literary turn, would sooner spend my leisure playing skittles with
boors than in reading sonorous lies in stout volumes.

'It is not so much,' wilily insinuates the Tempter, 'that these
renowned authors lack knowledge. Their habit of giving an occasional
reference (though the verification of these is usually left to the
malignancy of a rival and less popular historian) argues at least some
reading. No; what is wanting is ignorance, carefully acquired and
studiously maintained. This is no paradox. To carry the truisms,
theories, laws, language of to-day, along with you in your historical
pursuits, is to turn the muse of history upside down--a most
disrespectful proceeding--and yet to ignore them--to forget all about
them--to hang them up with your hat and coat in the hall, to remain
there whilst you sit in the library composing your immortal work,
which is so happily to combine all that is best in Gibbon and
Macaulay--a sneerless Gibbon and an impartial Macaulay--is a task
which, if it be not impossible is, at all events, of huge difficulty.

Another blemish in English historical work has been noticed by the
Rev. Charles Kingsley, and may therefore be referred to by me without
offence. Your standard historians, having no unnatural regard for
their most indefatigable readers, the wives and daughters of England,
feel it incumbent upon them to pass over, as unfit for dainty ears and
dulcet tones, facts, and rumours of facts, which none the less often
determined events by stirring the strong feelings of your ancestors,
whose conduct, unless explained by this light, must remain
enigmatical.

When, to these anachronisms of thought and omissions of fact, you have
added the dishonesty of the partisan historian and the false glamour