that the hills turn into echoes, and the past seems to unearth itself. It is possible to imagine a political theorist visiting Brazil to make a study of political conditions there; or to think of a student of public health going to Edinburgh to gain a knowledge of its drainage system; but apart from these specialists there is the traveller who will describe Brazil to men as a strange country, and there is the Stevenson who will give a sketch of Edinburgh for the general reader; and the historian is like these. He travels the past in a caravan; he dips into it as one would dip into Edinburgh, peeping into the shadowy slums and crooked streets, and hunting the eternal human things. He describes the past not because it has connections with the present that can be worked out, not because it holds a moral for to-day, but precisely because it is a strange land, precisely because it is past, and can never happen again; and he seeks to paint life as a whole--not man on his economic side, or man as a political animal, but man in all his adventures in living. Specialists and theorists may tread at his heels to draw a moral or to make generalisations, but as for the romantic historian, his is the mad human longing to see and to know people, to feel with them, and to peep at the world they lived in, and to understand their ways, their humours, their loves and fears. As he looks to the deserted ruins of a hillside farm he wonders what sentiments filled the hearts of men and women there when Jacobite rebels rode past on their dismal return Northwards; when he sees the old mill, where the tossing hill-streams meet and the twisted roads come to a ford, he wonders what difference it made to the children playing at the water’s edge, when Cromwell and his troopers passed that way; and when he stands in the shadow of what was once a frowning wall, he asks himself all the things that the wall must have overheard and overlooked, and all the tales of joy and adventure, of trouble and of treachery, that it might tell if it were not doomed to keep them to itself. And once the romanticist has stared at this programme of his, and has confessed his faith and has faced himself with this thing that he is really seeking--once he has understood his heart’s longing, then there must flash upon him the tremendous truth--the impossibility of history.