ings.

In able and candid minds, however, stuff of this kind is tolerably
harmless, and was never more innocent than in the case of the first
great historian of Greece. Herodotus was a man of vast natural powers.
Inspired by a splendid subject, and born at the most favorable time,
he grew to manhood surrounded by the heroes of Marathon and Salamis
and Plataea. The wonders of Egypt and Assyria were for the first time
thrown open to the inspection of strangers. The gloss of novelty was
not yet worn off, and the impressions falling fresh on an eager,
cultivated, but essentially simple and healthy mind, there were
qualities and conditions combined which produced one of the most
delightful books which was ever written. He was an intense patriot;
and he was unvexed with theories, political or moral. His philosophy
was like Shakespeare's,--a calm, intelligent insight into human
things. He had no views of his own, which the fortunes of Greece or
other countries were to be manipulated to illustrate. The world as he
saw it was a well-made, altogether promising and interesting world;
and his object was to relate what he had seen and what he had heard
and learnt, faithfully and accurately. His temperament was rather
believing than skeptical; but he was not idly credulous. He can be
critical when occasion requires. He distinguishes always between what
he had seen with his own eyes and what others told him. He uses his
judgment freely, and sets his readers on their guard against uncertain
evidence. And there is not a book existing which contains in the same
space so much important truth,--truth which survives the sharpest test
that modern discoveries can apply to it.

The same may be said in a slightly less degree of Livy and of the best
of the late European chroniclers: you have the same freshness, the
same vivid perception of external life, the same absence of what
philosophers call subjectivity,--the projection into the narrative of
the writer's own personality, his opinions, thoughts, and theories.
Still, in all of them, however vivid, however vigorous the
representation, there is a vein of fiction largely and perhaps
consciously intermingled. In a modern work of history, when a
statesman is introduced as making a speech, the writer at any rate
supposes that such a speech was actually made. He has found an account
of it somewhere either in detail or at least in outline or epitome.
The boldest fabricator would not venture to int