( 173 )
Many a magnificent ideal of the Historian has been put on paper. Sièyes could not fabricate a constitution more easily than the Critic will limn you a fancy portrait of the possible Historian. To transfer the Constitution from its pigeon-hole to practice, was quite another matter; and so is the flesh-and-blood fulfilment of the idealised writer of history. Nevertheless, it is welt to refer sometimes to some such ideal, however lofty—indeed the loftier the better—if only to restrain a too implicit confidence in, and plenary indulgence towards, some favourite author in this line of things. The true historian must possess, according to an "Able Editor," many of the faculties of an epic poet; aiming at his severe purpose, his cumulative interest, his conjunction of grandeur in the whole with simplicity in the parts—the solemnity of his spirit, the general gravity of his tone, the episodes in which he gathers up, as in baskets, the fragments of his story,—the high argument, or moral, less standing-up from, than living through, the whole strain—his union of imaginative and intellectual power, and his perspicuity, power, and clear energy of language. "Besides all this, the historian must do the following things: he must be able to live in and reproduce the age of which he writes; he most sympathise with its ruling passions and purposes, without being swallowed up or identified with them; he must understand the points, alike of agreement and of difference, between the past age and his own time; he must exercise a judicial impartiality in determining the deeds, motives, purposes, and pretexts of various parties; he must make the proper degree of allowance—nor more nor less—when judging of dubious or criminal conduct, for diversities of moral codes, national customs, and states of progress; he must practise the power of severe selection of facts, looking at them always in their representative character; he must unite broad views of the general current of events, and of the advance of the whole of society, with intense rushing lights, cast upon particular points and pinnacles of his subject; he must have a distinct and valid theory of progress; he must map out the under-currents, as well as the upper streams of his story; he must add a love of the picturesque, the beautiful, and the heroic, to an intense passion for truth; he must give to general principles the incarnate interest of facts, and make facts the graceful symbols of general principles; he must, in fine, be acquainted not only with the philosophy, science, statistics, and poetry, but with the religion of his art, and regard Clio not as a muse, but as a goddess." Such, an historian of the Scottish Covenanters professes to be his ideal, "in part," of a historian after the "own heart" of truth, love, and beauty; such the perilous preface to his own essay in historical composition. Rasselas would say to him. Thou hast convinced me it is impossible to be an historian.
Turn from the magnificent ideal to the extant Acts and Monuments of the Muse of History. Hear her apostrophised by a "Popular Lec-
