l them human, and give
life to the pallid figures of far-off warriors and lawgivers.

To these four aptitudes one need hardly add the faculty of literary
exposition, for whoever possesses in large measure the last three, or
even the last alone, cannot fail to interest his readers; and what
more does literary talent mean?

Distinguishing these several aptitudes, historians will be found to
fall into two classes, according as there predominates in them the
critical or the imaginative faculty. Though no one can attain
greatness without both gifts, still they may be present in very
unequal degrees. Some will investigate tangible facts and their
relations with special care, occupying themselves chiefly with that
constitutional and diplomatic side of history in which positive
conclusions are (from the comparative abundance of records) most
easily reached. Others will be drawn towards the dramatic and personal
elements in history, primarily as they appear in the lives of famous
individual men, secondarily as they are seen, more dimly but not less
impressively, in groups and masses of men, and in a nation at large,
and will also observe and dwell upon incidents of private life or
features of social and religious custom, which the student of stately
politics passes by.

As Coleridge, when he divided thinkers into two classes, took Plato
as the type of one, Aristotle of the other, so we may take as
representatives of these two tendencies among historians Thucydides
for the critical and philosophical, Herodotus for the imaginative
and picturesque. The former does not indeed want a sense of the
dramatic grandeur of a situation; his narrative of the later part of
the Athenian expedition against Syracuse is like a piece of Aeschylus
in prose. So too Herodotus is by no means without a philosophical
view of things, nor without a critical instinct, although his
generalisations are sometimes vague or fanciful, and his critical
apparatus rudimentary. Each is so splendid because each is wide,
with the great gifts largely, although not equally, developed.

Green was an historian of the Herodotean type. He possessed capacities
which belong to the other type also; he was critical, sceptical,
perhaps too sceptical, and philosophical. Yet the imaginative quality
was the leading and distinctive quality in his mind and writing. An
ordinary reader, if asked what was the main impression given by the
_Short History of the English People_, would