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and American historical scholars should take a vote as to who were the 

 two best historians, I have little doubt that Thucydides and Tacitus 

 would have a pretty large majority. . . . They are superior to 

 the historians who have written in our century because by long re- 

 flection and studious method they have better digested their materials 

 and compressed their narrative." — /. F. Rhodes, presidential address 

 of the American Historical Association (1899). "As an historian, 

 he holds the foremost place." — Encyclopœdia Americana (issued 

 under the supervision of the Scientific American, 1904-1905). "As a 

 writer of history, he has never been surpassed." — Nelson's Ency- 

 clopœdia (1907-1912). "He has subjected his materials to the most 

 searching scrutiny. The ruling principle of his work has been strict 

 adherence to carefully verified facts. He stands alone among the 

 men of his own days, and has no superior of any age in the width of 

 mental grasp which could seize the general significance of particular 

 events. The political education of mankind began in Greece, and 

 in the time of Thucydides their political life was still young. Thucy- 

 dides knew only the small city commonwealth on the one hand, and 

 on the other the vast barbaric kingdom; and yet, as has been well 

 said of him, 'there is hardly a problem in the science of government 

 which the statesman will not find, if not solved, at any rate handled, 

 in the pages of this universal master.' " — Encyclopœdia Britannica, 

 11th edition (1910-1911). The virtues ascribed to this historian in 

 each of the above citations are also ascribed to him as a whole by them 

 all; and the following passage from Chamber^ s Encyclopœdia (1860- 

 1868) jnay still be taken as -a fair and accurate summary of past and 

 present opinion of Thucydides : — "There is hardly a literary production 

 of which posterity has entertained a more uniformly favourable esti- 

 mate than the history of Thucydides. This high distinction he owes 

 to his undeviating fidelity and impartiality as a narrator; to the 

 masterly brevity of his style, in which he is content to give in a few 

 simple yet vivid expressions the facts which it must have often taken 

 him weeks or even months to collect, sift, and decide upon; to the 

 sagacity of his political and moral observations, in which he shows the 

 keenest insight into the springs of human action, and the mental 

 nature of man; and to the unrivalled descriptive power exemplified 

 in his account of the plague of Athens, and of the Athenian expedition 

 to Sicily. Often, indeed, does the modern student of history share 

 the wish of Grote, that the great writer had been a little more com- 

 municative on collateral topics, and that some of his sentences had 

 been expanded into paragraphs, and some of his paragraphs into chap- 

 ters. But this want cannot have been felt by the contemporaries of 

 Thucydides, while the fate of other ancient historians warns us that 



