Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/813

Rh growth and character. In setting about this work he found that "there was little help in anything American" and that he "could not count on anything English;" that he must "build a description from the ground. The complex states of knowing and thinking, of feeling and passion, must be explained. The little world as seen by the man of the seventeenth century must be understood. Its sun, moon, and planets were flames of fire without gravity, revolved about the earth by countless angels; its God governed this one little world with mock majesty." And so his preface goes on, pleasantly and not very clearly, to tell how the range and diligence of his reading extended. The fact of his conscientious research is further attested, if attestation were needed, by copious marginal references, which make his pages frequently remind one of a folio Burton, and by the numerous and closely printed supplementary notes—"Elucidations" he prefers to name them—which follow each of his six chapters. Whatever Dr. Eggleston's limits, nobody can charge him with lack of industry.

If occasional and random tests can prove anything, furthermore, these references and notes are thoroughly trustworthy. When Dr. Eggleston gives you chapter and verse, and he gives them freely, you may thankfully and confidently accept his authority. And yet the final result of all this labor, which one would be so glad to praise without reserve, suggests rather than commendation a word of warning to all modern students and writers of history. It is an agreeable incidental reflection that such warning to men still young can be based on work which comes from a man so far from young in years; nothing could more surely imply that fresh youthfulness of spirit which groups Dr. Eggleston with some of our elder men of letters, whose natures to the end rose above the impediments both of time and of infirmity. Assuming for the moment, then,—what anybody, if such body there be, who did not know Dr. Eggleston's name would instantly assume,—that this book may be held a fair example of contemporary writing, one cannot point out too clearly that human minds, like human stomachs, vary indefinitely in their power of digestion. Each man's limit of acquisition each man must learn for himself; but no man who desires to produce anything more individual than a compilation can afford to take into his head at any given time more information than he can handle with vigorous intellectual energy. The analogy of physical indigestion is variously close; at sympathetic moments the mental state of modern students, turned loose to browse amid all the riches of modern libraries, seems painfully like the plethoric inconveniences which disturb healthy boys toward the end of Thanksgiving dinners.

To be more precise, the work which Dr. Eggleston undertook demanded not only such wide research as he has courageously persisted in, but also at least two supplementary processes. Which of the two is the more important need hardly be determined; both are essential. In the first place, the historian of a past civilization must somehow bring himself into imaginative sympathy with the human spirit of the times