The great history is a partisan history, but it is the work of a bold and out-spoken and manly partisan. The colors that he uses are intense and glaring; but they are blended in the making of his great panorama of King William’s times, with a marvellous art. We are told that he was an advocate and not a philosopher; that he was a rhetorician and not a poet. We may grant all this, and we may grant more--and yet I think we shall continue to cherish his work. Men of greater critical acumen and nicer exploration may sap the grounds of some of his judgments; cooler writers, and those of more self-restraint, may draw the fires by which his indignations are kindled; but it will be very long before the world will cease to find high intellectual refreshment in the crackle of his epigrams, in his artful deployment of testimony, in his picturesque array of great historic characters and in the roll of his sonorous periods. Yet he is the wrong man to copy; his exaltations make an unsafe model. He exaggerates--but he knows how to exaggerate. He paints a truth in colors that flow all round the truth, and enlarge it. Such outreach of rhetoric wants corresponding capacity of brain, and pen-strokes that never swerve or tremble. Smallish men should beware how they copy methods which want fulness of power and the besom of enthusiasm to fill out their compass. Homer can make all his sea-waves iridescent and multitudinous--all his women high-bosomed or blue-eyed--and all his mountains sweep the skies: but _we_ should be modest and simple.