Page:Readings in European History Vol 1.djvu/42

 6 Readings in European History second-hand accounts can never produce. The mere information, too, comes to us in a form which we do not easily forget. The facts sink into our memory. One who actually talked with Attila, or who witnessed the capture of Jerusalem by the crusaders, is clearly more likely to excite our interest than a writer of our own day, however much he may know of the king of the Huns or of the first crusade. It makes no great impression upon us to be told that the scholars of Dante's time had begun to be interested once more in the ancient learning of the Greeks and Romans ; but no one can for- get Dante's own poetic account of his kindly reception in the lower regions by the august representatives of pagan literature, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, people " with eyes slow and grave, of great authority in their looks," who "spake seldom and with soft voices." Moreover, the study of the sources enables us to some extent to form our own opinions of the past, so that we need not rely entirely upon mere manuals, which are always one, and generally two or three, removes from the sources themselves. When we get at the sources themselves we no longer merely read and memorize ; we begin to consider what may be safely inferred from the statements before us and so develop the all-important faculty of criticism. We are not simply accumulating facts but are attempting to determine their true nature and meaning. The power to do this is not alone necessary to schol- arly work ; it is of the utmost importance as well in deal- ing with the affairs of everyday life. To take a single illustration : one cannot fail to see from a study of the sources that Luther was exceedingly unfair to his