- [225] We meet with declarations like the following: "I have been long familiar with the documents of this period and this class. I have an impression that such and such conclusions, which I cannot prove, are true." Of two things one: either the author can give the reasons for his impression, and then we can judge them, or he cannot give them, and we may assume that he has none of serious value.
- [226] This difference has a tendency to disappear. The most recent alphabetical collections of historical facts (the Realencyclopædie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft of Pauly-Wissowa, the Dictionnaire des antiquités of Daremberg and Saglio, the Dictionary of National Biography of Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee) are furnished with a sufficiently ample apparatus. It is principally in biographical dictionaries that the custom of giving no proofs tends to persist; see the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, &c.
- [227] Revue Critique, 1874, i. p. 327.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF HISTORY
395