ated theories, personal preferences, prejudices and
aversions, under the guise of solemn and irrefutable truth attested by
all the exact sciences known to man, but romance which aims like any
other art at communicating from one person to another something of the
inner and essential quality of life as it has been lived, even if the
material used is textually doubtful or even probably apocryphal. The
deadly enemy of good, sound history is scientific historical criticism.
The true history is romantic tradition; the stimulating thing, the tale
that makes the blood leap, the pictorial incident that raises up in an
instant the luminous vision of some great thing that once was.

I would not exchange Kit Marlowe's

_"Is this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"_

for all the critical commentaries of Teutonic pedants on the character
and attributes of Helen of Troy as these have (to them) been revealed by
archaeological investigations. I dare say that Bishop St. Remi of Reims
never said in so many words "Bow thy proud head, Sicambrian; destroy
what thou hast worshipped, worship what thou hast destroyed," and that
the Meroving monarch did not go thence to issue an "order of the day"
that the army should forthwith march down to the river and be baptized
by battalions; but _there_ is the clear, unforgettable picture of the
times and the men, and it will remain after the world has forgotten that
some one has proved that St. Remi never met Clovis, and that he himself
was probably only a variant of the great and original "sun-myth."

Closely allied with the teaching of history and forming a link as it
were with the teaching of English, is a branch of study at present
unformulated and unknown, but, I am convinced, of great importance in
education as a method of character development. Life has always focused
in great personalities, and formal history has recognized the fact while
showing little discretion, and sometimes very defective judgment, in the
choices it has made. A past period becomes our own in so far as we
translate it through its personalities and its art; the original
documents matter little, except when they become misleading, as they
frequently do, when read through contemporary spectacles. Now the great
figures of a time are not only princes and politicians, conquerors and
conspirators, they are quite as apt to be the knights and heroes and
brave gentlemen who held no con