of the great enterprise which the writing of history holds out itself to be. “Hujus enim fidei exempla majorum, vicissitudines rerum, fundamenta prudentiæ civilis, hominum denique nomen et fama commissa sunt.” {183} _Ellesmere_. Just wait a minute for me, and do not talk about the essay till I come back. I am going for Anster’s _Faust_. _Dunsford_. What has Ellesmere got in his head? _Milverton_. I see. There is a passage where Faust, in his most discontented mood, falls foul of history—in his talk to Wagner, if I am not mistaken. _Dunsford_. How beautiful it is this evening! Look at that yellow-green near the sunset. _Milverton_. The very words that Coleridge uses. I always think of them when I see that tint. _Dunsford_. I daresay his words were in my mind, but I have forgotten what you allude to. _Milverton_. “O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d, All this long eve, so balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow-green: And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye! And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen: Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel how beautiful they are.” _Dunsford_. Admirable! In the _Ode to Dejection_, is it not? where, too, there are those lines, “O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live.” _Milverton_. But here comes Ellesmere with triumphant look. You look as jovial, my dear Ellesmere, as if you were a Bentley that had found a false quantity in a Boyle. _Ellesmere_. Listen and perpend, my historical friends. “To us, my friend, the times that are gone by Are a mysterious book, sealed with seven seals: That which you call the spirit of ages past Is but, in truth, the spirit of some few authors In which those ages are beheld reflected, With what distortion strange heaven only knows. Oh! often, what a toilsome thing it is This study of thine—at the first glance we fly it. A mass of things confusedly heaped together; A lumber-room of dusty documents, Furnished with all approved court-precedents And old traditional maxims! History! Facts dramatised say rather—action—plot— Sentiment, everything the writer’s own, As it bests fits the web-work of his story, With here and there a solitary fact Of consequence, by those grave chroniclers, Pointed with many a moral apophthegm, And wise old saws, learned at the puppet-shows.” _Milverton_. Yes; admirable lines; they describe to the life the very faults we have been considering as the faults of badly-written histories. I do not see that they do much more.