a very sufficient account of what manner of persons they were and what they did. We have the same national mind expressed for us again in their literature, in epic and lyric poems, drama and philosophy; a very complete form. Then we have it once more in their architecture, a beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the straight line and the square,-a builded geometry. Then we have it once again in sculpture, the 'tongue on the balance of expression,' a multitude of forms in the utmost freedom of action and never transgressing the ideal serenity; like votaries performing some religious dance before the gods and, though in convulsive pain or mortal combat, never daring to break the figure and decorum of their dance. Thus of the genius of one remarkable people we have a fourfold representation; and to the senses what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Phocion?"

Do not think that I propose to cite Emerson here against Mr. Freeman. Do not understand me to imply that Mr. Freeman's word about history, which I quoted at the beginning, was intended by himself as a full definition of history. Who, in this time, has taught us more strenuously how broad is the domain of history, how varied are its branches, how numerous are its satellites? Who has shown us so strikingly how important a part of the study of history is the study of geography? Who has shown with a better enthusiasm the historical value of the statue, the painting and the cathedral? Who especially has emphasized more constantly or more wisely the importance to the student of political history of the study of lan

guage and of law? I could mention no living historical writer who better enforces and illustrates those methods of historical work and that general view of history which seem to me good. I could ask the attention of the teachers of history who may hear me to few words defining better the office of the teacher of history than Mr. Freeman's inaugural lecture at Oxford, with its memorable tribute to Arnold, his great predecessor, from whom, he tells us, he himself "first learned the truth which ought to be the centre and life of all our historic studies, the truth of the Unity of History."

It is legitimate and right, perhaps it is more and more necessary, that the historical writer who would be thorough and contribute something considerable to knowledge should devote his work mainly to one phase of a people's character and development. "Doubtless it is with a growing feeling of the infinite nature of History," wrote Carlyle sixty years agoand the sixty years since have illustrated and enforced the point sixty fold—“that in these times the old principle, division of labor, has been so widely applied to it." Only he prayed, as we have reason to, "that increased division of labor do not here, as elsewhere, aggravate our already strong mechanical tendencies, so that in the manual dexterity for parts we lose all command over the whole, and the hope of any philosophy of history be further off than ever." It is right and necessary, I say, that one should write the political history of Greece, perhaps but a single chapter of that history, that another should write the history of Greek art, another the history of Greek poetry, another the history of Greek philosophy;

only the writer and the reader must remember that to the history of Greece belong alike Plato and Pindar and Phidias and Phocion, and that philosopher and poet and sculptor and statesman all affect each other and all affect the general life, the public opinion and the national action. Anaxagoras and Sophocles will never fail to appear in the background of the true political history of the age of Pericles, nor windows through which we may look out upon all the influential activities of Athens and of Greece. The specialist in history may be an artist as truly as the encyclopedist; for in history, says Carlyle again truly, “as in all other provinces, there are Artists and Artisans; men who labor mechanically in a department, without eye for the Whole, nor feeling that there is a Whole; and men who inform and enoble the humblest department with an Idea of the Whole, and habitually know that only in the Whole is the partial to be truly discerned."

History has been defined as philosophy teaching by examples or by experience. The great historian must be a philosopher, not merely a great compiler of facts, but able to show whence the facts arise and whither they tend and what they utter. Thucydides, Tacitus, Winckelmann, Niebuhr, Ewald, Zeller, Gibbon, Grote, Motley, Lecky and Carlyle are great thinkers and teachers, gatherers of facts only that they may put facts to great uses, inquirers after principles, discerners of the genesis, the progress, the goal and the moral of the movements of nations and of men. "Whereas of old" says Carlyle, "the charm of history lay chiefly in gratifying our common appetite for the wonderful, for the unknown, and

her office was but that of a minstrel and story-teller, she has now farther become a school-mistress.” "It may be laid down as a general rule" says Macaulay, "though subject to considerable qualifications, that history begins in novel and ends in essay." "A perfect historian," Macaulay says again, "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." Is it not right to add that as the profound and ingenious historian must ever be circumspect and wary of his hypothesis, so he must be reserved and mediate, for the most part, in his pedagogism, guiding his narrative so wisely that it shall do its own teaching? This also it is useful to consider: that history is less dependent than aught else upon a good writer, and that the good reader is here almost omnipotent. The uninspired and perfunctory sermon is wholly useless, unless, as the poet pleads, we let God take the text and preach us patience. The romance is beyond our control or supplementing influence, and if it be bad we are without escape and without compensation. The prosy poem is prosiest to the poet. And the witless essay who can bear? But to the good reader, the man who brings to it philosophy and insight of his own, the driest chronicle or catalogue of historic facts, or the poorest report in the newspaper, is luminous and eloquent. The poem and the romance

are all imagination. History is the synthesis of imagination and facts. "Facts' as Macaulay says, "are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which inter-penetrates them, and lies latent among them like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value." "In history," he says, "the facts are given, to find the principles; and the writer who does not explain the phenomena as well as state them performs only one-half of his office." This is true; and happy are we when we have a Macaulay or a Bryce or a Parkman to explain the phenomena as well as state them for us. Yet it is also true that each of us may explain them for himself, and always possible that we may explain them better than this other man who writes about them. Each of us, in a word, may be his own historian. The material of history is open to all alike. History is no bound book; history is the past life of humanity. This historian or that may be a philosopher, and read that life aright, or not. But the spirit of history itself is a philosopher, reliable, abiding, one and the same; and each of us is free to study this philosopher's philosophy for himself, and to master it if he can. He is indeed but half a historian who is not a philosopher, who does not explain the phenomena as well as state them. But he is a most useful man who states the facts for us aright, to let our own minds work upon them. We are debtors to the faithful reporter of phenomena, to him who reports them as they are and not as they are not.

History, I have said, is philosophy teaching by examples or experience; and it is because there is so much truth in the old proverb, "Experience is the