PR CITY OF NEW YORK. MOOTED QUESTIONS OF HISTORICAL ATTITUDES, PAST AND N an essay which he contributed to the "Edinburgh Review" nearly seventy I years ago, Macaulay indicates his conception of the good historian by suggesting that if Lord Clarendon, instead of filling hundreds of folio pages with copies of state papers, had condescended to be "the Boswell of the Long Parliament," he would have proven not only more interesting but also more accurate. In a subsequent essay written in review of Hallam's "Constitutional History of England," Macaulay says that the ideal history is "a compound of poetry and philosophy," something which calls into play the imagination as well as the reason. These are the opinions of a comparatively recent historian, and yet they present a decided contrast with current conceptions of what good historical writing should be. Macaulay, who will perhaps be remembered more as an essayist than as an historian, said enough, in the article to which I have alluded, to make clear, even to the historians of his own age, the prime necessity of greater accuracy; yet such is not the lesson that he particularly enforces. With him, it is still a question of style rather than of facts, of ability to interest rather than the ability to separate the chaff of legend from the grain. of truth. The modern essayist reviews the ancient historians, but his criticism is not that they are deficient either in rhetoric or interest: Herodotus manufactures the speeches he puts in the mouths of Aristides and Gelon. History as written by Thucydides "calls into play the imagination quite as much as the reason." Xenophon places, on the pages of his sober chronicles, dreams, omens, and prophecies for which he asks equal credence. As for Livy, "no historian with whom we are acquainted has shown so complete indifference to truth," says |