Where so much is done, it is no doubt unreasonable to ask for more. But the very architectural symmetry of this great book imposes a limitation upon it. It is full of a certain sort of variety; but it is only the variety of a great plan’s detail, not the variety of English life. The noble structure obeys its own laws rather than the laws of a people’s fortunes. It is a monument conceived and reared by a consummate artist, and it wears upon its every line some part of the image it was meant to bear, of a great, complex, aspiring national existence. But, though it symbolizes, it does not contain that life. It has none of the irregularity of the actual experiences of men and communities. It explains, but it does not contain, their variety. The history of every nation has certainly a plan which the historian must see and reproduce; but he must reconstruct the people’s life, not merely expound it. The scope of his method must be as great as the variety of his subject; it must change with each change of mood, respond to each varying impulse in the great process of events. No rigor of a stately style must be suffered to exclude the lively touches of humor or the rude sallies of strength that mark it everywhere. The plan of the telling must answer to the plan of the fact,--must be as elastic as the topics are mobile. The matter should rule the plan, not the plan the matter. The ideal is infinitely difficult, if, indeed, it be possible to any man not Shakespearean; but the difficulty of attaining it is often unnecessarily enhanced. Ordinarily the historian’s preparation for his task is such as to make it unlikely he will perform it naturally. He goes first, with infinite and admirable labor, through all the labyrinth of document and detail that lies up and down his subject; collects masses of matter great and small, for substance, verification, illustration; piles his notes volumes high; reads far and wide upon the tracks of his matter, and makes page upon page of references; and then, thoroughly stuffed and sophisticated, turns back and begins his narrative. ’Tis impossible then that he should begin naturally. He sees the end from the beginning, and all the intermediate way from beginning to end; he has made up his mind about too many things; uses his details with a too free and familiar mastery, not like one who tells a story so much as like one who dissects a cadaver. Having swept his details together beforehand, like so much scientific material, he discourses upon them like a demonstrator,--thinks too little in subjection to them. They no longer make a fresh impression upon him. They are his tools, not his objects of vision.