AUGUSTIN THIERRY (1795-1856) nobly led the way. Some pages of Chateaubriand, full of the sentiment of the past, were his first inspiration; at a later time the influence of Fauriel and the novels of Walter Scott, "the master of historical divination," confirmed him in his sense of the uses of imagination as an aid to the scholarship of history. For a time he acted as secretary to Saint-Simon, and under his influence proposed a scheme for a community of European peoples which should leave intact the nationality of each. Then he parted from his master, to pursue his way in independence. It seemed to him that the social condition and the revolutions of modern Europe had their origins in the Germanic invasions, and especially in the Norman Conquest of England. As he read the great collection of the original historians of France and Gaul, he grew indignant against the modern travesties named history, indignant against writers without erudition, who could not see, and writers without imagination, who could not depict. The conflict of races--Saxons and Normans in England, Gauls and Franks in his own country--remained with him as a dominant idea, but he would not lose himself in generalisations; he would involve the abstract in concrete details; he would see, and he would depict. There was much philosophy in abstaining from philosophy overmuch. The _Lettres sur l'Histoire de France_ were followed in 1825 by the _Histoire de la Conquete de l'Angleterre_, in which the art of historiography attained a perfection previously unknown. Through charter and chronicle, Thierry had reached the spirit of the past. He had prophesied upon the dry bones and to the wind, and the dry bones lived. As a liberal, he had been interested in contemporary politics. His political ardour had given him that historical perspicacity which enabled him to discover the soul behind an ancient text. In 1826 Thierry, the martyr of his passionate studies, suffered the calamity of blindness. With the aid of his distinguished brother, of friends, and secretaries--above all, with the aid of the devoted woman who became his wife, he pursued his work. The _Recits des Temps Merovingiens_ and the _Essai sur l'Histoire de la Formation du Tiers Etat_ were the labours of a sightless scholar. His passion for perfection was greater than ever; twenty, fifteen lines a day contented him, if his idea was rendered clear and enduring in faultless form. Paralysis made its steady advance; still he kept his intellect above his infirmities, and followed truth and beauty. On May 22, 1856, he woke his attendant at four in the morning, and dictated with laboured speech the alteration of a phrase for the revised _Conquete_. On the same day, "insatiable of perfection," Thierry died. He is not, either in substance, thought, or style, the greatest of modern French historians; but, more than any other, he was an initiator.