History in a literary form was a remarkably late growth in Roman letters. Cicero declares several times in unmistakable terms that in his day “History is absent from Roman literature.” Twice he discusses the previous writers of Roman history, the annalists such as Fabius Pictor, Cato and Piso. He makes it clear that he found them very unpalatable because of their jejuneness: “erat enim in historia nihil aliud, nisi annalium confectio…unam dicendi laudem putant esse brevitatem.” Only Coelius Antipater stood out from the rest as one who made some attempt to achieve a pleasing style, but even he “ut homo, neque doctus, neque maxime aptus ad dicendum, sicut potuit, dolavit.” It is obvious that the basis of this criticism is purely literary and not historical, and that the demerits which Cicero censures in the older school of annalists, when considered as literature, may to a certain extent be considered as merits, if their historical value is to be weighed amongst the sources of Livy.

Christian relics have never received their due attention in history. Historians, justly suspecting the authenticity of the more eminent of them, have tended therefore to put them all to one side, forgetting that even a forgery can have its historical value; and only the theologians have taken notice of them, in their relations to the apocryphal improvements on Christian thought and story. This neglect is undeserved; for there are some of them that not only throw important sidelights on the history of their times, but even have played an active part in the moulding of that history.

The swing of the pendulum of historical opinion about Peterborough is in less violent oscillation than formerly, and is tending to become stationary at a middle point. The original belief that he both took Barcelona in 1705 and relieved it in 1706, and much else besides, based on Freind's and Carleton's contemporary eulogies, still held the field when Macaulay wrote his essay on the War of Succession in Spain, in the intervals of speech-making at his Leeds election of 1832. The reaction culminated in the refusal to believe that Carleton's memoirs were written by Carleton at all, or that Peterborough either took or relieved Barcelona; these later views found their extreme expression in Colonel Parnell's War of the Succession in Spain (1888), a work both learned and able, but very far from judicial.

Among the blithe adventurers of the eighteenth century, few sur-passed Macartney in the diversity and value of their public service, and none left a fairer name. Whether he was cajoling the Russian premier, or contending with republican patriots in the Irish Parliament, or defying a tenfold force of French in Grenada, or heartening Madras against Hyder Ali, or driving the Dutch from the coast of Coromandel, or facing the pistol of a soldier to whom as Governor of Bengal he had given the lie, or teaching the court of Pekin the merits of his country, or conspiring with Louis XVIII in Italy, or protecting our conquest at the Cape by threatening to blow up the mutinous Tremendous, he was always the same rare man, unflinching, versatile and incorruptible. When, as a gouty veteran of sixty-two, he turned his house at Chiswick into “the resort of every distinguished character,” the Latin verses in which he reviewed his wanderings contained no more mention of Russia than Europaeque plagas fere visimus omnes. Yet he lived to see the work that he had done there contribute, and that perhaps in no small degree, to the fate of Napoleon and of Europe. In 1806, when he died, the dependent empire had not yet made its most conspicuous effort to dispense with British commercial aid. Tilsit had yet to point the way to Borodino. But the fate of Paul I had already hinted at the attitude of the Russian gentry towards a Tsar who challenged the system which Macartney's treaty had confirmed. One great cause of the retreat from Moscow may be discovered in the Anglo-Russian commercial bargain of 1766.