peak from those that went before. The
middle ages, which possessed good writers of contemporary narrative,
were careless and impatient of older fact. They became content to be
deceived, to live in a twilight of fiction, under clouds of false
witness, inventing according to convenience, and glad to welcome the
forger and the cheat.[14] As time went on, the atmosphere of
accredited mendacity thickened, until, in the Renaissance, the art of
exposing falsehood dawned upon keen Italian minds. It was then that
history as we understand it began to be understood, and the
illustrious dynasty of scholars arose to whom we still look both for
method and material. Unlike the dreaming prehistoric world, ours knows
the need and the duty to make itself master of the earlier times, and
to forfeit nothing of their wisdom or their warnings,[15] and has
devoted its best energy and treasure to the sovereign purpose of
detecting error and vindicating entrusted truth.[16]

[Sidenote: INTERNATIONAL IDEAS]

[Sidenote: MEMORABLE MEN]

[Sidenote: INDEPENDENT MINDS]

In this epoch of full-grown history men have not acquiesced in the
given conditions of their lives. Taking little for granted they have
sought to know the ground they stand on, and the road they travel, and
the reason why. Over them, therefore, the historian has obtained an
increasing ascendancy.[17] The law of stability was overcome by the
power of ideas, constantly varied and rapidly renewed;[18] ideas that
give life and motion, that take wing and traverse seas and frontiers,
making it futile to pursue the consecutive order of events in the
seclusion of a separate nationality.[19] They compel us to share the
existence of societies wider than our own, to be familiar with distant
and exotic types, to hold our march upon the loftier summits, along
the central range, to live in the company of heroes, and saints, and
men of genius, that no single country could produce. We cannot afford
wantonly to lose sight of great men and memorable lives, and are bound
to store up objects for admiration as far as may be;[20] for the
effect of implacable research is constantly to reduce their number. No
intellectual exercise, for instance, can be more invigorating than to
watch the working of the mind of Napoleon, the most entirely known as
well as the ablest of historic men. In another sphere, it is the
vision of a higher world to be intimate with the character of Fenelon,
the cherished model of