The three English historians who have most influenced thought from 1776 to 1900 are those whom John Morley called "great born men of letters"[13]--Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle; and two of these despised mathematics. "As soon as I understood the principles," wrote Gibbon in his "Autobiography," "I relinquished forever the pursuit of the Mathematics; nor can I lament that I desisted before my mind was hardened by the habit of rigid demonstration, so destructive of the finer feelings of moral evidence, which must however determine the actions and opinions of our lives."[14] Macaulay, while a student at Cambridge, wrote to his mother: "Oh, for words to express my abomination of mathematics ... 'Discipline' of the mind! Say rather starvation, confinement, torture, annihilation!... I feel myself becoming a personification of Algebra, a living trigonometrical canon, a walking table of logarithms. All my perceptions of elegance and beauty gone, or at least going.... Farewell then Homer and Sophocles and Cicero."[15] I must in fairness state that in after life Macaulay regretted his lack of knowledge of mathematics and physics, but his career and Gibbon's demonstrate that mathematics need have no place on the list of the historian's studies. Carlyle, however, showed mathematical ability which attracted the attention of Legendre and deemed himself sufficiently qualified to apply, when he was thirty-nine years old, for the professorship of Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. He did not succeed in obtaining the post but, had he done so, he "would have made," so Froude his biographer thinks, "the school of Astronomy at Edinburgh famous throughout Europe."[16] When fifty-two, Carlyle said that "the man who had mastered the first forty-seven propositions of Euclid stood nearer to God than he had done before."[17] I may cap this with some words of Emerson, who in much of his thought resembled Carlyle: "What hours of melancholy my mathematical works cost! It was long before I learned that there is something wrong with a man's brain who loves them."[18] Mathematics are of course the basis of many studies, trades, and professions and are sometimes of benefit as a recreation for men of affairs. Devotion to Euclid undoubtedly added to Lincoln's strength, but the necessary range of knowledge for the historian is so vast that he cannot spend his evenings and restless nights in the solution of mathematical problems. In short, mathematics are of no more use to him than is Greek to the civil or mechanical engineer.