The case of Freeman, though different from that of Gardiner, for his style, though lacking in grace and flexibility was vigorous, may serve as another illustration of the same thesis.  Freeman was a keen politician, but he would never have for a moment entertained the thought of departing by one iota from strict historical truth in order to further any political cause in which he was interested.  Mr. Gooch says, “He regarded history as not only primarily, but almost exclusively, a record of political events.  Past politics, he used to say, were present history.”  Why is it, therefore, that his works are little read, and that they have exercised but slight influence on the opinions of the mass of his countrymen?  The answer is supplied by Mr. Gooch.  Freeman ignored organic evolution.  “The world of ideas had no existence for him....  No less philosophic historian has ever lived.”  For one man who, with effort, has toiled through Freeman’s ponderous but severely accurate Norman and Sicilian histories, there are probably a hundred whose imagination has been fired by Carlyle’s rhapsody on the French Revolution, or who have pored with interested delight over Froude’s account of the death of Cranmer.

Much the same may be said of Creighton’s intrinsically valuable but somewhat colourless work.  “He had no theories,” Mr. Gooch says, “no philosophy of history, no wish to prove or disprove anything.”  He took historical facts as they came, and recorded them.  “When events are tedious,” he wrote, “we must be tedious.”

The most meritorious, as also the most popular historians are probably those of the didactic school.  Of these, Seeley and Acton are notable instances.  Seeley always endeavoured to establish some principle which would capture the attention of the student and might be of interest to the statesman.  He held that “history faded into mere literature when it lost sight of its relation to practical politics.”  Acton, who brought his encyclopaedic learning to bear on the defence of liberty in all its forms, “believed that historical study was not merely the basis of all real insight into the present, but a school of virtue and a guide to life.”

Limitations of space preclude any adequate treatment of the illuminating work done by Ranke, whom Mr. Gooch regards as the nearest approximation the world has yet known to the “ideal historian”; by Lecky, who was driven by the Home Rule conflict from the ranks of historians into those of politicians; by Milman, whose style, in the opinion of Macaulay, was wanting in grace and colour, but who was distinguished for his “soundness of judgment and inexorable love of truth”; by Otfried Mueller, Berard, Gilbert Murray, and numerous other classical scholars of divers nationalities; by Fustel de Coulanges, the greatest of nineteenth-century mediaevalists; by Mahan, whose writings have exercised a marked influence on current politics, and who is thus an instance of “an historian who has helped to make history as well as to record it,” and by a host of others.