arments they
wore, the food they ate, the language they spoke, their method of social
intercourse among each other, and the sort of government under which
they lived.

That by investigation and critical inquiry we can know more of these
things than our ancestors of centuries past could know, is still a
notion comparatively new which has not been popularly realised. The
classic literature in which our early training lies has nothing in it to
show us the power of historical inquiry, and much to make us slight it.
The Romans, instead of improving on the Greeks, fell in this respect
behind them. Father Herodotus, credulous as he was, was a better
antiquary than any who wrote in Latin before the revival of letters.
Occupied entirely with the glory of their conquests, and blind to the
future which their selfish tyranny was preparing for them, the Romans
were equally thoughtless of the past, unless it were exaggerated and
falsified into a narrative to aggrandise their own glory. Their authors
abdicated the duty of leaving to the world the true narrative of the
early struggles and achievements out of which the Republic and the
Empire arose. It is easy to be sceptical at any time. We can cut away
Romulus and Remus from accepted history now, hundreds of years after the
Empire has ceased to govern or exist. But the golden opportunity for
sifting the genuine out of the fabulous has long passed away. It is
seldom possible to construct the infant histories of departed
nationalities. The difference between the facilities which a nation has
for finding out its own early history, and those which strangers have
for constructing it when the nationality has allowed its deathbed to
pass over without the performance of that patriotic task, is nearly as
great as a man's own facilities for writing the history of his youth,
and those of the biographer who makes inquiries about him after he is
buried.

We are becoming wiser than the Romans in this as in other matters, and
are constructing the infant histories of the various European nations
out of the materials which each possesses. The biographies of those
saints or missionaries who first diffused the light of the Gospel among
the various communities of the Christian north, form a very large
element in these materials; and no wonder, when we remember that the
Church possessed all the literature, such as it was, of the age. In
applying, however, to the British Empire, this new source of histor