ted in reading Hume and Robertson
as models, and no one goes to them for facts. But thirty years ago no
course of historical reading was complete without Hume. In this century
the sifting process still goes on. One loses little by not reading
Alison's "History of Europe." But he was much in vogue in the '50's.
_Harper's Magazine_ published a part of his history as a serial. His
rounded periods and bombastic utterances were quoted with delight by
those who thought that history was not history unless it was bombastic.
Emerson says somewhere, "Avoid adjectives; let your nouns do the work."
There was hardly a sentence in Alison which did not traverse this rule.
One of his admirers told me that the great merit of his style was his
choiceness and aptness in his use of adjectives. It is a style which now
provokes merriment, and even had Alison been learned and impartial, and
had he possessed a good method, his style for the present taste would
have killed his book. Gibbon is sometimes called pompous, but place him
by the side of Alison and what one may have previously called
pompousness one now calls dignity.

Two of the literary historians of our century survive--Carlyle and
Macaulay. They may be read with care. We may do as Cassius said Brutus
did to him, observe all their faults, set them in a note-book, learn and
con them by rote; nevertheless we shall get good from them. Oscar
Browning said--I am quoting H. Morse Stephens again--of Carlyle's
description of the flight of the king to Varennes, that in every one of
his details where a writer could go wrong, Carlyle had gone wrong; but
added that, although all the details were wrong, Carlyle's account is
essentially accurate. No defense, I think, can be made of Carlyle's
statement that Marat was a "blear-eyed dog leach," nor of those
statements from which you get the distinct impression that the
complexion of Robespierre was green; nevertheless, every one who studies
the French Revolution reads Carlyle, and he is read because the reading
is profitable. The battle descriptions in Carlyle's "Frederick the
Great" are well worth reading. How refreshing they are after technical
descriptions! Carlyle said once, "Battles since Homer's time, when they
were nothing but fighting mobs, have ceased to be worth reading about,"
but he made the modern battle interesting.

Macaulay is an honest partisan. You learn very soon how to take him, and
when distrust begins one has correctives in Ga