, garnished and even overloaded
with citations, one often felt that his own part was better, both in
substance and in form, than the passages which he had culled from his
predecessors. It becomes daily more than ever true that the secret of
historical composition is to know what to neglect, since in our time
it has become impossible to exhaust the literature of most subjects,
and, as respects the last two centuries, to exhaust even the original
authorities. Yet how shall one know what to neglect without at least a
glance of inspection? Acton was unwilling to neglect anything; and his
ardour for completeness drew him into a policy fit only for one who
could expect to live three lives of mortal men.

The love of knowledge grew upon him till it became a passion of the
intellect, a thirst like the thirst for water in a parching desert.
What he sought to know was not facts only, but facts in their
relations to principles, facts so disposed and fitly joined together
as to become the causeway over which the road to truth shall pass. For
this purpose events were in his view not more important than the
thoughts of men, because discursive and creative thought was to him
the ruling factor in history. Hence books must be known--books of
philosophic creation, books of philosophic reflection, no less than
those which record what has happened. The danger of this conception is
that everything men have said or written, as well as everything they
have done, becomes a possibly significant fact; and thus the search
for truth becomes endless because the materials are inexhaustible.

He expressed in striking words, prefixed to a list of books suggested
for a young man's perusal, his view of the aim of a course of
historical reading. It is "to give force and fulness and clearness and
sincerity and independence and elevation and generosity and serenity
to his mind, that he may know the method and law of the process by
which error is conquered and truth is won, discerning knowledge from
probability and prejudice from belief, that he may learn to master
what he rejects as fully as what he adopts, that he may understand the
origin as well as the strength and vitality of systems and the better
motive of men who are wrong ... and to steel him against the charm of
literary beauty and talent."[62]

Neither his passion for facts nor his appreciation of style and form
made him decline to the right hand or to the left from the true
position of a hist