— 

OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY Ig 
from Athens, the venerable King Archidamas, the 
implacable Jingo Sthenelaidas; but the words that 
came from their lips are the words of the historian. 
He knows in general the kind of sentiments that 
each one represented, and he makes up their speeches 
accordingly. No doubt the readers of Thucydides 
understood how this was done, and nobody was misled 
by it; but a critical age would not tolerate such a 
fashion. The critical scholar wants either the real 
thing or nothing; when inverted commas are used 
in connection with the first person singular, he wants 
to see the very words that came from the speaker, 
even with their faults of grammar or of taste. Half 
a century ago the letters of George Washington were 
edited by the late President Sparks of Harvard, who 
felt himself called upon to amend them. Where the 
writer said “Old Put,” the editor would change it to 
“General Putnam,” and where Washington exclaims 
that “things are in a devil of a state,” he is made to 
observe that “our affairs have reached a deplorable 
condition.” This sort of editing belongs to the o/d 
ways of treating history. The spirit of the new ways 
was long ago expressed by honest Oliver Cromwell, 
when he said to the artist, “ Paint me as I am — mole 
and all!” 
It has become difficult for us, in these days of 
punctilious antiquarian realism, to understand the 
tolerance of anachronisms that formerly prevailed in 
literature and on the stage, when in the tragedies of 
Corneille and Racine the wrathful Achilles and Aga- 
memnon, king of men, not only reviled each other 
in the court phrases of Versailles, but strutted about 
in bag-wigs and lace ruffles, while Klytemnestra lifted 
