but the commendable frugality in point of number.  Dates, apart from a few key years, are of small historical importance; so are the details of palace intrigues and military campaigns.  History is, or should be, life expressed in terms of romance, and it is of little moment whether the narrated incidents are established by documentary evidence or whether they are contemporary legend quite unsubstantiated by what are known (and overestimated) as “facts.”  There is more of the real Middle Ages in Mallory’s “Mort d’Arthur” than there is in all Hallam, and the same antithesis can be established for nearly all other periods of history.

The history of man is one great dramatic romance, and so used it may be made perhaps the most stimulating agency in education as character development.  I do not mean romance in the sense in which Mr. Wells takes it, that is to say, the dramatic assembling and clever cooerdination of unsubstantiated theories, personal preferences, prejudices and aversions, under the guise of solemn and irrefutable truth attested by all the exact sciences known to man, but romance which aims like any other art at communicating from one person to another something of the inner and essential quality of life as it has been lived, even if the material used is textually doubtful or even probably apocryphal.  The deadly enemy of good, sound history is scientific historical criticism.  The true history is romantic tradition; the stimulating thing, the tale that makes the blood leap, the pictorial incident that raises up in an instant the luminous vision of some great thing that once was.

I would not exchange Kit Marlowe’s

  "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships
  And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"

for all the critical commentaries of Teutonic pedants on the character and attributes of Helen of Troy as these have (to them) been revealed by archaeological investigations.  I dare say that Bishop St. Remi of Reims never said in so many words “Bow thy proud head, Sicambrian; destroy what thou hast worshipped, worship what thou hast destroyed,” and that the Meroving monarch did not go thence to issue an “order of the day” that the army should forthwith march down to the river and be baptized by battalions; but there is the clear, unforgettable picture of the times and the men, and it will remain after the world has forgotten that some one has proved that St. Remi never met Clovis, and that he himself was probably only a variant of the great and original “sun-myth.”

Closely allied with the teaching of history and forming a link as it were with the teaching of English, is a branch of study at present unformulated and unknown, but, I am convinced, of great importance in education as a method of character development.  Life has always focused in great personalities, and formal history has recognized the fact while showing little discretion, and sometimes very defective judgment,