e extracts from speeches, to intersperse in due proportion epithets
of praise and abhorrence, to draw up antithetical characters of great
men, setting forth how many contradictory virtues and vices they united,
and abounding in "withs" and "withouts"--all this is very easy. But
to be a really great historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual
distinctions. Many scientific works are, in their kind, absolutely
perfect. There are poems which we should be inclined to designate as
faultless, or as disfigured only by blemishes which pass unnoticed in
the general blaze of excellence. There are speeches, some speeches of
Demosthenes particularly, in which it would be impossible to alter a
word without altering it for the worse. But we are acquainted with
no history which approaches to our notion of what a history ought to
be--with no history which does not widely depart, either on the right
hand or on the left, from the exact line.

The cause may easily be assigned. This province of literature is a
debatable land. It lies on the confines of two distinct territories.
It is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers; and, like other
districts similarly situated, it is ill defined, ill cultivated, and ill
regulated. Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers, the
Reason and the Imagination, it falls alternately under the sole and
absolute dominion of each. It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes
theory.

History, it has been said, is philosophy teaching by examples.
Unhappily, what the philosophy gains in soundness and depth the examples
generally lose in vividness. A perfect historian must possess an
imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and
picturesque. Yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself
with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying
deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and
ingenious reasoner. Yet he must possess sufficient self-command to
abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis. Those who
can justly estimate these almost insuperable difficulties will not think
it strange that every writer should have failed, either in the narrative
or in the speculative department of history.

It may be laid down as a general rule, though subject to considerable
qualifications and exceptions, that history begins in novel and ends
in essay. Of the romantic historians Herodotus is the earliest and the
best. His a