History is the way that Herodotus and Fra Paolo and Tocqueville and ...

History is the way that Herodotus and Fra Paolo and Tocqueville and Maitland, and all those people, saw things happening.

And I dwell on the name of Maitland partly because, outside his own profession, England has never done justice to that royal intellect, at once as penetrating and comprehensive as any historian has ever possessed: but more because no other English writer has so perfectly apprehended the final and dominant object of historical study: which is, the origin, content, and articulation of that objective mind which controls the thinking and doing of an age or race, as our mother-tongue controls our speaking; or possessed, in so full a measure, the power of entering into that mind, thinking with its equipment, judging by its canons, and observing with its perceptions.

Capacity like that is no more imitable than the capacity which hung the dome of St.