ty, on
October 8, 1908; printed in the _Century Magazine_ for
October, 1909.

XVI. Edwin Lawrence Godkin 265
Lecture read at Harvard University, April 13, 1908;
printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for September, 1908.

XVII. Who Burned Columbia? 299
A Paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society
at the November Meeting of 1901, and printed in the
_American Historical Review_ of April, 1902.

XVIII. A New Estimate of Cromwell 315
A Paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society
at the January Meeting of 1898, and printed in the
_Atlantic Monthly_ of June, 1898.

Index 325

HISTORY

President's Inaugural Address, American Historical Association, Boston,
December 27, 1899; printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of February, 1900.

HISTORICAL ESSAYS

HISTORY[1]

My theme is history. It is an old subject, which has been discoursed
about since Herodotus, and I should be vain indeed if I flattered myself
that I could say aught new concerning the methods of writing it, when
this has for so long a period engaged the minds of so many gifted men.
Yet to a sympathetic audience, to people who love history, there is
always the chance that a fresh treatment may present the commonplaces in
some different combination, and augment for the moment an interest which
is perennial.

Holding a brief for history as do I your representative, let me at once
concede that it is not the highest form of intellectual endeavor; let us
at once agree that it were better that all the histories ever written
were burned than for the world to lose Homer and Shakespeare. Yet as it
is generally true that an advocate rarely admits anything without
qualification, I should not be loyal to my client did I not urge that
Shakespeare was historian as well as poet. We all prefer his Antony and
Cleopatra and Julius Caesar to the Lives in North's Plutarch which
furnished him his materials. The history is in substance as true as
Plutarch, the dramatic force greater; the language is better than that
of Sir Thomas North, who himself did a remarkable piece of work when he
gave his country a classic by Englishing a French version of the
stories of t