events which took place before
your own and your father's time. In many treatises which have been
written demanding an extraordinary equipment for the historian, it is
generally insisted that he shall have a fine constructive imagination;
for how can he re-create his historic period unless he live in it? In
the same treatises it is asserted that contemporary history cannot be
written correctly, for impartiality in the treatment of events near at
hand is impossible. Therefore the canon requires the quality of a great
poet, and denies that there may be had the merit of a judge in a country
where there are no great poets, but where candid judges abound. Does
not the common rating of Thucydides and Tacitus refute the dictum that
history within the memory of men living cannot be written truthfully and
fairly? Given, then, the judicial mind, how much easier to write it! The
rare quality of a poet's imagination is no longer necessary, for your
boyhood recollections, your youthful experiences, your successes and
failures of manhood, the grandfather's tales, the parent's
recollections, the conversation in society,--all these put you in vital
touch with the life you seek to describe. These not only give color and
freshness to the vivifying of the facts you must find in the record, but
they are in a way materials themselves, not strictly authentic, but of
the kind that direct you in search and verification. Not only is no
extraordinary ability required to write contemporary history, but the
labor of the historian is lightened, and Dryasdust is no longer his sole
guide. The funeral oration of Pericles is pretty nearly what was
actually spoken, or else it is the substance of the speech written out
in the historian's own words. Its intensity of feeling and the fitting
of it so well into the situation indicate it to be a living
contemporaneous document, and at the same time it has that universal
application which we note in so many speeches of Shakespeare. A few
years after our Civil War, a lawyer in a city of the middle West, who
had been selected to deliver the Memorial Day oration, came to a friend
of his in despair because he could write nothing but the commonplaces
about those who had died for the Union and for the freedom of a race
which had been uttered many times before, and he asked for advice. "Take
the funeral oration of Pericles for a model," was the reply. "Use his
words where they will fit, and dress up the rest to suit o