"He can, in fact, be seen as in many ways the last great neoclassical historian, writing history after a successful public career. His own culture was above all classical, broadened by a love of eighteenth-century novels and drama, as well as by his reading of Burke, whom he revered, and Scott. Where he was exceptional was not in being a social historian, which he certainly was not, but in the emotional range and depth, the almost pictorial vividness and concreteness, and the dramatic intensity of his historical writing. None of this was exactly new — it was foreshadowed in Robertson and Hume — but in no other historian was it so copiously and even extravagantly displayed. His own model historians were Tacitus and Thucydides."