Publisher's Synopsis
History is apt to be, and some think that it should be, a mere series of dryuncoloured statements. Such an event occurred, such a word was uttered, such adeed was done, at this date or the other. We give references to our authorities, tomen who heard of the events, or even saw them when they happened. But we, thewriter and the readers, see nothing: we only offer or accept bald and imperfectinformation. If we try to write history on another method, we become 'picturesque: 'we are composing a novel, not striving painfully to attain the truth. Yet, when weknow not the details;-the aspect of dwellings now ruinous; the hue and cut ofgarments long wasted into dust; the passing frown, or smile, or tone of the actorsand the speakers in these dramas of life long ago; the clutch of Bothwell at hisdagger's hilt, when men spoke to him in the street; the flush of Darnley's fair face asMary and he quarrelled at Stirling before his murder-then we know not the realhistory, the real truth. Now and then such a detail of gesture or of change ofcountenance is recorded by an eyewitness, and brings us, for a moment, into morevivid contact with the past. But we could only know it, and judge the actors andtheir conduct, if we could see the personages in their costume as they lived, passing by in some magic mirror from scene to scene. The stage, as in Schiller's'Marie Stuart, ' comes nearest to reality, if only the facts given by the poet were real;and next in vividness comes the novel, such as Scott's 'Abbot, ' with its picture ofMary at Loch Leven, when she falls into an hysterical fit at the mention of Bastian'smarriage on the night of Darnley's death. Far less intimate than these imaginarypictures of genius are the statements of History, dull when they are not'picturesque, ' and when they are 'picturesque, ' sometimes prejudiced, inaccurate, and misl