Excerpt from English Historians With an Introduction

Any attempt to illustrate the characteristics of English historians by a series of extracts can attain at best to a very limited success. Much more than any other volume in this series it must recall the classical wiseacre who carried round a brick as a sample of the house that he had for sale. At first it seemed to me impossible to devise anything within the limits imposed which could be of service to serious students of literature, but, upon deliberation, it seemed that something might be done by a double and to some extent parallel series of extracts, the first illustrating the aims and motives of historians, mostly by their own utterances with regard to their craft, the second exhibiting their style and method of composition by passages of some length drawn from their most important works. I have convinced myself during the progress of the book that the study of the development of historiography offers a promising and little-worked field, from which valuable results might come both for philosophy and history.

The volume is concerned only with works in English. This limitation gives a certain unreality to all that part which deals with the centuries before the sixteenth.

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