Perhaps the Contessa M---- C---- could do it; and if the book is on the Index (which is not unlikely),[4] she could easily get a dispensation by stating her object in wishing to read it. I suppose she is not a Garibaldian, by the way? that would never do. She should express as little opinion of any sort as possible--I don't mean, of course, that she should abstain from stating known facts--and should leave the man to speak for himself by an analysis and a string of quotations, which must be given from the Italian text, and severely literal. The above example--many others could of course be cited--are sufficient to indicate the spirit of rigid impartiality in which Bute treated, and desired that others should treat, historical questions of every kind, and his almost passionate endeavours to follow in all such researches the old maxim, _Audi alteram partem_. It must be confessed, however--indeed he himself practically owned--that were his historiographical principles universally adopted, English literature, if not the cause of historic truth, would be the poorer. "Most history," he said in one of his addresses to a body of university students, "is not history at all, but romance, sometimes fascinating but seldom trustworthy, coloured, as it often is deeply, with the prejudices and prepossessions of its {142} writers. Names--facts--dates--there is true history; but when a man gets beyond that, when he begins to dissect characters, to attribute motives, to analyse principles of action, then in nine cases out of ten he ceases to be a historian and becomes a romancer. Gibbon, with his enormous erudition, could have presented to us all the details of Rome's decline as they really were---he has given us instead a travesty of them distorted by his own devilish hatred of Christianity. Macaulay, whose whiggery may have been all very well on the hustings, disgusts us by intruding it into every page of his so-called "History of England." Froude vaunts that his history of the English Reformation is entirely based on original documents; by which he really means that he has used all those which have helped him in his self-imposed task of whitewashing Henry VIII., and has suppressed all the rest.[5] I need not give other instances."