ABSTRACT
‘Great abilities’, declared Dr Johnson in his confident way, ‘are not requisite for an historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent.’ Fifty years later, Thomas Babington Macaulay, in an essay for the Edinburgh Review, was of the opposite opinion. ‘To write History respectably’, he observed, ‘is easy enough; but to be a really great historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.’ 1
