gh repute
believed memoirs and chronicles to be trustworthy guides. When he laid
down his pen in 1886 every scholar with a reputation to make had learned
to content himself with nothing less than the papers and correspondence
of the actors themselves and those in immediate contact with the events
they describe. A third service was to found the science of evidence by
the analysis of authorities, contemporary or otherwise, in the light of
the author's temperament, affiliations, and opportunity of knowledge,
and by comparison with the testimony of other writers. There can be no
better preparation for the perils and responsibilities of authorship
than to study the critical analyses of Guicciardini and Sarpi,
Clarendon, Saint-Simon, and many another, scattered through the sixty
volumes of the master. And finally he taught by precept and practice the
necessity of exploring the relations of States to one another and of
measuring the interaction of foreign and domestic policy.

These sound principles have been applied by the scholars of all
countries who have jointly built up the history of the last four
centuries. We may study the Tudors under the guidance of Pollard, the
Stuarts under Gardiner and Firth, the Hanoverians under Lecky, without
fear that we are being misled or that essential facts are being withheld
from our notice. We continue to admire the literary brilliance of
Macaulay and Carlyle, Motley and Froude; but we are instinctively aware
that their partisanship is out of date. The same cooling process has
taken place in France, where the passions and tempers of Thiers and
Michelet have tended to yield place to the calm lucidity of which Mignet
and Guizot were the earliest masters. There is, it must be confessed, a
good deal of the old Adam in Taine's elaborate study of Jacobinism, in
Masson's innumerable volumes on Napoleon, and even in Aulard's priceless
contributions to our knowledge of the French Revolution; but such works
as Lavisse's full-length portrait of Louis XIV, Segur's volumes on
Turgot and Necker, Sorel's massive treatise on Europe and the
Revolution, and Vandal's incomparable presentation of the Consulate rank
as high in scholarship as in literature.

The unification of Germany after fierce struggles within and without
naturally deflected historical scholarship from the path marked out by
Ranke, who had grown to manhood in the era of political stagnation
following the downfall of Napoleon. The master'