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a more comprehensive sense than it has in popular usage. History has been supposed always to deal with facts, or, at least I may say, to rest in facts. Your papers, I take it, have all alike dealt with some actual occurrence or character or period; if they have passed beyond the facts to any general political conclusion they have done so perfunctorily, or if they have looked backward from the facts to questions of method, you have still thought only of the method of authenticating facts. I would have you consider that facts have only the same place in history as in any other inductive science; that is, that they are only to be valued for the conclusions that can be drawn from them, which conclusions must refer to the nature of states. Take just as much pains as may be necessary in authenticating them, and, by the nature of political facts, the authentication of them will always be a ponderous work, so that often you will appear to rest in them and aim at nothing beyond. But do not rest in them, do not consider historical facts as ends, but as means. What practical difference will this make in your operations? This, that you will have papers of reasoning as well as papers of investigation or narrative. According to this principle it is no less part of your work to classify, combine, and draw conclusions from the facts already established, than it is to discover or authenticate new facts. You ought to welcome papers of speculation on political science, and to pass them as historical, provided they are founded on a basis of history. You ought also to have papers on method; and this word method, too, you ought to take in a comprehensive sense, for you ought to consider not only how facts are to be authenticated, but also, and even more, what facts it is worth while to authenticate, that is, what facts out of the multitude which have been preserved to us are to be considered as properly belonging to history.

I said I was glad that you had given me this second opportunity of addressing you. Indeed what I said to you last year might possibly, if taken by itself, produce a depressing effeect. When I insisted upon the danger in history of indulging the popular taste for rhetoric and poetical diction, perhaps some of you might sigh, and answer in your minds, "All very true

perhaps, but if such views prevail history will become a mighty dull affair! So imagination is to be bound in fetters, and we are to look hard at reality without making the least attempt at investigating it with any poetic charm." You may have thought that because I asserted the charms in which the Muse of history has been accustomed to appear before us to be artificial, meretricious, barbarous, therefore I meant to deprive her of the charm which is natural to her. I hope that I have said to-day what may remove all such misapprehensions. History, as I conceive it, seems to me as much more interesting than history as conceived by word-painters and rhetoricians as that is more interesting than the driest and most jejune chronicle. I do not strip it of interest, but I clothe it in an interest of a different kind. No, I do not clothe it, I unclothe it; for the beauty of drapery I substitute the beauty of the nude figure. I look at the states which men have formed with eager curiosity, desiring really to find out their nature, origin, and development, whereas your word-painter imagines that he knows all this already. He is irritated by anything like a difficulty, and studiously conceals it in the folds of grandiloquence, whereas the scientific student likes nothing better than to find a difficulty except to clear one up satisfactorily; and when he finds what puzzles him, what he did not expect, what he cannot explain, drags it eagerly to light, dwells upon it, and will not suffer it to be explained away. The word-painter, again, cares nothing for facts in themselves they seem to him prosaic for the most part; his study therefore is to select a few that may be more poetical, or to twist the others about until they take a quaint, unreal appearance, and to make them glitter with the varnish of diction. But to the scientific student they are infinitely precious just because they are facts; he cares nothing for their form or colour or glitter; rather all this makes him suspicious that they may have been tampered with; for his purpose the all-important thing is that he should see them just as they were and in their true relation, and therefore he is impatient of all ambitious phraseology, and of that grandiloquence which is but the cloud

made by truth as it evaporates. But is such a student not interested and a subject so stripped bare, must it needs not be interesting? Nay, we all surely know by this time that no interest is so absorbing and so enduring as that excited by the real truth of things, by the eternal laws of the universe, when they dawn upon the investigator through the clouds formed by confused accumulations of fact. It is so in all subjects alike; but when the subject is closely connected with the largest of all practical interests, with the public welfare and with politics -when the subject is history-then it is so in the highest degree.

I say, then, do not think of yourselves as mere collectors of facts, and do not be content even to authenticate facts with rigid criticism, much less to narrate them with vivacity. Think of yourselves as explorers of a great science; select and marshal your facts so that laws may emerge out of them; bring to bear your highest faculties, even if you leave some of your showy ones in abeyance. When I urge you to renounce the literary method I do not bid you descend to the level of the mere dull, diligent chronicler. I want you not to descend, but to climb a loftier eminence. Be discoverers rather than artists; use your imagination, not to heighten reality, but as the man of science uses it, to frame those conceptions by which facts are held together and vivified. This kind of work is at least as intellectual, at least as interesting as the other, and surely it is far more fruitful. For what comes in the end of all that word-painting? It may give pleasure; but who supposes that the sort of familiarity with historical names and characters which so many have gained, for example, from the Waverley Novels, is really valuable, or leads to juster, truer views of the past? On the other hand, the introduction of some degree of scientific certainty into the matter of politics, if it be possible, as I believe it is-can any one question that it would be important? More important, more necessary, it seems to me, than any other work which this generation could undertake.

AN ENGLISH COLLEGE IN THE

OLDEN TIME.

BY BASS MULLINGER, ESQ., M.A.

October 10th, 1882.

To those whose attention has been given to the history of academic life in past times, there are few passages more familiar than that in which a master of St. John's College, Cambridge, preaching at Paul's Cross, in the reign of Edward VI., describes the state of that ancient society as it existed when the principles of the Reformation had, for the first time, been triumphantly proclaimed in England, and when the confiscating and destroying spirit, which assumed the guise of religious freedom, pursued its career of devastation unchecked throughout the land. We see pictured before us a group of needy, poorly-fed students, seated at their early ten o'clock dinner. Their meal consists of a penny piece of beef divided among four; to this is added a little porridge, which, as the orator informs us, had been made from the same piece of beef, a little oatmeal and salt being superadded, and, to quote Dr. Lever's own expression, "nothing else." This Spartan meal over, we see the students betaking themselves to their scholastic work, either as teachers or learners, until five in the evening, when a meal very similar to that in the morning is set before them. Then we see them devoting themselves to "problems," or some other exercitations of the mental powers, until the hour of nine or ten has arrived. However cold the weather, there are probably no fires, unless indeed it be the season of Yule-tide : and so, before they retire to their confined chambers to seek repose,

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derived from the latter part of the sixwall mir. I dink, very fairly be pendin er scolemic history, and a perl Trenler more intelligible the follege life which subsequently Book place. W, mint W, mint, I prehend, look upon Dr. Lever's picture of St. John's as presenting us with very exceptional experiences as regar is the vet earlier age. On the contrary, through

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