derstood. Between our compendiums, which tell too little,
and our long general histories, which tell too much, are Thucydides and
Tacitus.

Again, it is a common opinion that our condensed histories lack life and
movement. This is due in part to their being written generally from a
study of second-hand--not original--materials. Those of the Athenian and
the Roman are mainly the original.

I do not think, however, that we may infer that we have a much greater
mass of materials, and thereby excuse our modern prolixity. In written
documents, of course, we exceed the ancients, for we have been flooded
with these by the art of printing. Yet any one who has investigated any
period knows how the same facts are told over and over again, in
different ways, by various writers; and if one can get beyond the mass
of verbiage and down to the really significant original material, what a
simplification of ideas there is, what a lightening of the load! I own
that this process of reduction is painful, and thereby our work is made
more difficult than that of the ancients. A historian will adapt himself
naturally to the age in which he lives, and Thucydides made use of the
matter that was at his hand. "Of the events of the war," he wrote, "I
have not ventured to speak from any chance information, nor according to
any notion of my own; I have described nothing but what I either saw
myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and
particular inquiry. The task was a laborious one, because eye-witnesses
of the same occurrences gave different accounts of them, as they
remembered or were interested in the actions of one side or the other."
His materials, then, were what he saw and heard. His books and his
manuscripts were living men. Our distinguished military historian, John
C. Ropes, whose untimely death we deplore, might have written his
history from the same sort of materials; for he was contemporary with
our Civil War, and followed the daily events with intense interest. A
brother of his was killed at Gettysburg, and he had many friends in the
army. He paid at least one memorable visit to Meade's headquarters in
the field, and at the end of the war had a mass of memories and
impressions of the great conflict. He never ceased his inquiries; he
never lost a chance to get a particular account from those who took part
in battles or campaigns; and before he began his Story of the Civil War,
he too could have said, "I made the