establish fact, and hard to preserve it. Nevertheless, the thing is done, and 'tis the dearest interest of knowledge.
Poet. Nay, but examine the process. Take the city hard by. Yesterday there happened in it many millions of events, great and small, To-day there appears a sheet recording a few hundred of these. Who made the selection, and why? Are the most important events recorded? They are generally not even known. You have spoken of newspapers as "material," but, long before you get a newspaper, Art and Selection have been at work. Plainly the events selected have not been chosen for their value to the historian, too often he may wander through wildernesses of newspapers in search of the particular facts that come to have a meaning for him. A certain rough principle of selection I suppose there must be, but it is hard to divine. A shop-window is broken, or a Mayor lunches, and straightway the world knows it. Could anything be more wantonly whimsical? So that my objection to your newspapers, after all, is not that they are history, but that they are art, and very bad art—the worst of things. But if selection and rendering count for so much in the history of a day and a single town, what must they not count for in the history of centuries and a whole people?
Hist. The affair is not so hopeless as you make out. Thrones help, no doubt, and wars, and parliaments. Who is it that says, "Every beggarly corporation affords the State a mayor or two bailiffs yearly, a king or a poet is not born every year?" And I am willing to confess that great men often owe more than a little of their greatness to the laziness of historians, who are glad to simplify their task or recreate themselves with rhetoric. But the predilection for politics, which you deride, furnishes a guiding clue through the facts. Without some such clue history of course would be vain. That is why agreat
