ld seem that he did not first methodically analyse them in
order to determine their meaning.

[132] Fustel de Coulanges explains very clearly the danger of this
_method_: "Some students begin by forming an opinion ... and it is not
till afterwards that they begin to read the texts. They run a great risk
of not understanding them at all, or of understanding them wrongly. What
happens is that a kind of tacit contest goes on between the text and the
preconceived opinions of the reader; the mind refuses to grasp what is
contrary to its idea, and the issue of the contest commonly is, not that
the mind surrenders to the evidence of the text, but that the text
yields, bends, and accommodates itself to the preconceived opinion....
To bring one's personal ideas into the study of texts is the subjective
method. A man thinks he is contemplating an object, and it is his own
idea that he is contemplating. He thinks he is observing a fact, and the
fact at once assumes the colour, and the significance his mind wishes it
to have. He thinks he is reading a text, and the words of the text take
a particular meaning to suit a ready-made opinion. It is this subjective
method which has done most harm to the history of the Merovingian
epoch.... To read the texts was not enough; what was required was to
read them before forming any convictions...." (_Monarchie franque_, p.
31). For the same reason Fustel de Coulanges deprecated the reading of
one document in the light of another; he protested against the custom of
explaining the _Germania_ of Tacitus by the barbaric laws. In the _Revue
des questions historiques_, 1897, vol. i, a lesson on method, _De
l'analyse des textes historiques_, is given apropos of a commentary by
M. Monod on Gregory of Tours: "The historian ought to begin his work
with an exact analysis of each document.... The analysis of a text ...
consists in determining the sense of each word and eliciting the true
meaning of the writer.... Instead of searching for the sense of each of
the historian's words, and for the thought he has expressed in them, he
[M. Monod] comments on each sentence in the light of what is found in
Tacitus or the Salic law.... We should understand what analysis really
is. Many talk about it, few use it.... The use of analysis is, by an
attentive study of every detail, to elicit from a text all that is in
it; not to introduce into the text what is not there."

After reading this excellent advice it will be