the dim sight of even the most truthful narrators.

I doubt whether any historian would accept a statement made thirty
years after the event without independent confirmation. I could not
give the date of the battle of Sadowa, though I well remember reading
the full account of it in the _Times_ from day to day. I can of
course get at the date from historical books, and from that kind of
artificial memory which arises by itself without any _memoria
technica_. There is a favourite German game of cards called Sixty-six,
and it was reported that when the French in 1870 shouted _A Berlin_,
the then Crown-Prince who had won the battle of Sadowa, or Koeniggraetz,
said: "Ah, they want another game of Sixty-six!" that is they want a
battle like that of Sadowa. In this way I shall always remember the
date of that decisive battle. But I could not give the date of the
Crimean battles nor a trustworthy account of the successive stages of
that war. I doubt whether even my old friend, Sir William H. Russell,
could do that now without referring to his letters in the _Times_.
After thirty years no one, I believe, could take an oath to the
accuracy of any statement of what he saw or heard so many years ago.

All then that I can vouch for is that I read my memory as I should the
leaves of an old MS. from which many letters, nay, whole words and
lines have vanished, and where I am often driven to decipher and to
guess, as in a palimpsest, what the original uncial writing may have
been. I am the first to confess that there may be flaws in my memory,
there may be before my eyes that magic azure which surrounds the
distant past; but I can promise that there shall be no invention, no
_Dichtung_ instead of _Wahrheit_, but always, as far as in me lies,
truth. I know quite well that even a certain dislocation of facts is
not always to be avoided in an old memory. I know it from sad
experience. As the spires of a city--of Oxford for instance--arrange
themselves differently as we pass the old place on the railway, so
that now one and now the other stands in the centre and seems to rise
above the heads of the rest, so it is with our friends and
acquaintances. Some who seemed giants at one time assume smaller
proportions as others come into view towering above them. The whole
scenery changes from year to year. Who does not remember the trees in
our garden that seemed like giants in our childhood, but when we see
them again in our old age, they have s