of the author’s temperament, affiliations, and opportunity of knowledge, and by comparison with the testimony of other writers.  There can be no better preparation for the perils and responsibilities of authorship than to study the critical analyses of Guicciardini and Sarpi, Clarendon, Saint-Simon, and many another, scattered through the sixty volumes of the master.  And finally he taught by precept and practice the necessity of exploring the relations of States to one another and of measuring the interaction of foreign and domestic policy.

These sound principles have been applied by the scholars of all countries who have jointly built up the history of the last four centuries.  We may study the Tudors under the guidance of Pollard, the Stuarts under Gardiner and Firth, the Hanoverians under Lecky, without fear that we are being misled or that essential facts are being withheld from our notice.  We continue to admire the literary brilliance of Macaulay and Carlyle, Motley and Froude; but we are instinctively aware that their partisanship is out of date.  The same cooling process has taken place in France, where the passions and tempers of Thiers and Michelet have tended to yield place to the calm lucidity of which Mignet and Guizot were the earliest masters.  There is, it must be confessed, a good deal of the old Adam in Taine’s elaborate study of Jacobinism, in Masson’s innumerable volumes on Napoleon, and even in Aulard’s priceless contributions to our knowledge of the French Revolution; but such works as Lavisse’s full-length portrait of Louis XIV, Segur’s volumes on Turgot and Necker, Sorel’s massive treatise on Europe and the Revolution, and Vandal’s incomparable presentation of the Consulate rank as high in scholarship as in literature.

The unification of Germany after fierce struggles within and without naturally deflected historical scholarship from the path marked out by Ranke, who had grown to manhood in the era of political stagnation following the downfall of Napoleon.  The master’s Olympian serenity was deplored by the group of hot-blooded scholars who are collectively known as the Prussian School, and who were firmly convinced that the principal duty of historians was to supply guidance and encouragement to their fellow-countrymen in the national and international problems of the time.  In his gigantic work on the History of Prussian Foreign Policy, Droysen, the eldest of the Triumvirate, calls four centuries to witness that the Hohenzollerns alone, from their unswerving fidelity to German interests as a whole, were fitted to restore the Empire.  He worked exclusively from Prussian archives, and history seen exclusively through Prussian spectacles was bound to be one-sided.  No student of European history would contest the value of his researches; but his interpretation of Prussian policy in terms of German nationalism was at once recognized as a fundamental error, and has long been abandoned.  The second member of the group, Sybel, himself one of the three favourite pupils of Ranke, revolted in middle life, and in his two great treatises on the era of the French Revolution and the foundation of the German Empire championed the policy of the Hohenzollerns and delivered slashing attacks on France and Austria, their rivals and antagonists.