Page:Inaugural lecture on The Study of History.djvu/16

 over the whole period from the Call of Abraham or the Dorian Migration to the Russo-Turkish war, which was (when he spoke) the last landmark in European annals. The theme was inspiring; the general truth of the fact that it is absurd to shut up history. with water-tight compartments is undeniable. But the application of it to the practical needs of the University was the difficult point. Freeman tried to illustrate it by delivering a series of lectures on the history of Sicily, which was to range from the earliest Greek and Carthaginian settlement of the island past the Punic Wars, the Goths and Vandals and Moors, down to the days of the Norman Roger and Frederic of Hohenstaufen. But the lectures were never completed, because no continuous audience could be found to attend them. Nor can I blame the University for not being able to provide hearers for a great historian lecturing on a great subject. It is a melancholy fact that the days are past in which it was possible for any one—graduate or undergraduate—to aim at being encyclopaedic. The bulk of knowledge to be assimilated, of books to be read, has grown so great that no wise man proposes to himself, even in his wildest dreams, to acquire more than a sound working knowledge of general history. That proper basis of assimilated facts he must possess, or he will risk building his specialized work without a foundation. But the main interest of the student must be confined within some narrower and less ambitious sphere, and to expect him to master over two thousand years of the history of Sicily in anything but the main outlines was hopeless. Freeman did not propose to give a rapid sketch of the annals of the island, but to linger over them lovingly for some four or five terms—now commenting on the text of Thucydides or of Diodorus, anon on that of