In our days historical studies have been directed as never before to the original monuments of the past in every century. The deciphering of Assyrian and Egyptian monuments, the collecting of Greek and Roman inscriptions, the publishing of the records and literature of the Middle Ages, the ransacking of modern archives, –however different may be the objects, the means of study, and even the intellectual capacities employed–have all the same end, viz. to get free from the trammels of established tradition, to gain a mastery over the immediate circumstances and issues of life, to see the past as a present, as it were with our own eyes.

Moreover the last centuries have produced in more than one nation historians of genuine ability, who, in themselves, are perhaps the equals of the masters of antiquity: they stand, however, and that to their disadvantage, in a relation to modern studies altogether different from that in which the old historians are placed. For antiquarian discoveries scarcely ever extend to the province of political events, which forms the basis of descriptive history; whereas it is precisely to this province that the investigation of archives in modern times has been directed. The ancients stand in solitary grandeur above an extinct world; they are almost inaccessible to a criticism based on other sources of information; the moderns on the other hand are in the widest extent exposed to such.