When he visits the Coliseum, that vast ruin declares that the wealth of an empire, once devoted to the gratification of the most savage passions, has been diverted into some other channel.

When he visits the catacombs, and reads long lines of heathen epitaphs, with their despairing symbols of broken columns, extinguished torches, and their heart-breaking "Farewell! an eternal farewell!" and then turns to the monuments of only two centuries later, and reads, "He sleeps in the Lord," "He waits the resurrection to life eternal," recording the hopes of whole generations of survivors, he can not doubt the truth of the written records of the conversion of the Roman Empire.
There is, moreover, another kind of contemporary history not so connected and regular as the formal diary or journal, which does not even propose to relate history at all, but is for that very reason entirely removed from the suspicion of giving a coloring to it; which, at the cost of a little patience and industry, gives us the most convincing confirmations of the truth, or exposures of the mistakes of historians, by the undesigned and incidental way in which the use of a name, a date, a proverb, a jest, an expletive, a quotation, an allusion, flashes conviction upon the reader's mind.

I mean contemporary correspondence.

If we have the private letters of celebrated men laid before us, we are enabled to look right into them, and see their true character.

Thus Macaulay exhibits to the world the proud, lying, stupid tyrant, James, displayed in his own letters.