periods, though rather to supplement the view of which I have been speaking than to oppose it. It has always seemed to me that even as a help to our modern thought and life, the study of history is of greater service in proportion as it relates to peoples whose habits and thoughts are different from those which prevail at the present day. It is therefore upon the use which may be made of the history of earlier times that I wish to speak to you to-day.

One service which a history of former times might render us, and one that is easily comprehensible, would be to afford a refuge for minds that were in any way distressed with the present. This, in fact, is very much the sort of way in which a man like Sir Walter Scott turned to history, that he might escape from environments that were unsatisfactory to him, into what was to him almost a fairyland, where men lived and acted under different conditions to those of his own day. We have, happily a power of solacing ourselves if we have work which we are obliged to do, but which does not occupy all our powers, by thoughts and activities which contrast most sharply with our ordinary employments. It is thus that the contemplation of art or nature seems to fill up that which is wanting to make us more complete than we have been before, and in much the same way we not merely derive pleasure, but enlarge our moral and intellectual sympathies by learning to dwell in thought amongst the men of the past who were more or less unlike ourselves.

Let us

After all, however, we can hardly rest satisfied here. therefore ask ourselves how we are to study history to produce a larger result? We are told again, in those lectures of Professor Seeley's, which are so very suggestive-as is generally the case with anything that Professor Seeley says or writes-that our study of history must be scientific. For some reason or other, however, he did not tell you in what way history is to be scientifically studied.

Let us then ask ourselves what we mean by the science of history? How do we know what we know or think we know? We are, of course, aware that the first requisite of anybody who

studies history in detail, or on a large scale, is accuracy, and we are frequently told that absolute accuracy is what is required of a historian. Now that is a phrase that comes very nicely and pleasantly over the tongue; it glides off very easily. Try, however, to reduce it to practice by telling the story of any single occurrence correctly, and see what dreadful difficulties you get into; how certain you are, if you have any conscience about the matter at all, to learn that much knowledge which you require to give a complete account is for ever unattainable by you. You will become conscious that after you have for several weeks or months been doing your best, you have only succeeded to a very limited extent, because a great part of the evidence which you need is unprocurable. Even if in dealing with contemporary events, when you can put a witness into the box and cross-examine him, you cannot be sure that he has not told you lies, and you may think it very likely that some lies he has told you have failed to be detected. You know, that even with the most effective system of trial and with living witnesses to examine, you cannot be certain of every detail. How much farther is the chance of certainty removed when you come to deal with the events of the past. You wish to know all about some man, whose words in the course of his life were numerous beyond the possibility of reckoning, and of these have, perhaps, been reported less than a-millioneth part of those which he uttered. It may be that he kept up a most voluminous correspondence, and very likely you have got about the thousandth part of the letters which he wrote and received. No doubt, however, you can learn something from the reports of his friends and enemies, of those who thought that he did everything that was right, and of those who thought he did everything that was wrong. What becomes of your historical accuracy? You may depend upon it that no perfectly accurate history will ever be written unless you can get a man to write it who is omniscient.

The outlook certainly does not appear to be cheerful. Fortunately, however, we are not left without comfort. Happily the sources of error decrease as we ascend from the individual to the

class, from the class to the society or to the nation. When you speak of an individual you may misunderstand his motives, or even misdescribe his actions; but when you come to a thousand, or a million, or ten millions of people acting together, you gradually eliminate the sources of error, and are able to trace their progress and to understand their aims. Fortunately history has higher objects than to tell us what individuals did at any given time. I do not in the least wish to say anything against the study of individuals. I believe, if a person were to say, "I will study history and I will confine myself to the general movements of society," he would write the most unsatisfactory history that ever was written. I once had a gentleman call upon me who came from an American publisher. He said, "I want you to write a history of the English people." He explained that he wanted a history of the people generally, apart from what any particular Englishman ever did. I did not consent to do it. If we wish to write the history of the movements of the people as a body, we may resolve to generalize as much as we please, but we shall only generalize correctly in proportion as we know what individuals thought and said. No doubt you must fix your eyes as much as possible on typical individuals, and when you have done that, you need not be frightened at the uncertainty which surrounds all knowledge. This fact and that fact about them may be matter of dispute, but you will have no difficulty as to the general sum of these facts. You will know, generally, what it was at which they aimed, and you will thus be able to estimate their work aright. In proportion, again, as you know what were the aims of many men, you will have a basis upon which to build, and will be able to understand the work of the generation to which these men belonged. Well, then, how do we do that? Do we mean by our Scientific History simply the accumulation of facts? No, we do not. We mean by our Scientific History this: That when a generation has passed by and the next generation comes, the men of whom it is composed are in some way different from their fathers. They have acquired somewhat of new aims, somewhat of new means by

which they attempt to realise their aims. What we wish to do is to trace out what the change has been and how it came about. A mere collection of facts will not be enough for our purpose. Their very multitude will bewilder us, and we need to select those facts which are most important. What, however, is it that constitutes the importance of one fact rather than another. Is it not that it marks the direction in which the stream is setting, or brings before us the resistance caused by old habits of thought to the speedy arrival of the necessary change. Study, alone, will not enable you to make your selection wisely. There will always be many people who study, but who never get any further, who accumulate facts but do not know what to do with them. Don't let me seem to throw cold water upon the accumulation of facts of these people —and, by the way, it is wonderful what a number of persons in England devote themselves, with perfect contentment, to the mere attainment of a correct knowledge of facts-the pages, take Notes and Queries for instance, swarms with their names. There are hundreds of people who find their happiness in correcting mistakes. They do immense service, but they are not historians. A great many of them never rise to any broad conception of what really affected the life of the country even in the time in which they are themselves interested—and are quite as happy if they can discover what happened to Cromwell's head after it fell from its spike over Westminster Hall, as if they were able to give a truer account than had ever been given before of the effect of his political system upon the generation in which he was born and upon the generation which succeeded him. What the historian needs is the tone of mind which enables him to see facts not in isolation, but as living forces, and that tone of mind is what we call the imagination.

The imagination has very much changed its meaning. When Lord Bacon was laying down the classification of the different faculties of the mind as they were applied to different branches of knowledge, he said that "History belongs to the memory; Poetry to the imagination." Now gradually-not altogether, I think, for

the word is one which still preserves a double meaning-but for men who think about the matter it has acquired a new, a very much higher signification. An older writer than Bacon-one who was a man by no means flighty in his thought-Aristotle-said distinctly, "Poetry is truer than History." What did he mean by that? He meant this: That History was, as Bacon said, a matter of memory. It was held to be the duty of the historian to tell simply what had happened-a war here, a political event there, and so on-this it was his business to do; but a poet had carefully to group his facts, to bring them together, to give life and reality to them, and if he was a good poet, he gave this reality by putting more prominently forward what was important in its due relation to the action or thought, rather than that which is unimportant. We say that a poet who can do that has imagination, which is something very different to that mere fancy of which Bacon speaks. And so it has always seemed to me that if historians want really a guide they must go, not to the great masters of their own art, but to the great masters of another, and that if you would deal with history you must first know your Shakspere, and such of his fellow-poets as have most closely tro lden in his steps. It is these writers who will show you the best and highest way to deal with history. There are, indeed, many of Shakspere's plays which, treated as works of poetry, or rather as studies of the human mind, stand far higher than the play of Richard II.; but to me, as a historian, the play of Richard II., has always been the one which seems to me to be the most marvellous. He has there dealt with two characters, Richard II. and Henry IV. As Gervinus pointed out long ago, you can evidently see that he likes Richard II. better than he likes Henry IV.; but you can evidently also see that-with that wonderful instinct of justice which characterizes the man, he makes it plain that Richard II. is sure to lose; and not only is sure to lose, but ought to lose, and that the unaimable, practical Henry IV. is sure to win and ought to win. The sensitive mind, the mind capable of tender feeling, the man who can speak beautiful words and