Here is truth and eloquence, at one blow, enough to stagger the strongest of us. "It is the artist only who is the true historian," he again resolutely affirms. We should apprehend that, unless history were allowed to stand on a separate basis of its own, supported by its own peculiar testimony, it could be of little use even in enlarging the boundaries of art. History is said to enable the artist to transcend the limits which the modes of thought and feeling of his own day would else prescribe to him. But if the rules by which we judge of truth in history be no other than those by which we judge of truth or probability in works of fiction, (and to this the views of Mr Sims inevitably conduct us)--if history has not its own independent place and value--it can no longer lend this aid--no longer raise art above, or out of the circle in which existing opinions and sympathies would place her. Each generation of artists would not learn new truths from history, but history would be rewritten by each generation of artists. How, for example, could a Protestant of the nineteenth century, with whom religion and morality are inseparably combined--with whom conscience is always both moral and religious--how could he, guided only by his own experience, represent, or give credit to that entire separation of the two modes of feeling, moral and religious, which encounters us frequently in the middle ages, and constantly in the Pagan world? Surely a fact like this, learned from historical testimony, has a value of its own, other and greater than any fictitious representation which an artist might supply. But even this fictitious representation, as we have said, would grow null and void if not upheld by the independent testimony of history; the past would become the attendant shadow merely of the present.