ned whether the change of this old kind is
not in itself almost as noteworthy as in the other cases is the
practical introduction of a new. What the change is was
epigrammatically, if somewhat paradoxically, summed up recently by a
great authority, Lord Acton. "History," the Cambridge Professor of that
art or science said in his inaugural lecture, "has become independent of
the historian."

It is possible to demur to the fact, but it is not difficult to explain
the meaning. From the necessity of the case, the earliest history, at
least in the West, is almost independent of documents and records.
Thucydides and Herodotus wrote, the one from what he had actually seen
and heard of contemporary events, the other partly from the same sources
and partly from tradition of short date. Somewhat later historians of
course had their predecessors before them, and in a few cases a certain
amount of document, but never a large amount. When history, vernacular
or Latin, began to be written again in the dark and middle ages, the
absence of documents was complicated (except in the case of those early
chroniclers, English and Irish chiefly, who merely put down local
events) by that more peculiar and unaccountable, though possibly
kindred, absence of critical spirit, which, of the many things more or
less fancifully attributed to the mediaeval mind, is perhaps the most
certain. It is a constant puzzle to modern readers how to account
exactly for the fashion in which men, evidently of great intellectual
ability, managed to be without any sense of the value of evidence, or
any faculty of distinguishing palpable and undoubted fiction from what
either was, or reasonably might be held to be, history. But by degrees
this sense came into being side by side with the multiplication of the
document itself. Even then, however, it was very long before the average
historian either could or would regard himself as bound first to consult
all the documents available, and then to sift and adjust them in
accordance rather with the laws of evidence and the teachings of the
philosophy of history than with his own predilections, or with the
necessities of an agreeable narrative. But the patient industry of the
French school of historical scholars, at the end of the seventeenth and
the beginning of the eighteenth century, founded this new tradition; the
magnificent genius of Gibbon showed how the observance of it might not
be incompatible with history-writing