The works of Clarendon and Burnet, for instance, can never lose a certain value on this account.

The immortal book which all subsequent generations have agreed to call a possession for ever, is the unapproachable ideal of this class.

But neither Thucydides nor Clarendon were historians in the sense in which Gibbon was an historian, that is, engaged in the delineation of a remote epoch by the help of such materials as have escaped the ravages of time.

It is historians like Gibbon who are exposed to the particular unhappiness referred to a little way back--that of growing out of date through no fault of their own, but through the changed aspect presented by the past in consequence of the movement which has brought us to the present.

But if this is the field of historical disaster, it is also the opportunity of historical genius.