of the most literary kind; the
national and natural tendency of German study adopted it; and shortly
after Gibbon's own day the school of historians, which is nothing if not
documentary, began gradually to oust that of which the picturesque, if
not strictly historical, legend about the Abbe Vertot and his "Mon siege
est fait" is the anecdotic _locus classicus_ of characterisation.

It has been shown, in the chapter devoted to the subject, how this
school of documentary historians grew and flourished in England itself,
from the days of Turner and Palgrave to those of Froude and Freeman.
Certainly there could not, at least for some time, be said to be any
very sensible tendency in history to dispense with the historian, or, in
other and perhaps rather more intelligible words, of history ceasing to
be literary. No historians have been more omnilegent, more careful of
the document, than Carlyle and Macaulay, much as they differed in other
respects, and in no histories has the "historian"--that is to say, the
personal writer as opposed to the mere "diplomatist"--been more evident
than he is in theirs. Nor is it very easy to see why the mere study of
the document, still less why the mere accumulation of the document,
should ever render superfluous the intelligent shaping which the
historian alone can give. In the first place, documents are
contradictory and want shifting and harmonising; in the second they want
grasping and interpreting; in the third (and most important of all) they
need to be made alive.

Nevertheless Lord Acton's somewhat enigmatic utterance points, however
vaguely, to real dangers, and it would be idle to say that these dangers
have not been exemplified in the period and department we are
considering. In the first place, the ever-increasing burden of the
documents to be consulted is more and more crushing, and more and more
likely to induce any one but a mere drudge either to relinquish the task
in despair, or to perform it with a constant fear before his eyes, which
prevents freedom and breadth of work. In the second it leads, on the one
hand, to enormous extension of the scale of histories, on the other to
an undue restraining and limiting of their subjects. Macaulay took four
large volumes to do, nominally at least, not more than a dozen years;
Froude twelve to cover fifty or sixty; Grote as many to deal with the
important, but neither long nor richly documented, period of Greek, or
rather Athenian, fl