nse as to gaze on those most wonderful monuments of human
industry, constructed certainly 5000 years ago, and to read at the same
time the account that Herodotus gave of his visit there about 2350 years
before the date of my own. That same night I read in a modern and garish
Cairo hotel the current number of the _London Times_. In it was an
account of an annual meeting of the Royal Historical Society and a
report of a formal and carefully prepared address of its president,
whose subject was "Herodotus," whose aim was to point out the value of
the Greek writer as a model to modern historians. The _Times_, for the
moment laying aside its habitual attack on the then Liberal government,
devoted its main leader to Herodotus--to his merits and the lessons he
conveyed to the European writers. The article was a remarkable blending
of scholarship and good sense, and I ended the day with the reflection
of what a space in the world's history Herodotus filled, himself
describing the work of twenty-six hundred years before his own time and
being dilated on in 1894 by one of the most modern of nineteenth-century
newspapers.

It is generally agreed, I think, that Thucydides is first in order of
time of philosophic historians, but it does not seem to me that we have
most to learn from him in the philosophic quality. The tracing of cause
and effect, the orderly sequence of events, is certainly better
developed by moderns than it has been by ancients. The influence of
Darwin and the support and proof which he gives to the doctrine of
evolution furnish a training of thought which was impossible to the
ancients; but Thucydides has digested his material and compressed his
narrative without taking the life out of his story in a manner to make
us despair, and this does not, I take it, come from paucity of
materials. A test which I began to make as a study in style has helped
me in estimating the solidity of a writer. Washington Irving formed his
style by reading attentively from time to time a page of Addison and
then, closing the book, endeavored to write out the same ideas in his
own words. In this way his style became assimilated to that of the great
English essayist. I have tried the same mode with several writers. I
found that the plan succeeded with Macaulay and with Lecky. I tried it
again and again with Shakespeare and Hawthorne, but if I succeeded in
writing out the paragraph I found that it was because I memorized their
very words.