I told you, dear Monkton, in my first letter, of my favorite retreat in
Mr. Mandeville's grounds. I have grown so attached to it, that I spend
the greater part of the day there.
I am not one of those persons who always perambulate with a book in their
hands, as if neither nature nor their own reflections could afford them
any rational amusement. I go there more frequently _en paresseux_ than
_en savant_: a small brooklet which runs through the grounds broadens at
last into a deep, clear, transparent lake. Here fir and elm and oak
fling their branches over the margin and beneath their shade I pass all
the hours of noon-day in the luxuries of a dreamer's reverie. It is
true, however, that I am never less idle than when I appear the most so.
I am like Prospero in his desert island, and surround myself with
spirits. A spell trembles upon the leaves; every wave comes fraught to
me with its peculiar music: and an Ariel seems to whisper the secrets of
every breeze, which comes to my forehead laden with the perfumes of the
West. But do not think, Mounton, that it is only good spirits which
haunt the recesses of my solitude. To push the metaphor to
exaggeration--Memory is my Sycorax, and Gloom is the Caliban she
conceives. But let me digress from myself to my less idle occupations;--
I have of late diverted my thoughts in some measure by a recurrence to a
study to which I once was particularly devoted--history. Have you ever
remarked, that people who live the most by themselves reflect the most
upon others; and that he who lives surrounded by the million never thinks
of any but the one individual--himself?
Philosophers--moralists-historians, whose thoughts, labours, lives, have
been devoted to the consideration of mankind, or the analysis of public
events, have usually been remarkably attached to solitude and seclusion.
We are indeed so linked to our fellow-beings, that, where we are not
chained to them by action, we are carried to and connected with them by
thought.
I have just quitted the observations of my favourite Bolingbroke upon
history. I cannot agree with him as to its utility. The more I
consider, the more I am convinced that its study has been upon the whole
pernicious to mankind. It is by those details, which are always as
unfair in their inference as they must evidently be doubtful in their
facts, that party animosity and general prejudice are supported and
sustained. There is not one abuse--one intolerance--one remnant of
ancient barbarity and ignorance existing at the present day, which is not
advocated, and actually confirmed, by some vague deduction from the
bigotry of an illiterate chronicler, or the obscurity of an uncertain
legend. It is through the constant appeal to our ancestors that we
transmit wretchedness and wrong to our posterity: we should require, to
corroborate an evil originating in the present day, the clearest and most
satisfactory proof; but the minutest defence is sufficient for an evil
handed down to us by the barbarism of antiquity. We reason from what
even in old tunes was dubious, as if we were adducing what was certain in
those in which we live. And thus we have made no sanction to abuses so
powerful as history, and no enemy to the present like the past.