anything at all which has the hall mark of an established reputation,
quite careless as to their love of it or their appetite for it. One
could further show how more than one book of permanent value in English
life has been discovered in our generation outside England, and has been
as it were thrust upon the English public by foreign opinion.

But for my purpose it will be sufficient to take one very important
branch which I can claim to have watched with some care, and that is the
branch of History.

It may be said with truth that in our generation no single first-rate
piece of history has enjoyed an appreciable sale. That is not true of
France, it is not true of the United States, it is not even true of
Germany in her intellectual decline, but it is true of England.

History is an excellent test. No man will read history, at least history
of an instructive sort, unless he is a man who can read a book, and
desires to possess one. To read History involves not only some permanent
interest in things not immediately sensible, but also some permanent
brain-work in the reader; for as one reads history one cannot, if one is
an intelligent being, forbear perpetually to contrast the lessons it
teaches with the received opinions of our time. Again, History is
valuable as an example in the general thesis I am maintaining, because
no good history can be written without a great measure of hard work. To
make a history at once accurate, readable, useful, and new, is probably
the hardest of all literary efforts; a man writing such history is
driving more horses abreast in his team than a man writing any other
kind of literary matter. He must keep his imagination active; his style
must be not only lucid, but also must arrest the reader; he must
exercise perpetually a power of selection which plays over innumerable