ν.Τ HISTORY AS STATUARY. "3 of historical genius chiefly displays itself. But the same method may be applied to an institution that has a wellascertained growth, and the result in that case will certainly be not less valuable. Still there are certain unities of time; place, and interest, which are more readily united in biography than in institutional history. As valuable History may be so written, so a good deal of History may be so read, in a way, that is, to produce in the mind a perfect image of the character worth studying ; nay, the method is more applicable to the reading than to the writing of History, because it is easier for the mind to receive Successive images or phases of the one character, than it is for the writer to reproduce them without becoming tedious ; the realisation in the mind may easily be a regular and orderly development, whilst in the written record of even the best historian it is liable to become a series of postures and attitudes, attended by tricks and mannerisms of style that are unworthy of the serious student. The second form of our art is analogous to painting, and its result to a picture ; it aims at reproducing not a character or a life, but a situation; it requires a background and a foreground, scenery and perspective, as well as unity and symmetry; it studies the relations and positions, the features and habit of each of the persons or groups that the picture contains, and tries to make them true to the eye, whatever they may be to the life. Thoroughness and complete realisation is not a requisite of this sort of work quite so much as accurate reproduction. The painter is not, like the statuary, obliged to look at his figures all round ; he need not go to the back of his picture, or if he does, he will see nothing : so the historian, who works at a situation, will often satisfy himself if his grouping is true and consistent for the moment which he wishes to seize ; and he will not spend much time in trying to show us how the scene comes to be what it is, satisfied ι