deduce with some accuracy the
daily routine, the several duties, and hear the professional jokes and
squabbles, of their officers and crews. The serious people who write
history can never fill the place of the gossips, who pour out an
unpremeditated mixture of intimate knowledge and idle trash.

Trash? Upon the whole is not the trash the truest history? perhaps not
the most valuable, but the most real? If you want contemporary color,
contemporary atmosphere, you must seek it among the impressions which
can be obtained only from those who have lived a life amid particular
surroundings, which they breathe and which colors them--dyes them in
the wool. However skilless, they cannot help reproducing, any more
than water poured from an old ink-bottle can help coming out more or
less black; although, if sufficiently pretentious, they can
monstrously caricature, especially if they begin with the modest
time-worn admission that they are more familiar with the marling-spike
than with the pen. But even the caricature born of pretentiousness
will not prevent the unpremeditated betrayal of conditions, facts, and
incidents, which help reconstruct the _milieu_; how much more, then,
the unaffected simplicity of the born story-teller. I do not know how
Froissart ranks as an authority with historians. I have not read him
for years; and my recollections are chiefly those of childhood, with
all the remoteness and all the vividness which memory preserves from
early impressions. I think I now might find him wearisome; not so in
boyhood. He was to me then, and seems to me now, a glorified Flexible
Grommet or Jonathan Oldjunk; ranking, as to them, as Boswell does
towards the common people of biography. That there are many solid
chunks of useful information to be dug out of him I am sure; that his
stories are all true, I have no desire to question; but what among it
all is so instructive, so entertaining, as the point of view of
himself, his heroes, and his colloquists--the particular contemporary
modification of universal human nature in which he lived, and moved,
and had his being?

If such a man has the genius of his business, as had Froissart and
Boswell, he excels in proportion to his unconsciousness of the fact;
his colors run truer. For lesser gobblers, who have not genius, the
best way to lose consciousness is just to IT themselves go; if they
endeavor to paint artistically the muddle will be worse. To such the
proverb of the cobbler