the historian—­one to whom history is a genuine vocation—­applies to the facts with which he has to deal, to the evidence which he has to sift, to the relations which he has to peruse, a faculty which shall detect a meaning where the common reader would find none,—­which shall conceive a whole picture, a complete view, where another would see but fragments,—­which shall combine and reproduce in one distinct and living image the relics of a past age, which lie broken, scattered, and buried beneath the mounds of time.  Such a work has Niebuhr performed for early Roman history, and Michelet for the confused epochs of mediaeval France.  The spirit, instead of escaping in the process, was for the first time made visible.  The historian did not merely anatomize the body of the Past, but with magic power summoned up its ghost.

It cannot be said that the claims of history have ever been disallowed by the reading public.  There is, indeed, no class of literature so secure of receiving the attention which it demands.  While the novelist modestly confines himself to a brace of spare duodecimos, and, if his story be somewhat extended, endeavors to conceal its length in the smallness of the print, the historian unblushingly presents himself with three, six, a dozen, nay, if he be a Frenchman or a German, with forty huge tomes, and is more often taken to task for his omissions than censured for the fulness of his narrative.  It is respectable to buy his volumes, and respectable to read them.  We don’t put them away in corners, but give them the most conspicuous places on our shelves.  Strange to say, that kind of reading to which we were once driven as to a task, which our fathers thought must be useful because it was so dull, has of late outstripped every other branch in its attractiveness to the mass.  Nobody yawns over Carlyle; people set upon Macaulay as if quite unconscious that they were about to be led into the labyrinths of Whig and Tory politics; and gentlemen whirled along in railway-cars bend over the pages of Prescott, and pronounce them as fascinating as any romance.  Stranger still, these modern historians excel their predecessors as much in learning and depth of research as in dramatic power, artistic arrangement and construction, and beauty and picturesqueness of style.  Compare the meagre array of references in the foot-notes of Watson’s “History of Philip the Second” with the multitude of authorities cited by Mr. Prescott.  It may be doubted, whether any printed book, however rare or little known, which could throw the least glimmer of light upon his subject, has been overlooked or neglected by the last-mentioned author; while thousands of manuscript pages, gathered from libraries and collections in almost every part of Europe, have furnished him with some of his most curious particulars and enabled him to clear up the mystery that shrouded many portions of the subject.