Another peculiar merit of this system is that it enables us to preserve specimens of the work of a large coterie of historians, whose influence was great and whose writings were formerly standard, but whose books, as a whole, have been superseded by more recent works. Some of the classical authors are cases in point. A few of these are indeed read by students in colleges everywhere, but the great bulk of them are as utterly unknown to the average reader as if they had never existed. Who reads Pausanias, or Diodorus, or Polybius, or Appian, or Dion Cassius, or Dionysius, or Ælianus, or Arrian, or Quintus Curtius, or Zosimus? Yet these men are the only original authorities left us in many fields of ancient history. Their works are the sources which moderns can do little more than paraphrase in writing of those times. Surely, then, it is worth while to go to these authors themselves and hear their story at first hand, applying to it the corrective judgment of later criticism, rather than to depend upon the mere paraphrase of some modern compiler. Much the same argument applies to parts of the work of once famous historians of more recent times: such historians as Hume, Mitford, Thirlwall, and a host of others. Their work, as a whole, can no longer be commended to the student who is to confine himself to a single authority, for in many parts their writings have been superseded; yet there are other parts of their work that are to-day as valuable as when they were written, and it seems regrettable that a great name should drop from public recognition merely because the sweep of progress has dethroned it from supremacy. It is inevitable that the present should always loom large before mankind, and that egotism should stamp with peculiar force the importance of the Recent. “Each generation abandons the ideas of its predecessors like stranded ships,” says Emerson. Yet it must not be forgotten that posterity often plays strange tricks with reputations. Herodotus was held up to ridicule some centuries after his death by a “False Plutarch,” who is only known now because of his attack upon the master historian, while the work criticised, though for some generations looked on with suspicion, is as fully appreciated, after more than two thousand years, as it can have been in the day when it was written. Similarly, the judgments of our own age of specialism may be reversed by posterity; and in any event it would be regrettable if a once important historical work should be quite forgotten. Yet such a fate threatens work of every grade. Müller’s collection of the fragments of Greek historians gives mere bits from the writings of more than five hundred authors about whom nothing is known--not even the exact age in which they lived--beyond the fact that they wrote works of which these fragments are the only mementoes. Could any page of manuscript of any one of these authors be recovered, it would to-day be considered worth many times its weight in gold.