If his speakers, as one of them tells us, strove hard to conceal what they had to say under new and startling forms, in order to outrun in smartness the cleverness of their audience, and play a sort of intellectual hide-and-seek with their critics, so Thucydides himself plays hide-and-seek with the grammarians, both ancient and modern. To make out exactly what he means his speakers to say, and to render it with every shade of nicety into modern English, is a task to which many acute men have devoted years, and upon its success very considerable reputations depend. It is but natural that this school, or these schoolmen, should become so enamoured of his intricacies as to love them with a love passing the love of women, and consequently to resent bitterly any word of depreciation which affects the importance of their idol. [Sidenote: He remains the special property of critical scholars.] Enthusiastic study of any subject is always praiseworthy; the insistence upon minute accuracy, and contempt for slovenliness in writing, are always to be admired and encouraged, for it is to these qualities in the minute scholars that we owe much of our precision in thinking, and still more the sense of clearness and correctness in style. To this class, therefore, let Thucydides remain forever the foremost of books; but let them not bully us into the belief that because they have studied his grammar more carefully than any other, they are therefore to decide that he is absolutely faultless as a narrator, and absolutely trustworthy as a historian. [Sidenote: Herodotus underrated in comparison.] I have already dealt with this latter point[103:1]; what I am here concerned with is the exaggerated place given in our modern histories to the petty feuds and border-raids of his often tedious chronicle,--tedious only because the events he describes are completely trivial. Herodotus, on the other hand, is apt to be underrated in these modern days. The field he covers is so wide, and the chances of error in observation so great, that it is impossible he should not often be found wrong. But what would our notions of earlier Greece or Asia Minor be without his marvellous prose epic? [Sidenote: The critics of Thucydides.]