lity of the best type of a man of letters; he has the fine
critical aptitude for seizing the secret of an author's or an
artist's manner, for penetrating to dominant and central ideas, for
marking the abstract and general under accidental forms in which
they are concealed, for connecting the achievements of literature
and art with facts of society and impulses of human character and
life. He is the master of a style which, if it seems to lack the
breadth, the firmness, the sustained and level strength of great
writing, is yet always energetic, and fresh, and alive with that
spontaneous reality and independence of interest which distinguishes
the genuine writer from the mere weaver of sentences and the servile
mechanic of the pen. The matter and form alike of M. Taine's best
work--and we say best, for his work is by no means without degrees
and inequalities of worth--prove that he has not shrunk from the
toil and austerity of the student, from that scorn of delight and
living of laborious days, by which only can men either get command
of the art of just and finished expression, or gather to themselves
much knowledge.

[1] _Les Origines de la France Contemporaine_. Tom. i. _L'Ancien
Regime._ Par H. Taine. Paris: Hachette. 1876.

But with all its attractiveness and high uses of its own, the genius
for literature in its proper sense is distinct from the genius for
political history. The discipline is different, because the matter
is different. To criticise Rousseau's Social Contract requires one
set of attainments, and to judge the proceedings of the Constituent
Assembly or the Convention requires a set of quite different
attainments. A man may have the keenest sense of the filiation of
ideas, of their scope and purport, and yet have a very dull or
uninterested eye for the play of material forces, the wayward tides
of great gatherings of men, the rude and awkward methods that
sometimes go to the attainment of wise political ends.

It would perhaps not be too bold to lay down this proposition; that
no good social history has ever been written by a man who has not
either himself taken a more or less active part in public affairs,
or else been an habitual intimate of persons who were taking such a
part on a considerable scale. Everybody knows what Gibbon said about
the advantage to the historian of the Roman Empire of having been a
member of the English parliament and a captain in the Hampshire
grenadiers. Thucydides comma