iS4 THE INSPIRATIONS OF HISTORIANS
objectives; and, meanwhile, they wrung from a working life that was
mainly occupied with 'practical' duties a modicum of leisure for em-
ployment in gradually approaching a distant intellectual goal by teaching
themselves how to lay out and economize their time to best advantage in
the daily round.

Even Grote, who was perhaps the weakest vessel among these iron
wills, was able, after all, to summon up the staying-power to abide by
his decision to write a history of Greece for at least twenty years before
he began to put it into execution and for twelve years more before the
work was complete. James Ford Rhodes held to his purpose for twenty-
six years before setting to work in A.D. 1887 on the writing of his History
of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, and for no less than
sixty-one years till the publication, in A.D. 1922, of a final volume carry-
ing the story down to A.D. 1909, if it is true

'that even in school days he had conceived the purpose of writing
American history, and, as the Civil War was then waging, he saw templing
material in rapid and exciting creation around him, whereby the scheme
inevitably took evermore and more powerful hold upon his imagination.'1

In Schliemann's life a Time-interval of thirty-nine years separated the
date of his resolve, in AJD. 1829, to excavate Troy from the date of his
first assault upon the mound at Hisarlyq in A.D. 1868. Bryce lived to ac-
complish the writing of the most ambitious of all his works, Modern
Democracies, though the unforeseen interruption of the work on his
literary agenda by the calls of public duty during the First World War
had prevented him from putting pen to paper on this long-since planned
and persistently cherished literary project till he was eighty years old.
And these heroically self-disciplined characters showed the same stead-
fast patience in biding their time for taking their principal intermediate
steps towards the achievement of their eventual objectives as in pushing
forward their saps and traverses, decade by decade, towards these ulti-
mate goals,

SchHemann, for example, could have put his marvellous linguistic
gift to work in mastering the Ancient Greek language at any time after
that memorable day in A.D. 18372 on which he had listened, spell-bound,
to the recitation of Homeric verses which were then still unintelligible to
him; and Greek was, in fact, 'the first language he learnt for other than
practical purposes*,3 though it was the tenth out of the twelve that he
taught himself from first to last.4 Yet, just because his craving to drink

1 Morse Jr., J. T.: 'Memoir of James Ford Rhodes', in the Proceedings of the Massa-
chusetts Historical Society, October 1926-June 1927, vol. Ix (Boston 1927), p. 178. The
memoir continues: *Now Mr. Rhodes was, by his nature, a very wise man. Already,
•while still so near to the outset of life, he showed that sound good sense and wideness of
vision which come to most of us, when fortunately they come at all, so many years
later. He had no notion of being too eager, of making a start before he was sure of being
able to hold on. So he held his ardour well in hand until all desirable preparations were
fully completed and he could devote all his mind and all his hours to his writing.'

2 Seep, 15,above.

3 Ludwig, E,: SchUemarm of Troy (London 1931, Putnam), p. 104. At the bank for
buying gold-dust which Schliemann set up at Sacramento, California, in A.D. 1851, he
conducted, according to his own account, in eight languages a business at which he was
working every day from 6.0 a.m. to 10.0 p.m. (Ludwig, op. cit., p. 90).

•* See p. i5,_above.