At the close of his book Mr. Gooch very truly points out that “the scope of history has gradually widened till it has come to include every aspect of the life of humanity.”  Many of the social and economic subjects of which the historian has now to treat are of an extremely controversial character.  However high may be the ideal of truth, which will be entertained, it would appear that the various forms in which the facts of history may be stated, as also the conclusions to be drawn from these facts, will tend to divergence rather than to uniformity of treatment.  It is not, therefore, probable that the partisan historian—­or, at all events, the historian who will be accused of partisanship—­will altogether disappear from literature.  Neither, on the whole, is his disappearance to be desired, for it would almost certainly connote the composition of somewhat vapid and colourless histories.

The verdicts which Mr. Gooch passes on the historians whose writings he briefly summarises are eminently judicious, though it cannot be expected that in all cases they will command universal assent.  In a work which ranges over so wide a field it is scarcely possible that some slips should not have occurred.  We may indicate one of these, which it would be as well to correct in the event of any future editions being published.  On p. 435 the authorship of Fieramosca and Nicolo dei Lapi, which were written by Azeglio, is erroneously attributed to Cesare Balbo.

[Footnote 76:  History and Historians of the Nineteenth Century.  By G.P.  Gooch.  London:  Longmans and Co. 10s. 6d.]

XI

THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY[77]

"The Spectator,” May 10, 1913

Shelley, himself a translator of one of the best known of the epigrams of the Anthology, has borne emphatic testimony to the difficulties of translation.  “It were as wise,” he said, “to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.”

The task of rendering Greek into English verse is in some respects specially difficult.  In the first place, the translator has to deal with a language remarkable for its unity and fluency, qualities which, according to Curtius (History of Greece, i. 18), are the result of the “delicately conceived law, according to which all Greek words must end in vowels, or such consonants as give rise to no harshness when followed by others, viz. n, r, and s.”  Then, again, the translator must struggle with the difficulties arising from the fact that the Greeks regarded condensation in speech as a fine art.  Demetrius, or whoever was the author of De Elocutione, said:  “The first grace of style is that which results from compression.”  The use of an inflected language of course enabled the Greeks to carry this art to a far higher degree