I do not now call to mind any more notable chapter which illustrates this than the chapter of Curtius, "The years of peace." One is perhaps better adapted for the keen enjoyment of it if he does not know the original material, for his suspicion that some of the inferences are strained and unwarranted might become a certainty. But accepting it as a mature and honest elaboration by one of the greatest historians of Greece of our day, it is a sample of the vivifying of dry bones and of a dovetailing of facts and ideas that makes a narrative to charm and instruct. You feel that the spirit of that age we all like to think and dream about is there, and if you have been so fortunate as to visit the Athens of to-day, that chapter, so great is the author's constructive imagination, carries you back and makes you for the moment live in the Athens of Pericles, of Sophocles, of Phidias and Herodotus. With the abundance of materials for modern history, and, for that reason, our tendency to diffuseness, nothing is so important as a thorough acquaintance with the best classic models, such as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus. In Herodotus you have an example of an interesting story with the unity of the narrative well sustained in spite of certain unnecessary digressions. His book is obviously a life work and the work of a man who had an extensive knowledge gained by reading, social intercourse, and travel, and who brought his knowledge to bear upon his chosen task. That the history is interesting all admit, but in different periods of criticism stress is sometimes laid on the untrustworthy character of the narrative, with the result that there has been danger of striking Herodotus from the list of historical models; but such is the merit of his work that the Herodotus cult again revives, and, I take it, is now at its height. I received, six years ago, while in Egypt, a vivid impression of him whom we used to style the Father of History. Spending one day at the great Pyramids, when, after I had satisfied my first curiosity, after I had filled my eyes and mind with the novelty of the spectacle, I found nothing so gratifying to the historic sense as to gaze on those most wonderful monuments of human industry, constructed certainly 5000 years ago, and to read at the same time the account that Herodotus gave of his visit there about 2350 years before the date of my own. That same night I read in a modern and garish Cairo hotel the current number of the _London Times_. In it was an account of an annual meeting of the Royal Historical Society and a report of a formal and carefully prepared address of its president, whose subject was "Herodotus," whose aim was to point out the value of the Greek writer as a model to modern historians. The _Times_, for the moment laying aside its habitual attack on the then Liberal government, devoted its main leader to Herodotus--to his merits and the lessons he conveyed to the European writers.