Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.

Landor’s remark treats “history” not as a genre but as an inescapable dimension of serious writing. Even when a great author writes lyric, fiction, criticism, or philosophy, the work records the temper of an age: its language, assumptions, conflicts, and ideals. In that sense, imaginative literature becomes evidence—often more vivid than chronicles—of how people felt and thought. The claim also implies a standard for greatness: writing that endures does so partly because it captures human experience in a way later readers can use to understand the past. Great writers, knowingly or not, become historians of the inner life.