While there is literal
truth in this comparison, the fact is not applicable to historical
writing, except in a very limited degree. The preparation of the most
successful works in this department, in modern times, has been attended
with an outlay impossible to the poor scholar. It has involved the
examination and reproduction of voluminous manuscript authorities,
distant travel, the purchase of rare books and family papers, and
sometimes years of busy reference, observation, and study, lucrative
only in prospect. The same amount of culture and facile vigor of
composition which less prosperous authors expend on a masterly review
would suffice to make them famous historians, if blessed with the
pecuniary means to seek foreign sources of information, or gather about
them scattered and rare materials wherewith to weave a chronicle of the
past. Hence, not only has History become the chosen field of writers
with no special gift for more individually inspired kinds of literature,
but of the educated sons of fortune. Accordingly, it is curious to
remark the contrast between the lives of historians and those of
poets; and in the average circumstances of the former there is some
justification for the title of an aristocratic guild in letters.
Compare Cowper's humble home at Olney with Gibbon's elegant library at
Lausanne,--the social environment of Hallam, Grote, or Macaulay with
the rustic isolation of Wordsworth, the economies of Shelley, or the
life-struggle of Jerrold.
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