Book Description

Excerpt from English Historians With an Introduction Any attempt to illustrate the characteristics of English historians by a series of extracts can attain at best to a very limited success. Much more than any other volume in this series it must recall the classical wiseacre who carried round a brick as a sample of the house that he had for sale. At first it seemed to me impossible to devise any thing within the limits imposed which could be of service to serious students of literature; but, upon deliberation, it seemed that something might be done by a double and to some extent parallel series of extracts, the first illustrating the aims and motives of historians, mostly by their own utterances with regard to their craft; the second exhibiting their style and method of composition by passages of some length drawn from their most important works. I have convinced myself during the progress of the book that the study of the development of historiography offers a promising and little-worked field, from which valuable results might come both for philosophy and history. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.