had felt the
necessity of giving authorities in a footnote for every statement about
which there might have been a question, he certainly would have written
an entirely different sort of a book.

My other head is the originality which comes from a fresh combination of
known historical facts.

I do not now call to mind any more notable chapter which illustrates
this than the chapter of Curtius, "The years of peace." One is perhaps
better adapted for the keen enjoyment of it if he does not know the
original material, for his suspicion that some of the inferences are
strained and unwarranted might become a certainty. But accepting it as a
mature and honest elaboration by one of the greatest historians of
Greece of our day, it is a sample of the vivifying of dry bones and of a
dovetailing of facts and ideas that makes a narrative to charm and
instruct. You feel that the spirit of that age we all like to think and
dream about is there, and if you have been so fortunate as to visit the
Athens of to-day, that chapter, so great is the author's constructive
imagination, carries you back and makes you for the moment live in the
Athens of Pericles, of Sophocles, of Phidias and Herodotus.

With the abundance of materials for modern history, and, for that
reason, our tendency to diffuseness, nothing is so important as a
thorough acquaintance with the best classic models, such as Herodotus,
Thucydides, and Tacitus. In Herodotus you have an example of an
interesting story with the unity of the narrative well sustained in
spite of certain unnecessary digressions. His book is obviously a life
work and the work of a man who had an extensive knowledge gained by
reading, social intercourse, and travel, and who brought his knowledge
to bear upon his chosen task. That the history is interesting all admit,
but in different periods of criticism stress is sometimes laid on the
untrustworthy character of the narrative, with the result that there has
been danger of striking Herodotus from the list of historical models;
but such is the merit of his work that the Herodotus cult again revives,
and, I take it, is now at its height. I received, six years ago, while
in Egypt, a vivid impression of him whom we used to style the Father of
History. Spending one day at the great Pyramids, when, after I had
satisfied my first curiosity, after I had filled my eyes and mind with
the novelty of the spectacle, I found nothing so gratifying to the
historic se