In this wide field of the dead how much of early thought and feeling, and life is storied. How much contemporary history in wood and stone, in earthenware, and glass, and paint. Contemporary history—not history composed, heaven save the mark! centuries after the events, often by authors (sometimes truly the authors of all they tell) who did not understand their own time, often merely for bread and cheese;—not composed twentieth-hand from writings which, even at their original source and fountain-head, were the work of men who were not agents in what they endeavoured to record, and who, not knowing truly the events, their causes, or their consequences, were but ill qualified to write the record;—not composed when the feelings and ways of thinking of the time were no longer living things, but had died out, and other thoughts and feelings come in their place, and when what the writer had to construct had become obscure by party prejudice in politics and religion, and by social misunderstandings. Nothing of this kind is here. What is here is contemporary history, presented in such a form that it is the actual pressure and embodiment of the heart and mind of each individual. Here are the occupations he delighted in, the sentiments that stirred him, the business that was the business of his life, the clothes he wore, the furniture he used, the forms religious thought had assumed in his mind, the forms social arrangements had assumed around him. No people have ever so written their history. Here is a biography of each man as he knew himself. Here every man is a Boswell to himself. It is a nation’s life individually photographed in granite.