essible or unprinted material; it may be
in the employment of some sources of information open to everybody, but
not before used, or it may be in a fresh combination of well-known and
well-elaborated facts. It is this last-named feature that leads Mr.
Winsor to say, in speaking of the different views that may be honestly
maintained from working over the same material, "The study of history is
perennial." I think I can make my meaning clearer as to the originality
one should try to infuse into historical work by drawing an illustration
from the advice of a literary man as to the art of writing. Charles
Dudley Warner once said to me, "Every one who writes should have
something to add to the world's stock of knowledge or literary
expression. If he falls unconsciously into imitation or quotation, he
takes away from his originality. No matter if some great writer has
expressed the thought in better language than you can use, if you take
his words you detract from your own originality. Express your thought
feebly in your own way rather than with strength by borrowing the words
of another."

This same principle in the art of authorship may be applied to the art
of writing history. "Follow your own star," said Emerson, "and it will
lead you to that which none other can attain. Imitation is suicide. You
must take yourself for better or worse as your own portion." Any one who
is bent upon writing history, may be sure that there is in him some
originality, that he can add something to the knowledge of some period.
Let him give himself to meditation, to searching out what epoch and what
kind of treatment of that epoch is best adapted to his powers and to his
training. I mean not only the collegiate training, but the sort of
training one gets consciously or unconsciously from the very
circumstances of one's life. In the persistence of thinking, his subject
will flash upon him. Parkman, said Lowell, showed genius in the choice
of his subject. The recent biography of Parkman emphasizes the idea
which we get from his works--that only a man who lived in the virgin
forests of this country and loved them, and who had traveled in the far
West as a pioneer, with Indians for companions, could have done that
work. Parkman's experience cannot be had by any one again, and he
brought to bear the wealth of it in that fifty years' occupation of his.
Critics of exact knowledge--such as Justin Winsor, for instance--find
limitations in Parkman's book