Sidgwick, have taught our age very much; but no one of them was ever
seen to smile; and it is not easy to recall in their voluminous works a
single irradiating image or one monumental phrase.

There are eminent historians to-day who disdain the luminous style of
Hume and Robertson, and yet deride the colour and fire of Gibbon.
Grote poured forth the precious contents of his portentous notebooks
with as little care for rhythm and as little sense of proportion as a
German professor. Freeman and Gardiner have evidently trained
themselves in the same school of elaborate learning, till they would
appear to count the graceful English of Froude, Lecky, and Green as
hardly becoming the dignity of history. It would seem as if the charge
which some of our historians are most anxious to avoid is the charge of
being "readable," and of keeping to themselves any fact that they know.

The men who are rather pleased than pained to hear themselves called by
the barbarous term of "scientists" seem to think that it matters
nothing how ill-digested be their book, or how commonplace be their
language. They are accustomed to lecture to students in the laboratory
in their shirt-sleeves with their hands in their pockets; and they
believe that immortality may be achieved if they can pile up enough
facts and manufacture an adequate number of monographs. And they do
this, in the teeth of excellent examples to the contrary. Huxley and
Tyndall have given their brethren in science fine examples of a pure,
vigorous, and well-knit style. Yet, how many of them are still quite
content to go rumbling along with an interminable rigmarole of dry
"memoirs." Our ponderous biographies of third-rate people tend to
become mere bags of letters and waste-paper baskets. And all this with
such consummate models before us, and so very high a standard of
general cultivation. We have had in this age men who write an English