2i6 C. F. Adams The Greek follows hard upon the Jew ; and of the Greek I have already said enough. He had a natural sense of art in all its shapes ; and, when it came to writing history, Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon seemed mere evolutions. Of the three, Thucydides alone combined in perfection the qualities of erudition, judgment and form ; but to the last-named element, their literary form, it is that all three owe their immortality. It is the same with the Romans — Livy, Sallust, Tacitus. The Roman had not that artistic instinct so noticeable in the Greek. He was, on the contrary, essentially a soldier, a ruler and organizer ; and a literary imitator. Yet now and again even in art he attained a proficiency which challenged his models. Cicero has held his own with Demosthenes ; and Virgil, Horace and Juvenal survive, each through a mastery of form. Tacitus, it is needless to say, is the Latin Thucydides. In him again, five centuries after Thucydides, the three essentials are combined in the highest degree. The orbs of the great historical constellation are wide apart, — the interval that divided Tacitus from Thucydides is the same as that which divided Matthew Paris from Edward Gibbon ; — twice that which divides Shakespeare from Tennyson. Coming rapidly down to modern times, of the three great lan- guages fruitful in historical work, — the French, English and Ger- man, — those writing in the first have alone approached the aptitude for form natural to the Greeks ; but in Gibbon only of those who have, in the three tongues, devoted themselves to historical work, were all the cardinal elements of historical greatness found united in such a degree as to command general assent to his pre-eminence. The Germans are remarkable for erudition, and have won respect for their judgment; but their disregard of form has been innate, — indicative either of a lack of perception or of contempt.^ Their work accordingly will hardly prove enduring. The French, from Voltaire down, have evinced a keener perception of form, nor have they been lacking in erudition. Critical and quick to perceive, they have still failed in any one instance to combine the three great attributes each in its highest degree. Accordingly, in the historical firmament they count no star of the first magnitude. Their lights have been meteoric rather than permanent. In the case of Great Britain it is interesting to follow the familiar ' " Not only does a German writer possess, as a rule, a full measure of the patient industry which is required for thinking everything that may be thought about his theme, and knowing what others have thought ; he alone, it seems, when he comes to write a book about it, is imbued with the belief that that book ought necessarily to be a complete compendium of everything that has been so thought, whether by himself or others." The Athenanwi, September 8, 1900, p. 303.
