Page:Inaugural lecture on The Study of History.djvu/14

 educational training, and still derided as such by some of the academic thinkers of that generation. We are far from the time when Dr. Stubbs had to declare that 'History is not well used: it is taught as a task for children, it is valued only as an instrument to strengthen the memory: it is undervalued in its true character of mental training: it is learned to qualify men to make effective speeches to ignorant hearers, and to indite brilliant articles for people who only read periodicals: it has been begun from the base of ecclesiastical or political partizanship: it is made the embellishment for wordy eloquence, a source of subjects for pictorial talent that evolves grouping, features, and circumstances from its own consciousness, and then goes to its dictionary to look out names and dates for its figures: it is written for readers already known, courted, and pandered to. What wonder if there are few who love it for its own sake, when there are so few who know it as it is!' In 1867 that great man thought it necessary to defend history from the charge of being the mere handmaid of political or ecclesiastical controversy, to declare that it should be studied as an end in itself with no ulterior motives. How he would have been surprised to find that, less than forty years later, the apologetic tone of historians would be so much a thing of the past that a Cambridge Regius professor could declare that history, considered as history, has no more to do with morals than it has to do with literature, and seem almost to deprecate any attempt either to strive to make it readable, or to draw any moral deductions from its study. Stubbs believed, and most of us (I think) still believe to-day, that the science which we love is not merely concerned with the stringing together of facts in their correct order and the reconstitution of annals, but with