in a New England college fifty years ago. He had to teach
Latin and Greek and the history of classical literature, con-
ducting sometimes as many as thirty-three exercises weekly.
The transition, he tells us,^ from philological studies which
comprise the historical to the actually historical was very-
easy, and it was helped by the task of teaching the history
of ancient literature. To do this from the customary hand-
books he found contrary to his nature and feeling. The
authors of some of them apparently had not even read the
prefaces of the works they discussed, to say nothing of
the works themselves. He based his lectures on his own
personal study of the authors. In the course of his prepara-
tion he read the ancient historians systematically. In the
universal outlook of Herodotus he found something especially
congenial to his mind. His teaching of the classical authors
became more and more imbued with the historical spirit. He
taught them as monuments of antiquity.
That Ranke, with his heavy burden of teaching, founded his lectures on personal study of the sources shows the ex- traordinary stuff of which he was made. The classical his- torians were followed by the post-classical, and those by the mediaeval so far as they were accessible. Thus early he started on th e straight ^nd nar row path of Jhistorical s cienc e — " critical study of the genuine sources " — from which he ne ver'departed. "^ ~ ~
This is one of the great characteristics of Ranke, and one of the secrets of his success. He expended very little time at any period of his career on secondary sources. The method was laborious, but every day's work told, and little had to be done over, or unlearned. Even while at Leipzig he had been led to the sources of mediaeval history by his friend Stenzel, at whose rooms he saw for the first time a collection of the jSeriptores^^ and began to read them — much as Luther saw and read his first Bible at Erfurt. At Frank- fort it was almost with rapture that he read in Grotius's edition of Jordanes and Paulus Diaconus, the story of the
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