Mrs. Ward lays more stress than everybody will agree to on what she likens to the difference between good translation and bad, in dealing with the materials of history.  Doubtless, in our time, the historical imagination, like the historical conscience, has been awakened.  In history, as in other things, the effort after the real and the living has been very marked; it has sometimes resulted, as we know, in that parading of the real which we call the realistic.  The mode of telling a story or stating a case varies, even characteristically, from age to age, from Macaulay to Hume, from Hume to Rapin, from Rapin to Holinshed or Hall; but after all, the story in its main features remains, after allowing for the differences in the mode of presenting it.  German criticism, to which we are expected to defer, has its mode.  It combines two elements—­a diligent, searching, lawyer-like habit of cross-examination, laborious, complete and generally honest, which, when it is not spiteful or insolent, deserves all the praise it receives; but with it a sense of the probable, in dealing with the materials collected, and a straining after attempts to construct theories and to give a vivid reality to facts and relations, which are not always so admirable; which lead, in fact, sometimes to the height of paradox, or show mere incapacity to deal with the truth and depth of life, or make use of a poor and mean standard—­mesquin would be the French word—­in the interpretation of actions and aims.  It has impressed on us the lesson—­not to be forgotten when we read Mrs. Ward’s lists of learned names—­that weight and not number is the test of good evidence.  German learning is decidedly imposing.  But after all there are Germans and Germans; and with all that there has been of great in German work there has been also a large proportion of what is bad—­conceited, arrogant, shallow, childish.  German criticism has been the hunting-ground of an insatiable love of sport—­may we not say, without irreverence, the scene of the discovery of a good many mares’ nests?  When the question is asked, why all this mass of criticism has made so little impression on English thought, the answer is, because of its extravagant love of theorising, because of its divergences and variations, because of its negative results.  Those who have been so eager to destroy have not been so successful in construction.  Clever theories come to nothing; streams which began with much noise at last lose themselves in the sand.  Undoubtedly, it presents a very important, and, in many ways, interesting class of intellectual phenomena, among the many groups of such inquiries, moral, philosophical, scientific, political, social, of which the world is full, and of which no sober thinker expects to see the end.  If this vaunted criticism is still left to scholars, it is because it is still in the stage in which only scholars are competent to examine and judge it; it is not fit to be a factor in the practical thought