has been most justly said of his own method of writing history, “He must make everything clear and bright, and bring it into the range of his analysis; his exaggeration chiefly applies to individual characters, not to general facts”; and the reason given for the decided preference manifested for his vivid record is not less true than philosophical,—­“We learn so much from him enjoyably.”  It is precisely the lack of this pleasurable trait which makes the greater part of the annals of the past a dead letter to the world, and wins to romance, ballad, epic, fiction, relic, and poetry the keen attention which facts coldly “set in a note-book” never enlisted.  How many of us unconsciously have adopted the portraits of the early English kings as Shakspeare drew them!  To what a host of living souls is the history of Scotland what the author of “Waverley” makes it!  Charles I. haunts the fancy, not as drawn by Hume, but as painted by Vandyck.  The institutions of the Middle Ages are realized to every reflective tourist through the architecture of Florence more than by the municipal details of Hallam.  Pyramids, obelisks, mummies have brought home Egyptian civilization; the “old masters,” that of Europe in the fifteenth century; the ruins of the Colosseum, Roman art and barbarism, as they never were by Livy or Gibbon.  Lady Russell’s letters tell us of the Civil War in England,—­Saint Mark’s, at Venice, of Byzantine taste and Oriental commerce,—­the Escurial and the Alhambra, Versailles, a castle on the Rhine, and a “modest mansion on the banks of the Potomac,” of their respective eras and their characteristics, social, political, religious,—­more than the most elaborate register, muster-roll, or judicial calendar.  For around and within these memorials lingers the life of Humanity; they speak to the eye as well as to memory,—­to the heart as well as the intelligence; they draw us by human associations to the otherwise but technical statement; they lure us to repeople solitudes and reanimate shadows; and having become intimate with the scenes, the effigies, the monuments of the Past, we have, as it were, a vantage-ground of actual experience an impulse from personal observation and, perhaps, a sympathy born of local inspiration, whereby the phantoms of departed ages are once more clothed with flesh, and their sorrows and triumphs are renewed in the soul of enlightened contemplation.

* * * * *

MY NEIGHBOR, THE PROPHET.

The point of commencement for a story is altogether arbitrary.  Some writers stick to Nature and go back to the Creation; others take a few dozen of the grandfatherly old centuries for granted; others seize Time by the forelock and bounce into the middle of a narrative; but, as I said before, the beginning is a mere matter of taste and convenience.  I choose to open my tale with the day on which I took possession of my newly purchased country-house.