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HARYARD

COLLEGE
LIBRARY

04341

COPYRIGHT IN 1900 BY FORDS, HOWARD, & HULBERT.

NOTE.

THE object of this gathering of ideas from expert historical and critical writers is to gain a conception of the demands of true Historical Art." The present time is crowded with histories and biographies, great and small, striving to " summon up remembrance of things past," by rescuing old chronicles and re-creating the great men and women whose thoughts or deeds first gave them being. And it were surely well that we who read, in hope of getting truthful pictures of the earlier, simpler days out of which have grown and branched our own more complex times, should have some guide of principles by which to test the tales these story-tellers offer us.

The essays here collected are drawn from various sources; yet they bear a logical relation to each other and to the theme of this little book,-namely, the true aim and method of artistic historical writing.

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MACAULAY is represented by the larger part of one of his most famous critical articles from the Edinburgh Review,—first, explaining why "to be a really great historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions," then making a brilliant survey of the most eminent ancient and modern historical writers, and closing with his admirable ideal portrait of the model historian-a fragment often quoted, yet well worth frequent reading, and here preserved in its original connection. Dean STANLEY describes the sifting process" of history as to facts, and shows the need of the picturesque element in reconstructing men and manners as they were. FROUDE makes plain the demand for discrimination and charity in the verdict on statesmen and rulers, whose work, being based on political theories, will always be debated, while that of artists, poets, musicians, stands free from personal prejudice after their death, and may be judged on its merits, fairly. JOHN FISKE shows how significant were the social conditions under which great men labored, illustrating by the

impossibility of the appearance of inventors and discoverers before kings and warriors had done their chief work in the creation of nations, and before mankind had turned for power rather to industry and commerce than to war. ARMSTRONG describes and analyzes the work of a single writer who seems to him to offer a rare combination of the just, the clear, and the comprehensive, with the imaginative picturesque. And EMERSON concludes the picture of the worth and scope of history with the central fact that "the proper study of mankind is MAN; that in great men we behold ourselves in the ideal; and that the genuinely great are unerringly selected by time, and will stand above their fellows forever.

In all, it is hoped that this little handbook may be not only a stimulus to the reading of History, but also a helpful guide to the reading with discrimination, as well as affording in itself a delightful series of papers on this very popular realm of litera

ture.

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