
be said with any profit is that each writer will do best if he follows
the natural bent of his genius, and that he should select those kinds
or periods of history in which his special gifts have most scope and
the qualities in which he is deficient are least needed.

It is the fashion of a modern school of historical writers to deplore
what they call the intrusion of literature into history. History, in
their judgment, should be treated as science and not as literature,
and the kind of intellect they most value is not unlike that of a
skilful and well-trained attorney. To collect documents with industry;
to compare, classify, interpret and estimate them is the main work of
the historian. It is no doubt true that there are some fields of
history where the primary facts are so little known, so much contested
or so largely derived from recondite manuscript sources, that a
faithful historian will be obliged in justice to his readers to
sacrifice both proportion and artistic charm to the supreme importance
of analysing evidence, reproducing documents and accumulating proofs;
but in general the depreciation of the literary element in history
seems to me essentially wrong. It is only necessary to recall the
names of Herodotus and Thucydides, of Livy and Tacitus, of Gibbon and
Macaulay, and of the long line of great masters of style who have
related the annals of France. It may, indeed, be confidently asserted
that there is no subject in which rarer literary qualities are more