most careful and particular inquiry"
of generals and officers on both sides, and of men in civil office privy
to the great transactions. His knowledge drawn from living lips was
marvelous, and his conversation, when he poured this knowledge forth,
often took the form of a flowing narrative in an animated style. While
there are not, so far as I remember, any direct references in his two
volumes to these memories, or to memoranda of conversations which he
had with living actors after the close of the war drama, and while his
main authority is the Official Records of the Union and Confederate
Armies,--which, no one appreciated better than he, were unique
historical materials,--nevertheless this personal knowledge trained his
judgment and gave color to his narrative.

It is pretty clear that Thucydides spent a large part of a life of about
threescore years and ten in gathering materials and writing his history.
The mass of facts which he set down or stored away in his memory must
have been enormous. He was a man of business, and had a home in Thrace
as well as in Athens, traveling probably at fairly frequent intervals
between the two places; but the main portion of the first forty years of
his life was undoubtedly spent in Athens, where, during those glorious
years of peace and the process of beautifying the city, he received the
best education a man could get. To walk about the city and view the
buildings and statues was both directly and insensibly a refining
influence. As Thucydides himself, in the funeral oration of Pericles,
said of the works which the Athenian saw around him, "the daily delight
of them banishes gloom." There was the opportunity to talk with as good
conversers as the world has ever known; and he undoubtedly saw much of
the men who were making history. There was the great theater and the
sublime poetry. In a word, the life of Thucydides was adapted to the
gathering of a mass of historical materials of the best sort; and his
daily walk, his reading, his intense thought, gave him an intellectual
grasp of the facts he has so ably handled. Of course he was a genius,
and he wrote in an effective literary style; but seemingly his natural
parts and acquired talents are directed to this: a digestion of his
materials, and a compression of his narrative without taking the vigor
out of his story in a manner I believe to be without parallel. He
devoted a life to writing a volume. His years after the peace was
brok