t Murray, and numerous other classical scholars of divers
nationalities; by Fustel de Coulanges, the greatest of
nineteenth-century mediaevalists; by Mahan, whose writings have
exercised a marked influence on current politics, and who is thus an
instance of "an historian who has helped to make history as well as to
record it," and by a host of others.

At the close of his book Mr. Gooch very truly points out that "the scope
of history has gradually widened till it has come to include every
aspect of the life of humanity." Many of the social and economic
subjects of which the historian has now to treat are of an extremely
controversial character. However high may be the ideal of truth, which
will be entertained, it would appear that the various forms in which the
facts of history may be stated, as also the conclusions to be drawn from
these facts, will tend to divergence rather than to uniformity of
treatment. It is not, therefore, probable that the partisan
historian--or, at all events, the historian who will be accused of
partisanship--will altogether disappear from literature. Neither, on the
whole, is his disappearance to be desired, for it would almost certainly
connote the composition of somewhat vapid and colourless histories.

The verdicts which Mr. Gooch passes on the historians whose writings he
briefly summarises are eminently judicious, though it cannot be expected
that in all cases they will command universal assent. In a work which
ranges over so wide a field it is scarcely possible that some slips
should not have occurred. We may indicate one of these, which it would
be as well to correct in the event of any future editions being
published. On p. 435 the authorship of _Fieramosca_ and _Nicolo dei
Lapi_, which were written by Azeglio, is erroneously attributed to
Cesare Balbo.

[Footnote 76: _History and Historians of the Nineteenth Century_. By
G.P. Gooch. London: Longmans and Co. 10s. 6d.]

XI

THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY[77]

_"The Spectator," May 10, 1913_

Shelley, himself a translator of one of the best known of the epigrams
of the Anthology, has borne emphatic testimony to the difficulties of
translation. "It were as wise," he said, "to cast a violet into a
crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and
odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations
of a poet."

The task of rendering Greek into English verse is in some respects
specially d