Page:Inaugural lecture on The Study of History.djvu/30

 to have the desired effect on all the better minds that are brought into contact with them. If a man cannot pick up the art of weighing and comparing facts and theories from studying his Aristotle and his Maine, his Hobbes, his Maitland and his Stubbs, he will not pick it up from any lectures on method. If he can read all the prescribed books for his special subject without learning how to compare sources and evaluate their worth; if he can peruse Clarendon and Ludlow, Baillie and Cromwell's Speeches; or again, if he can read James Mill with the dispatches of Warren Hastings and Wellesley, or Boha-ed-din alongside of the Itinerarium Ricardi, without learning automatically the elements of historical criticism—then he is not a person about whom we need bother our heads at all. He will never make a historian, though you drive ' method into him with a hammer.

In short, the true historian—and here lies the gist of my creed—is born and not made. If he has the root of the matter in him, he gets precisely such a preliminary education from his schools as will enable him to work for himself when his schools are over. Of course if his tastes are mediaeval he will have to learn palaeography afterwards; but this is a small matter. Do we not possess an admirable teacher in that subject, though we pay him too little, and do not even enable him to lecture all the year round? But as to the rest, it seems to me that the one counsel that can be given to the man who has achieved his first class for the Schools and then wishes to set sail into the ocean of Research, is simply to work— and work—and work again. He will think many hours wasted—they are not really so: a negative result is often as valuable as (though less exciting than) a positive one. In the