details and richness of illustration, to eloquence and poetry and beauty.  A dry history, however learned, will never be read; it will only be consulted, like a law-book, or Mosheim’s “Commentaries.”  We require life in history, and it is for their vividness that the writings of Livy and Tacitus will be perpetuated.  Voltaire and Schiller have no great merit as historians in a technical sense, but the “Life of Charles XII.” and the “Thirty Years’ War” are still classics.  Neander has written one of the most searching and recondite histories of modern times; but it is too dry, too deficient in art, to be cherished, and may pass away like the voluminous writings of Varro, the most learned of the Romans.  It is the art which is immortal in a book,—­not the knowledge, nor even the thoughts.  What keeps alive the “Provincial Letters” of Pascal?  It is the style, the irony, the elegance that characterize them.  The exquisite delineation of character, the moral wisdom, the purity and force of language, the artistic arrangement, and the lively and interesting narrative appealing to all minds, like the “Arabian Nights” or Froissart’s “Chronicles,” are the elements which give immortality to the classic authors.  We will not let them perish, because they amuse and interest and inspire us.

A remarkable example is that of Plutarch, who, although born a Greek and writing in the Greek language, was a contemporary of Tacitus, lived long in Rome, and was one of the “immortals” of the imperial age.  A teacher of philosophy during his early manhood, he spent his last years as archon and priest of Apollo in his native town.  His most famous work is his “Parallel Lives” of forty-six historic Greeks and Romans, arranged in pairs, depicted with marvellous art and all the fascination of anecdote and social wit, while presenting such clear conceptions of characters and careers, and the whole so restrained within the bounds of good taste and harmonious proportion, as to have been even to this day regarded as forming a model for the ideal biography.

But it is taking a narrow view of history to make all writers after the same pattern, even as it would be bigoted to make all Christians belong to the same sect.  Some will be remarkable for style, others for learning, and others again for moral and philosophical wisdom; some will be minute, and others generalizing; some will dig out a multiplicity of facts without apparent object, and others induce from those facts; some will make essays, and others chronicles.  We have need of all styles and all kinds of excellence.  A great and original thinker may not have the time or opportunity or taste for a minute and searching criticism of original authorities; but he may be able to generalize previously established facts so as to draw most valuable moral instruction from them for the benefit of his readers.  History is a boundless field of inquiry; no man can master it in all its departments and periods.  It will not do to lay