such a man is also an eye-witness of much that he relates; when he knew and conversed with many of the chief actors in the great events which he records; when again he tells us of transactions so remote in time, that all written documents have necessarily perished, and those in more durable bronze and stone all but followed in their train, then indeed the interest rises to the highest pitch. Like Herodotus and Thucydides, then, Polybius tells us of his own times, and of the generations immediately preceding them. It is true that the part of his work which has survived in a complete form deals with a period before his own day, just as the greater part of the history of Herodotus does, but in the larger part of the fragments he is writing with even more complete personal knowledge than Thucydides. He had, again, neither the faculty for story-telling possessed by Herodotus nor the literary and dramatic force of Thucydides. The language which he spoke and wrote had lost the magic of style; had lost the lucidity and grace of Sophocles, and the rugged vigour and terseness of Thucydides. Nor had he apparently acquired any of those artifices which, while they sometimes weary us in the later rhetoricians, yet generally serve to make their writings the easiest and pleasantest of reading. Equally remote again is his style from the elaborate and involved manner of Plutarch, with its huge compound words built up of intricate sentences, more like difficult German than Greek. Polybius had no tricks of this sort;[3] but his style lacks logical order and clearness. It seems rather the language of a man of affairs, who had had neither leisure to study style, nor taste to read widely with a view to literature as such. But after all it is Greek, and Greek that still retained its marvellous adaptability to every purpose, to every shade of thought, and every form of literature. Nor is his style in the purely narrative parts of his work wanting in a certain force, derived from singleness and directness of purpose. He “speaks right on,” and turns neither to the right hand nor the left. It is when he reflects and argues and moralises, that his want of literary skill sometimes makes him difficult and involved; and though the thought is essentially just, and his point of view wonderfully modern, we continually feel the want of that nameless charm which the Greeks called χάρις.