t thinkers whose methods have furthered the advance of this spirit of
historical criticism, I shall pass over those annalists and chroniclers
who intervened between Thucydides and Polybius. Yet perhaps it may serve
to throw new light on the real nature of this spirit and its intimate
connection with all other forms of advanced thought if I give some
estimate of the character and rise of those many influences prejudicial
to the scientific study of history which cause such a wide gap between
these two historians.

Foremost among these is the growing influence of rhetoric and the
Isocratean school, which seems to have regarded history as an arena for
the display of either pathos or paradoxes, not a scientific investigation
into laws.

The new age is the age of style. The same spirit of exclusive attention
to form which made Euripides often, like Swinburne, prefer music to
meaning and melody to morality, which gave to the later Greek statues
that refined effeminacy, that overstrained gracefulness of attitude, was
felt in the sphere of history. The rules laid down for historical
composition are those relating to the aesthetic value of digressions, the
legality of employing more than one metaphor in the same sentence, and
the like; and historians are ranked not by their power of estimating
evidence but by the goodness of the Greek they write.

I must note also the important influence on literature exercised by
Alexander the Great; for while his travels encouraged the more accurate
research of geography, the very splendour of his achievements seems to
have brought history again into the sphere of romance. The appearance of
all great men in the world is followed invariably by the rise of that
mythopoeic spirit and that tendency to look for the marvellous, which is
so fatal to true historical criticism. An Alexander, a Napoleon, a
Francis of Assisi and a Mahomet are thought to be outside the limiting
conditions of rational law, just as comets were supposed to be not very
long ago. While the founding of that city of Alexandria, in which
Western and Eastern thought met with such strange result to both,
diverted the critical tendencies of the Greek spirit into questions of
grammar, philology and the like, the narrow, artificial atmosphere of
that University town (as we may call it) was fatal to the development of
that independent and speculative spirit of research which strikes out new
methods of inquiry, of which historica