es, fashions, manners, crabbed scraps of old law, which you used,
perhaps, to read up and forget again, because they were not rooted, but
stuck into your brain, as pins are into a pincushion, to fall out at the
first shake--all these you will remember; because they will arrange and
organize themselves around the central human figure: just as, if you have
studied a portrait by some great artist, you cannot think of the face in
it, without recollecting also the light and shadow, the tone of
colouring, the dress, the very details of the background, and all the
accessories which the painter's art has grouped around; each with a
purpose, and therefore each fixing itself duly in your mind. Who, for
instance, has not found that he can learn more French history from French
memoirs, than even from all the truly learned and admirable histories of
France which have been written of late years? There are those, too, who
will say of good old Plutarch's lives (now-a-days, I think, too much
neglected), what some great man used to say of Shakspeare and English
history--that all the ancient history which they really knew, they had
got from Plutarch. I am free to confess that I have learnt what little I
know of the middle-ages, what they were like, how they came to be what
they were, and how they issued in the Reformation, not so much from the
study of the books about them (many and wise though they are), as from
the thumbing over, for years, the semi-mythical saints' lives of Surius
and the Bollandists.

Without doubt History obeys, and always has obeyed, in the long run,
certain laws. But those laws assert themselves, and are to be
discovered, not in things, but in persons; in the actions of human
beings; and just in proportion as we understand human beings, shall we
understand the laws which they have obeyed, or which have avenged
themselves on their disobedience. This may seem a truism: if it be such,
it is one which we cannot too often repeat to ourselves just now, when
the rapid progress of science is tempting us to look at human beings
rather as things than as persons, and at abstractions (under the name of
laws) rather as persons than as things. Discovering, to our just
delight, order and law all around us, in a thousand events which seemed
to our fathers fortuitous and arbitrary, we are dazzled just now by the
magnificent prospect opening before us, and fall, too often, into more
than one serious mistake.

First; students