No rectitude of intention will save us from mistakes.  Sympathies and antipathies are but synonyms of prejudice, and indifference is impossible.  Love is blind, and so is every other passion; love believes eagerly what it desires; it excuses or passes lightly over blemishes, it dwells on what is beautiful, while dislike sees a tarnish on what is brightest, and deepens faults into vices.  Do we believe that all this is a disease of unenlightened times, and that in our strong sunlight only truth can get received:  then let us contrast the portrait for instance of Sir Robert Peel as it is drawn in the Free Trade Hall, at Manchester, at the county meeting, and in the Oxford Common Room.  It is not so.  Faithful and literal history is possible only to an impassive spirit; it is impossible to man, until perfect knowledge and perfect faith in God shall enable him to see and endure every fact in its reality; until perfect love shall kindle in him under its touch the one just emotion which is in harmony with the eternal order of all things.

How far we are in these days from approximating to such a combination we need not here insist.  Criticism in the hands of men like Niebuhr seems to have accomplished great intellectual triumphs:  and in Germany and France and among ourselves we have our new schools of the philosophy of history; yet their real successes have hitherto only been destructive; when philosophy reconstructs, it does nothing but project its own idea; when it throws off tradition, it cannot work without a theory, and what is a theory but an imperfect generalization caught up by a predisposition? what is Comte’s great division of the eras, but a theory, and facts but as day in his hands which he can mould to illustrate it, as every clever man will find facts to be, let his theory be what it will.  Intellect can destroy but it cannot make alive again,—­call in the creative faculties, call in Love, Idea, Imagination, and we have living figures, but we cannot tell whether they are figures which ever lived before.  Alas, the high faith in which Love and Intellect can alone unite in their fulness, has not yet found utterance in modern historians.

The greatest man who has as yet given himself to the recording of human affairs is, beyond question, Cornelius Tacitus.  Alone in Tacitus a serene calmness of insight was compatible with intensity of feeling; he took no side; he may have been Imperialist, he may have been Republican, but he has left no sign whether he was either:  he appears to have sifted facts with scrupulous integrity; to administer his love, his scorn, his hatred, according only to individual merit, and these are rather felt by the reader in the life-like clearness of his portraits than expressed in words by himself.  Yet such a power of seeing into things was only possible to him, because there was no party left with which he could determinedly side, and no wide spirit alive in Rome through which he could feel; the spirit of Rome, the spirit of life