the _virtuosi_
of criticism are accustomed to display their skill.[92]

Nor must we be content with it. The critical investigation of
authorship, like textual criticism, is preparatory, and its results
negative. Its final aim and crowning achievement is to get rid of
documents which are not documents, and which would have misled us; that
is all. "It teaches us not to use bad documents; it does not teach us
how to turn good ones to account."[93] It is not the whole of
"historical criticism;" it is only one stone in the edifice.[94]

CHAPTER IV

CRITICAL CLASSIFICATION OF SOURCES

By the help of the preceding operations the documents, all the
documents, let us suppose, of a given class, or relating to a given
subject, have been found. We know where they are; the text of each has
been restored, if necessary, and each has been critically examined in
respect of authorship. We know where they have come from. It remains to
combine and classify the materials thus verified. This is the last of
the operations which may be called preparatory to the work of higher (or
internal) criticism and construction.

Whoever studies a point of history is obliged, first of all, to classify
his sources. To arrange, in a rational and convenient manner, the
verified materials before making use of them, is an apparently humble,
but really very important, part of the historian's profession. Those who
have learnt how to do it possess, on that account alone, a marked
advantage: they give themselves less trouble, and they obtain better
results; the others waste their time and labour; they are smothered
sometimes under the disorderly mass of notes, extracts, copies, scraps,
which they themselves have accumulated. Who was it spoke of those busy
people who spend their lives lifting building-stones without knowing
where to place them, raising as they do so clouds of blinding dust?

I. Here, again, we have to confess that the first, the natural impulse,
is not the right one. The first impulse of most men who have to utilise
a number of texts is to make notes from them, one after another, in the
order in which they study them. Many of the early scholars (whose papers
we possess) worked on this system, and so do most beginners who are not
warned beforehand; the latter keep, as the former kept, note-books,
which they fill continuously and progressively with notes on the texts
they are interested in. This method is utterly wrong. The materials