I have considered formerly, with a good deal of attention, the subject
on which you command me to communicate my thoughts to you; and I
practised in those days, as much as business and pleasure allowed me
time to do, the rules that seemed to me necessary to be observed in
the study of history. They were very different from those which
writers on the same subject have recommended, and which are commonly
practised. But I confess to your lordship that this neither gave me
then, nor has given me since, any distrust of them. I do not affect
singularity. On the contrary, I think that a due deference is to be
paid to received opinions, and that a due compliance with received
customs is to be held; tho both the one and the other should be, what
they often are, absurd or ridiculous. But this servitude is outward
only, and abridges in no sort the liberty of private judgment. The
obligations of submitting to it likewise, even outwardly, extend no
further than to those opinions and customs which can not be opposed;
or from which we can not deviate without doing hurt, or giving
offense, to society. In all these cases, our speculations ought to be
free; in all other cases, our practise may be so. Without any regard,
therefore, to the opinion and practise even of the learned world, I am
very willing to tell you mine. But as it is hard to recover a thread
of thought long ago laid aside, and impossible to prove some things
and explain others, without the assistance of many books which I have
not here, your lordship must be content with such an imperfect sketch
as I am able to send you in this letter.
The motives that carry men to the study of history are different. Some
intend, if such as they may be said to study, nothing more than
amusement, and read the life of Aristides or Phocion, of Epaminondas
or Scipio, Alexander or Cæsar, just as they play a game at cards, or
as they would read the story of the seven champions.
Others there are whose motive to this study is nothing better, and who
have the further disadvantage of becoming a nuisance very often to
society, in proportion to the progress they make. The former do not
improve their reading to any good purpose; the latter pervert it to a
very bad one, and grow in impertinence as they increase in learning. I
think I have known most of the first kind in England, and most of the
last in France. The persons I mean are those who read to talk, to
shine in conversation, and to impose in company; who, having few ideas
to vend of their own growth, store their minds with crude unruminated
facts and sentences, and hope to supply by bare memory the want of
imagination and judgment.
But these are in the two lowest forms. The next I shall mention are in
one a little higher; in the form of those who grow neither wiser nor
better by study themselves, but who enable others to study with
greater ease, and to purposes more useful; who make fair copies of
foul manuscripts, give the signification of hard words, and take a
great deal of other grammatical pains. The obligation to these men
would be great indeed, if they were in general able to do anything
better, and submitted to this drudgery for the sake of the public; as
some of them, it must be owned with gratitude, have done, but not
later, I think, than about the time of the resurrection of letters.
When works of importance are pressing, generals themselves may take
up the pickax and the spade; but in the ordinary course of things,
when that pressing necessity is over, such tools are left in the hands
destined to use them, the hands of common soldiers and peasants. I
approve, therefore, very much the devotion of a studious man at Christ
Church, who was overheard in his oratory entering into a detail with
God, acknowledging the divine goodness in furnishing the world with
makers of dictionaries! These men court fame, as well as their
letters, by such means as God has given them to acquire it; and
Littleton exerted all the genius he had when he made a dictionary, tho
Stephens did not. They deserve encouragement, however, while they
continue to compile, and neither affect wit, nor presume to reason.
There is a fourth class, of much less use than these, but of much
greater name. Men of the first rank in learning, and to whom the whole
tribe of scholars bow with reverence. A man must be as indifferent as
I am to common censure or approbation, to avow a thorough contempt for
the whole business of these learned lives; for all the researches into
antiquity, for all the systems of chronology and history, that we owe
to the immense labors of a Scaliger, a Bochart, a Petavius, an Usher,
and even a Marsham. The same materials are common to them all; but
these materials are few, and there is a moral impossibility that they
should ever have more. They have combined these into every form that
can be given to them; they have supposed, they have guessed, they have
joined disjointed passages of different authors, and broken traditions
of uncertain originals, of various people, and of centuries remote
from one another as well as from ours. In short, that they might leave
no liberty untaken, even a wild fantastical similitude of sounds has
served to prop up a system. As the materials they have are few, so are
the very best and such as pass for authentic extremely precarious, as
learned persons themselves confess.
Julius Africanus, Eusebius, and George the Monk opened the principal
sources of all this science; but they corrupted the waters. Their
point of view was to make profane history and chronology agree with
sacred. For this purpose, the ancient monuments that these writers
conveyed to posterity were digested by them according to the system
they were to maintain; and none of these monuments were delivered down
in their original form and genuine purity. The dynasties of Manetho,
for instance, are broken to pieces by Eusebius, and such fragments of
them as suited his design are stuck into his work. We have, we know,
no more of them. The "Codex Alexandrinus" we owe to George the Monk.
We have no other authority for it; and one can not see without
amazement such a man as Sir John Marsham undervaluing this authority
in one page, and building his system upon it in the next. He seems
even by the lightness of his expressions, if I remember well, for it
is long since I looked into his canon, not to be much concerned what
foundation his system had, so he showed his skill in forming one, and
in reducing the immense antiquity of the Egyptians within the limits
of the Hebraic calculation.