, from
his gait and manner of approaching social inquiries! Is there any
reason to suppose that such mutations are now at an end? None. The
probability, well nigh a certainty, is that metamorphoses of the
social organism are in store for us which will equal, if they do not
vastly exceed, anything that the past has offered.

Considerations of this kind need to be kept in view if we would be
just in our appreciation of historical writings which have already a
certain age. It is impossible that a history composed a century ago
should fully satisfy us now; but we must beware of blaming the writer
for his supposed or real shortcomings, till we have ascertained how
far they arose from his personal inadequacy to his task, and were not
the result of his chronological position. It need not be said that
this remark does not refer to many books which are called histories,
but are really contemporary memoirs and original authorities
subservient to history proper. The works of Clarendon and Burnet, for
instance, can never lose a certain value on this account. The immortal
book which all subsequent generations have agreed to call a possession
for ever, is the unapproachable ideal of this class. But neither
Thucydides nor Clarendon were historians in the sense in which Gibbon
was an historian, that is, engaged in the delineation of a remote
epoch by the help of such materials as have escaped the ravages of
time. It is historians like Gibbon who are exposed to the particular
unhappiness referred to a little way back--that of growing out of date
through no fault of their own, but through the changed aspect
presented by the past in consequence of the movement which has brought
us to the present. But if this is the field of historical disaster, it
is also the opportunity of historical genius. In proportion as a
writer transcends the special limitations of his time, will "age fail
to wither him." That he cannot entirely shake off the fetters which
fasten him to his epoch is manifest. But in proportion as his vision
is clear, in proportion as he has with singleness of eye striven to
draw the past with reverent loyalty, will his bondage to his own time
be loosened, and his work will remain faithful work for which due
gratitude will not be withheld.

The sudden and rapid expansion of historic studies in the middle of
the eighteenth century constitutes one of the great epochs in
literature. Up to the year 1750 no great historical work had ap