The Best Portraits Are Those In Which

In The Infancy Of Civilization, When Our Island Was As Savage As New Guinea, When Letters And Arts Were Still Unknown To Athens, When Scarcely A Thatched Roofed Hut Stood On What Was Later The Site Of Rome, This Contemned People Had Their Fenced Cities And Cedar Palaces, Their Splendid Temple, Their Fleets Of Merchant Ships, Their Schools Of Sacred Learning, Their Great Statesmen And Soldiers, Their Natural Philosophers, Their Historians And Their Poets.

A Perfect Historian Must Possess An Imagination Sufficiently Powerful To Make His Narrative Affecting And Picturesque; Yet He Must Control It So Absolutely As To Content Himself With The Materials Which He Finds, And To Refrain From Supplying Deficiencies By Additions Of His Own. He Must Be A Profound And Ingenious Reasoner; Yet He Must Possess Sufficient Self-command To Abstain From Casting His Facts In The Mould Of His Hypothesis.

The Spartan, Smiting And Spurning The Wretched Helot, Moves Our Disgust. But The Same Spartan, Calmly Dressing His Hair, And Uttering His Concise Jests, On What The Well Knows To Be His Last Day, In The Pass Of Thermopylae, Is Not To Be Contemplated Without Admiration.

Parent Of Sweetest Sounds, Yet Mute Forever.

If Ever Shakespeare Rants, It Is Not When His Imagination Is Hurrying Him Along, But When He Is Hurrying His Imagination Along.