Instead, he went fishing or wasted his time playing dominoes in a wine-shop. Or he sat down and in sheer despair of himself and his people, he wrote the story of Don Quixote. CHAPTER X CONCERNING THE WRITING OF HISTORY IN GENERAL AND THIS BOOK IN PARTICULAR In the correspondence of Erasmus, which I recommend most eagerly to those who are tired of modern fiction, there occurs a stereotype sort of warning in many of the letters sent unto the learned Desiderius by his more timid friends. “I hear that you are thinking of a pamphlet upon the Lutheran controversy,” writes Magister X. “Please be very careful how you handle it, because you might easily offend the Pope, who wishes you well.” Or again: “Some one who has just returned from Cambridge tells me that you are about to publish a book of short essays. For Heaven’s sake, do not incur the displeasure of the Emperor, who might be in a position to do you great harm.” Now it is the Bishop of Louvain, then the King of England or the faculty of the Sorbonne or that terrible professor of theology in Cambridge who must be treated with special consideration, lest the author be deprived of his income or lose the necessary official protection or fall into the clutches of the Inquisition or be broken on the wheel. Nowadays the wheel (except for purposes of locomotion) is relegated to the museum of antiquities. The Inquisition has closed its doors these hundred years, protection is of little practical use in a career devoted to literature and the word “income” is hardly ever mentioned where historians come together. But all the same, as soon as it was whispered that I intended to write a “History of Tolerance,” a different sort of letters of admonition and advice began to find their way to my cloistered cell. “Harvard has refused to admit a negro to her dormitories,” writes the secretary of the S.P.C.C.P. “Be sure that you mention this most regrettable fact in your forthcoming book.” Or again: “The local K.K.K. in Framingham, Mass., has started to boycott a grocer who is a professed Roman Catholic. You will want to say something about this in your story of tolerance.” And so on. No doubt all these occurrences are very stupid, very silly and altogether reprehensible. But they hardly seem to come within the jurisdiction of a volume on tolerance. They are merely manifestations of bad manners and a lack of decent public spirit. They are very different from that official form of intolerance which used to be incorporated into the laws of the Church and the State and which made persecution a holy duty on the part of all good citizens. History, as Bagehot has said, ought to be like an etching by Rembrandt. It must cast a vivid light upon certain selected causes, on those which are best and most important, and leave all the rest in the shadow and unseen.