theorise with him, without
making her more just, more philosophical, more moral than reality; and,
in difficult matters, leaving much to reflection which cannot be
explained.

And if this be true of Poetry--if Homer and Shakespeare are what they
are, from the absence of everything didactic about them--may we not
thus learn something of what History should be, and in what sense it
should aspire to teach?

If Poetry must not theorise, much less should the historian theorise,
whose obligations to be true to fact are even greater than the poet's.
If the drama is grandest when the action is least explicable by laws,
because then it best resembles life, then history will be grandest also
under the same conditions. 'Macbeth,' were it literally true, would be
perfect history; and so far as the historian can approach to that kind
of model, so far as he can let his story tell itself in the deeds and
words of those who act it out, so far is he most successful. His work is
no longer the vapour of his own brain, which a breath will scatter; it
is the thing itself, which will have interest for all time. A thousand
theories may be formed about it--spiritual theories, Pantheistic
theories, cause and effect theories; but each age will have its own
philosophy of history, and all these in turn will fail and die. Hegel
falls out of date, Schlegel falls out of date, and Comte in good time
will fall out of date; the thought about the thing must change as we
change; but the thing itself can never change; and a history is durable
or perishable as it contains more or least of the writer's own
speculations. The splendid intellect of Gibbon for the most part kept
him true to the right course in this; yet the philosophical chapters for
which he has been most admired or censured may hereafter be thought the
least interesting in his work. The time has been when they would not
have been comprehended: the time may come when they will seem
commonplace.

It may be said, that in requiring history to be written like a drama, we
require an impossibility.

For history to be written with the complete form of a drama, doubtless
is impossible; but there are periods, and these the periods, for the
most part, of greatest interest to mankind, the history of which may be
so written that the actors shall reveal their characters in their own
words; where mind can be seen matched against mind, and the great
passions of the epoch not simply be described as exist