Page:The reflections of Lichtenberg.djvu/114

wiser, it will, in any case, as Sterne says, bring more than half the book with it. I should, however, very much like to know how far the German is at present capable of such a history as this. My own opinion I advance with some trepidation. Your true professor or stay-at-home is, I should rather say, the very last person capable of becoming a great historian. He may prepare the way for another, he may write whole dissertations enabling that other to speak his one word, and may in so far become a very useful man. But it is certain that these laboured chronicles will all, in say, four to five hundred or a thousand years, ultimately disappear, while posterity will still be reading the work of the man who relates events shortly, concisely, and with that manly dignity which attests the greatest possible research—as a set face and plain yet neat attire attest a manly character. This is the writer, too, who without preaching intersperses observations out of which a good sermon might be made. The stay-at-home, I repeat, is not the man for this; for without intercourse with the world and with people in various classes of wider experience than oneself it is impossible to attain that sense which almost unconsciously prompts us to judge of events, or at least to look for them in the proper place and follow them up in the right direction. Books would fully supply any deficiency in this respect if they were all written with a knowledge of human nature; but even the man who has experience, who acts upon it in everyday life, who gives expression to it at table and on walks will often fail to put into his