may be expedient to warn those
who use these excellent summaries against the habit of neglecting the
great English classics for short biographies or compendious sketches
of periods and personages, as if one could learn enough of Edmund
Burke, or Milton, or Oliver Cromwell, or master the events of some
important period, from a well-written serial in some two hundred
pages.

The demand for these historical handbooks has evidently been created
by the spread of general education, which stimulates the laudable
desire to learn something about subjects of which it is hardly
respectable, in these days, to be ignorant. Such knowledge is very
useful to those who have no leisure for more; and it is far superior
to mere desultory reading, to the habit of picking out amusing bits
here and there. Yet I hope it is unnecessary to impress on earnest
students of history that they must go further; must push up as near as
possible to the fountain heads of the rivers of knowledge; must make
acquaintance with the masterpieces of literature--that their reading
must be continuous and consecutive.

Now those among you who are studying for University honours have no
need for any advice from me; they are well aware that the wide
expansion, in these days, of the field of history has raised the
standard of examinations, and that they must be prepared for questions
testing a candidate's critical acumen, the breadth and depth of his
reading, much more closely than was required formerly. But there must
also be many here present who have no examinations in front of them,
who have no ardent inclination or even leisure for abstruse labours.
And I presume that all of you read history for a clear understanding
of past ages, of the acts and thoughts of the great men who illustrate
those times. You all desire to comprehend the sequence and
significance of events. You feel the intellectual pleasure of
appreciating rightly the character and motive of the men and women who
stand in the foreground of our country's annals, and also of those who
are famous in other countries, to know how and why they rose or fell,
whether they deserved the success that they won, or won it without
deserving it. Moreover, for us English folk, who live at the centre of
an empire containing races and communities in various stages of
political development, the lessons of history have a special value.
They teach us to judge leniently of acts and opinions that appear to
us irrational