It is not easy, to say truth, to find actual examples when you are constructing the ideal historian, the man with the vision and the faculty divine to see affairs justly and tell of them completely. If you are not satisfied with this passionate and intolerant seer of Chelsea, whom will you choose? Shall it be Gibbon, whom all praise, but so few read? He, at any rate, is passionless, it would appear. But who could write epochal history with passion? All hot humors of the mind must, assuredly, cool when spread at large upon so vast a surface. One must feel like a sort of minor providence in traversing that great tract of world history, and catch in spite of one’s self the gait and manner of a god. This stately procession of generations moves on remote from the ordinary levels of our human sympathy. ’Tis a wide view of nations and peoples and dynasties, and a world shaken by the travail of new births. There is here no scale by which to measure the historian of the sort we must look to see handle the ordinary matter of national history. The “Decline and Fall” stands impersonal, like a monument. We shall reverence it, but we shall not imitate it. If we look away from Gibbon, exclude Carlyle, and question Macaulay; if we put the investigators on one side as not yet historians, and the deliberately picturesque and entertaining _raconteurs_ as not yet investigators, we naturally turn, I suppose, to such a man as John Richard Green, at once the patient scholar,--who shall adequately say how nobly patient?--and the rare artist, working so like a master in the difficult stuffs of a long national history. The very life of the man is as beautiful as the moving sentences he wrote with so subtle a music in the cadence. We know whence the fine moral elevation of tone came that sounds through all the text of his great narrative. True, not everybody is satisfied with our _doctor angelicus_. Some doubt he is too ornate. Others are troubled that he should sometimes be inaccurate. Some are willing to use his history as a manual; while others cannot deem him satisfactory for didactic uses, hesitate how they shall characterize him, and quit the matter vaguely with saying that what he wrote is “at any rate literature.” Can there be something lacking in Green, too, notwithstanding he was impartial, and looked with purged and open eyes upon the whole unbroken life of his people,--notwithstanding he saw the truth and had the art and mastery to make others see it as he did, in all its breadth and multiplicity?