In a similar way if at all--the historian wins over for himself, and comes to possess an age of the past; but whereas Stevenson in his absence could constantly shoot back in his mind to a distant, remembered Edinburgh, in the case of the historian it is in a peculiar sense an irrecoverable, and so to speak, only half-remembered world that is “referred” to, and the man cannot go direct to the original to confirm the mental picture he retains. He can never know the past just as Stevenson knew the city he had actually trodden, and there is more of himself, more of the personal element, in his appropriation of it--how much, he cannot tell, because he can never go behind his vision of the past to compare it with the reality. We who may hold some place as Stevenson did Edinburgh, and perhaps remember it as a distant thing we knew in the old days, and retread it in our imagination and refer to it in our thinking--we can return to the spot itself to verify the impression it has left in our minds and see if our picture is true; and returning we may be shocked to find how Memory has played us false, how the Edinburgh that was in our thoughts is out of touch with the real thing. Working with an equally imperfect “Memory” the historian cannot do this, cannot put back the clock to a distant age to see if the “world” he has created out of it in his mind has parted from reality. And yet, given that “world” of the past as he holds it, it is still true that he makes it peculiarly his own, in that he constantly traverses it in his imagination, it is as a magnet to his mind, he carries present things back into it and is for ever making calls upon it, till it becomes a part of his thinking. It was because Scott had worked like this upon the history that he knew so well, and because he had entered into the past in this special way and made it a country of his mind, that Hutton could write of him that “He had something like a personal experience of several centuries.”