Page:In The Cage (London, Duckworth, 1898).djvu/197

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Of the French edition Literature (Feb. 12th, 1898) spoke thus: 'No effort so seriously methodical to fix the nature and determine the difficulties of historical studies has ever been made in France. Nor is there anything of the sort in English or German at once so precise, so admirably concise, and so logically complete. . . . MM. Langlois and Seignobos, with that clearness which seems inalienable from French thought, but with none of that superficiality, that wilful defect of vision, which usually in French books is the condition of French clearness—does not Renan himself, in the preface to L'Avenir de la Science, note this ordinary disability and this incomparable privilege of the French tongue?—not only have been the first to systematise concisely and clearly the scattered results of reflections upon, and experience of, historical studies, but have also themselves formulated the principles of historical research with a critical precision and competence which make these remarkably compact and suggestive pages as useful an essay in definition of a right historical method, as Renan's famous early book just cited was, and still is, for the cultivation of what he called "historic psychology." . . . This book of M. Seignobos and M. Langlois is, as it were, a solid monument of masonry raised on the high plateau to which French scholars have been ascending now for thirty years, and elevated there as a memorial of the victory of the critical method. . . . The rigorous scientific treatment of historical studies has not been more general and systematic, however, in England than in France, and an "Introduction to Historical Studies" that is adequate is bound to be as warmly welcomed by students in Great Britain or the United States as by students in France.'

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