It is impossible that a history composed a century ago
should fully satisfy us now; but we must beware of blaming the writer
for his supposed or real shortcomings, till we have ascertained how
far they arose from his personal inadequacy to his task, and were not
the result of his chronological position. It need not be said that
this remark does not refer to many books which are called histories,
but are really contemporary memoirs and original authorities
subservient to history proper. The works of Clarendon and Burnet, for
instance, can never lose a certain value on this account. The immortal
book which all subsequent generations have agreed to call a possession
for ever, is the unapproachable ideal of this class. But neither
Thucydides nor Clarendon were historians in the sense in which Gibbon
was an historian, that is, engaged in the delineation of a remote
epoch by the help of such materials as have escaped the ravages of
time. It is historians like Gibbon who are exposed to the particular
unhappiness referred to a little way back--that of growing out of date
through no fault of their own, but through the changed aspect
presented by the past in consequence of the movement which has brought
us to the present.
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