of making history a vehicle of controversy.
His object was to be a faithful historian, and due regard being had to
his limitations, he attained to it.

If we now consider the defects of the _Decline and Fall_--which the
progress of historic study, and still more the lapse of time, have
gradually rendered visible, they will be found, as was to be expected,
to consist in the author's limited conception of society, and of the
multitudinous forces which mould and modify it. We are constantly
reminded by the tone of remark that he sees chiefly the surface of
events, and that the deeper causes which produce them have not been
seen with the same clearness. In proportion as an age is remote, and
therefore different from that in which a historian writes, does it
behove him to remember that the social and general side of history is
more important than the individual and particular. In reference to a
period adjacent to our own the fortunes of individuals properly take a
prominent place, the social conditions amid which they worked are
familiar to us, and we understand them and their position without
effort. But with regard to a remote age the case is different. Here
our difficulty is to understand the social conditions, so unlike those
with which we are acquainted, and as society is greater than man, so
we feel that society, and not individual men, should occupy the chief
place in the picture. Not that individuals are to be suppressed or
neglected, but their subordination to the large historic background
must be well maintained. The social, religious, and philosophic
conditions amid which they played their parts should dominate the
scene, and dwarf by their grandeur and importance the human actors who
move across it. The higher historical style now demands what may be
called compound narrative, that is narrative having reference to two
sets of phenomena--one the obvious surface events, the other the
larger and wider, but less obvious, sociological condition. A better
example could hardly be given than Grote's account of the mutilation
of the Hermae. The fact of the mutilation is told in the briefest way
in a few lines, but the social condition which overarched it, and made
the disfiguring of a number of half-statues "one of the most
extraordinary events in Greek history," demands five pages of
reflections and commentary to bring out its full significance. Grote
insists on the duty "to take reasonable pains to realise in our minds