collateral revelations drawn from our own experience, modified acceptance of both statement and inference, superiority to the blandishments of style, are as needful for the right interpretation of a chronicle as of a scientific problem.  Thus history is perpetually rewritten; fresh knowledge opens new vistas in the past as well as the future; the discovery of to-day may rectify, in important respects, the statement which has been unchallenged for centuries; one new truth leavens a thousand old formulas; and nothing is more gradual than the elucidation of historical events and characters.  Even our own brief annals suggest how large must be the historian’s faith in time:  only within a year or two has it been possible to demonstrate the justice of Washington’s estimate of Lee, and how completely the sagacious provision of Schuyler secured the capture of Burgoyne.  Since the American Revolution, one of these men has been as much overrated as the other has failed of just appreciation—­because the documentary wisdom requisite for an enlightened judgment has not until now been patent.[C]

[Footnote C:  See Lossing’s Life and Correspondence of General Schuyler, and Professor Moore’s paper on Charles Lee.]

With the imposing array of professed histories and historians in view, it is curious to revert to the actual sources of our own historic ideas,—­those which are definite and pervasive.  The vast number of intelligent readers, who have made no special study of this kind of literature, probably derive their most distinct and attractive impressions of the past from poetry, travel, and the choicest works of the novelist; local association and imaginative sympathy, rather than formal chronicles, have enlightened and inspired them in regard to Antiquity and the great events and characters of modern Europe.  This fact alone suggests how inadequate for popular effect have been the average labors of historians; and so fixed is the opinion among scholars that it is impossible for the annalist to be profound and interesting, authentic and animated, at the same time, that a large class of the learned repudiate as spurious the renown of Macaulay,—­although his research and his minuteness cannot be questioned, and only in a few instances has his accuracy been successfully impugned.  They distrust him chiefly because he is agreeable, doubt his correctness for the reason that his style fascinates, and deem admiration for him inconsistent with their own self-respect, because he is such a favorite as no historian ever was before, and his account of a parliament, a coinage, or a feud as winsome as a portraiture of a woman.  In one of his critical essays, Macaulay himself gives a partial explanation of this protest of the minority in his own case.  “People,” he remarks, “are very loath to admit that the same man can unite very different kinds of excellence.  It is soothing to envy to believe that what is splendid cannot be solid and what is clear cannot be profound.”  And it