"I Was Informed By _Ahmed Almatin Aljorhami_, Who Had It From _Rephaa Ebn Kais Alamiri_, Who Had It From _Saiph

Ebn Fabalah Alchatquarmi_, who had it from _Thabet Ebn Alkamah_, who said he was present at the action." These fathers

Of history were not anxious to preserve, but to learn the fact; and hence it was not forgotten. Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the _past_ cannot be _presented_; we cannot know what we are not. But one veil hangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating. We will sit on a mound and muse, and not try to make these skeletons stand on their legs again. Does Nature remember, think you, that they _were_ men, or not rather that they _are_ bones?

Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the spectator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience. Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind, as they are battered down by the encroachments of time; but while they loiter, they and their works both fall a prey to the arch enemy.

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