criptions, has earned the eternal gratitude of scholarly posterity,
but Mr. Gooch very truly remarks that his historical work is tainted
with the "strident partisanship" of a keen politician and journalist.
Truth, as the old Greek adage says, is indeed the fellow-citizen of the
gods; but if the standard of historical truth be rated too high, and if
the authority of all who have not strictly complied with that standard
is to be discarded on the ground that they stand convicted of
partiality, we should be left with little to instruct subsequent ages
beyond the dry records of men such as the laborious, the useful, though
somewhat over-credulous Clinton, or the learned but arid Marquardt,
whose "massive scholarship" Mr. Gooch dismisses somewhat summarily in a
single line. Such writers are not historians, but rather compilers of
records, upon the foundations of which others can build history.

Under the process we have assumed, Droysen, Sybel, and Treitschke would
have to be cast down from their pedestals. They were the political
schoolmasters of Germany during a period of profound national
discouragement. They used history in order to stir their countrymen to
action, but "if the supreme aim of history is to discover truth and to
interpret the movement of humanity, they have no claim to a place in the
first class." Patriotism, as the Portuguese historian, Herculano da
Carvalho, said, is "a bad counsellor for historians"; albeit, few have
had the courage to discard patriotic considerations altogether, as was
the case with the Swiss Kopp, who wrote a history of his country "from
which Gessler and Tell disappeared," and in which "the familiar
anecdotes of Austrian tyranny and cruelty were dismissed as legends."

Philosophic historians, who have endeavoured to bend facts into
conformity with some special theory of their own, would fare little
better than those who have been ardent politicians. Sainte-Beuve, after
reading Guizot's sweeping and lofty generalisations, declared that they
were far too logical to be true, and forthwith "took down from his
shelves a volume of De Retz to remind him how history was really made."
Second-or third-rate historians, such as Lamartine, who, according to
Dumas, "raised history to the level of the novel," or the vitriolic
Lanfrey, who was a mere pamphleteer, would, of course, be consigned--and
very rightly consigned--to utter oblivion. The notorious inaccuracy of
Thiers and the avowed hero-worsh