Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/113

 can throw himself personally into the action of it; not merely regarding it as an image, or a picture, or a piece of biography, but as part of the growth of his own life, of the laws, history, circumstances, that have helped to make him what he is; acts that have taken place in scenes with which he is familiar, great deeds of war and peace done by the men whose blood runs in his own veins; high aspirations, sympathies and instincts, that he knows are living in his own heart and brain, not merely by imitation or engrafted life, but with continuous, hereditary strength. I would not have him read as a partisan, with the likes and dislikes, the prejudices, the false and artificial antipathies of modern political life, but with the sympathies of an Englishman; I would have my brother Yorkshireman, for instance, learn to look on Fairfax and on Strafford both as men of flesh and blood, with beliefs, sincerities and virtues that bring them very near to us, notwithstanding their antagonism to each other, and the gap that widens daily between us and both of them. I am sure that the more I know of both of them, the more I find that is admirable and loveable in them. But perhaps it is easier to grow enthusiastic here than to maintain judicial calmness; and I will proceed.

There is yet another way of reading and of writing history which demands its place in our enumeration, which, however, can scarcely be regarded as educational, because the historic faculty, whatever it is, must have been already educated before it can attempt to approach the task. To read and write with the single and simple purpose of collecting, testing, and arranging the facts of history, to discover causes and work out consequences, to determine the rights and wrongs of questions as they arise, the growth and decline of institutions as they emerge from and retire into darkness when their work is done, to build up history as a treasure-house of knowledge, that may enable the man who attempts the task to read with like facility the history of the past and present, to solve the difficulties of conflicting testimony, and hold the balance of equitable judgment between conflicting systems; the study, for I must recur to the first of our three heads, the study of History for its own sake can scarcely be regarded as