Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/89

 what I mean; only a word first on the interest and value of the processes I refer to. If I were drawing a comparison between ancient and medieval and modern history as remunerative studies, this is probably the first point in which I should claim superior interest for the latter. In ancient history we have wonderful models of thoughtful writing, and ingenious record of primitive tradition, tradition at least that is so far primitive that to us no further analysis is possible. There are exceptional departments even here; recent discoveries in Assyriology and Egyptology are opening up regions of interest which appear to me to be absolutely beyond parallel or comparison; new records of most ancient life which not only lie out of the scope within which criticism, up to the last twenty or thirty years, confined itself, but which must, if they be approached with due reverence and delicacy of touch, reveal a strange and hitherto unread age of the world's History, and in it the springs of an older cultivation than we have been used to dwell upon, and the links that bind the great civilisations of the Western world with the earliest, but not perhaps less magnificent, civilisations of the East. In these we may hope one day to read a new and clear page of the fair record of human history, of which we have bright but unconnected glimpses in the incidental notices of Holy Scripture. But outside of these, and the study of them is to most of us only in its beginning, the study of ancient History is mainly the study of classical History; and in classical History, splendid as our materials are, they have been in our hands for ages. Every bone of the great skeleton has long been put into its place: criticism upon it is becoming more and more every year the rearrangement of the critical material collected long ago, or the reconstruction of the History with all the charm which novel treatment, without novel material, can supply. Unluckily we can only, in a very fragmentary way, trace back, in commenting on Herodotus or Livy, the actual line of tradition by which they received what they report to us; as to Thucydides and Tacitus the chain is less fragmentary, and, of course, in the narrative of contemporary writers we look less for traces of earlier authority than for traces of sympathy and