HISTORY. (May 1828.)

"The Romance of History. England." By Henry Neele.

London, 1828.

To write history respectably--that is, to abbreviate despatches, and

make extracts from speeches, to intersperse in due proportion epithets

of praise and abhorrence, to draw up antithetical characters of great

men, setting forth how many contradictory virtues and vices they united,

and abounding in "withs" and "withouts"--all this is very easy. But

to be a really great historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual

distinctions. Many scientific works are, in their kind, absolutely

perfect. There are poems which we should be inclined to designate as

faultless, or as disfigured only by blemishes which pass unnoticed in

the general blaze of excellence. There are speeches, some speeches of

Demosthenes particularly, in which it would be impossible to alter a

word without altering it for the worse. But we are acquainted with

no history which approaches to our notion of what a history ought to

be--with no history which does not widely depart, either on the right

hand or on the left, from the exact line.

The cause may easily be assigned. This province of literature is a

debatable land. It lies on the confines of two distinct territories.

It is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers; and, like other

districts similarly situated, it is ill defined, ill cultivated, and ill

regulated. Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers, the

Reason and the Imagination, it falls alternately under the sole and

absolute dominion of each. It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes

theory.

History, it has been said, is philosophy teaching by examples.

Unhappily, what the philosophy gains in soundness and depth the examples

generally lose in vividness. A perfect historian must possess an

imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and

picturesque. Yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself

with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying

deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and

ingenious reasoner. Yet he must possess sufficient self-command to

abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis. Those who

can justly estimate these almost insuperable difficulties will not think

it strange that every writer should have failed, either in the narrative

or in the speculative department of history.

It may be laid down as a general rule, though subject to considerable

qualifications and exceptions, that history begins in novel and ends

in essay. Of the romantic historians Herodotus is the earliest and the

best. His animation, his simple-hearted tenderness, his wonderful talent

for description and dialogue, and the pure sweet flow of his language,

place him at the head of narrators. He reminds us of a delightful child.

There is a grace beyond the reach of affectation in his awkwardness, a

malice in his innocence, an intelligence in his nonsense, an insinuating

eloquence in his lisp. We know of no writer who makes such interest

for himself and his book in the heart of the reader. At the distance

of three-and-twenty centuries, we feel for him the same sort of pitying

fondness which Fontaine and Gay are said to have inspired in society.

He has written an incomparable book. He has written something better

perhaps than the best history; but he has not written a good history;

he is, from the first to the last chapter, an inventor. We do not here

refer merely to those gross fictions with which he has been reproached

by the critics of later times. We speak of that colouring which is

equally diffused over his whole narrative, and which perpetually leaves

the most sagacious reader in doubt what to reject and what to receive.

The most authentic parts of his work bear the same relation to his

wildest legends which Henry the Fifth bears to the Tempest. There was

an expedition undertaken by Xerxes against Greece; and there was an

invasion of France. There was a battle at Plataea; and there was

a battle at Agincourt. Cambridge and Exeter, the Constable and the

Dauphin, were persons as real as Demaratus and Pausanias. The harangue

of the Archbishop on the Salic Law and the Book of Numbers differs much

less from the orations which have in all ages proceeded from the right

reverend bench than the speeches of Mardonius and Artabanus from those

which were delivered at the council-board of Susa. Shakspeare gives us

enumerations of armies, and returns of killed and wounded, which are

not, we suspect, much less accurate than those of Herodotus. There are

passages in Herodotus nearly as long as acts of Shakspeare, in which

everything is told dramatically, and in which the narrative serves only

the purpose of stage-directions. It is possible, no doubt, that the

substance of some real conversations may have been reported to the

historian. But events which, if they ever happened, happened in ages and

nations so remote that the particulars could never have been known to

him, are related with the greatest minuteness of detail. We have all

that Candaules said to Gyges, and all that passed between Astyages and

Harpagus. We are, therefore, unable to judge whether, in the account

which he gives of transactions respecting which he might possibly have

been well informed, we can trust to anything beyond the naked outline;

whether, for example, the answer of Gelon to the ambassadors of the

Grecian confederacy, or the expressions which passed between Aristides

and Themistocles at their famous interview, have been correctly

transmitted to us. The great events are, no doubt, faithfully related.

So, probably, are many of the slighter circumstances; but which of them

it is impossible to ascertain. The fictions are so much like the facts,

and the facts so much like the fictions, that, with respect to many most

interesting particulars, our belief is neither given nor withheld, but

remains in an uneasy and interminable state of abeyance. We know that

there is truth; but we cannot exactly decide where it lies.

The faults of Herodotus are the faults of a simple and imaginative

mind. Children and servants are remarkably Herodotean in their style of

narration. They tell everything dramatically. Their "says hes" and "says

shes" are proverbial. Every person who has had to settle their disputes

knows that, even when they have no intention to deceive, their reports

of conversation always require to be carefully sifted. If an educated

man were giving an account of the late change of administration, he

would say--"Lord Goderich resigned; and the King, in consequence, sent

for the Duke of Wellington." A porter tells the story as if he had been

hid behind the curtains of the royal bed at Windsor: "So Lord Goderich

says, 'I cannot manage this business; I must go out.' So the

King says,--says he, 'Well, then, I must send for the Duke of

Wellington--that's all.'" This is in the very manner of the father of

history.

Herodotus wrote as it was natural that he should write. He wrote for a

nation susceptible, curious, lively, insatiably desirous of novelty

and excitement; for a nation in which the fine arts had attained their

highest excellence, but in which philosophy was still in its infancy.

His countrymen had but recently begun to cultivate prose composition.

Public transactions had generally been recorded in verse. The first

historians might, therefore, indulge without fear of censure in the

license allowed to their predecessors the bards. Books were few. The

events of former times were learned from tradition and from popular

ballads; the manners of foreign countries from the reports of

travellers. It is well known that the mystery which overhangs what is

distant, either in space or time, frequently prevents us from censuring

as unnatural what we perceive to be impossible. We stare at a dragoon

who has killed three French cuirassiers, as a prodigy; yet we read,

without the least disgust, how Godfrey slew his thousands, and Rinaldo

his ten thousands. Within the last hundred years, stories about China

and Bantam, which ought not to have imposed on an old nurse, were

gravely laid down as foundations of political theories by eminent

philosophers. What the time of the Crusades is to us, the generation of

Croesus and Solon was to the Greeks of the time of Herodotus. Babylon

was to them what Pekin was to the French academicians of the last

century.

For such a people was the book of Herodotus composed; and, if we may

trust to a report, not sanctioned indeed by writers of high authority,

but in itself not improbable, it was composed, not to be read, but to

be heard. It was not to the slow circulation of a few copies, which the

rich only could possess, that the aspiring author looked for his reward.

The great Olympian festival,--the solemnity which collected multitudes,

proud of the Grecian name, from the wildest mountains of Doris, and the

remotest colonies of Italy and Libya,--was to witness his triumph. The

interest of the narrative, and the beauty of the style, were aided

by the imposing effect of recitation,--by the splendour of the

spectacle,--by the powerful influence of sympathy. A critic who could

have asked for authorities in the midst of such a scene must have been

of a cold and sceptical nature; and few such critics were there. As was

the historian, such were the auditors,--inquisitive, credulous, easily

moved by religious awe or patriotic enthusiasm. They were the very

men to hear with delight of strange beasts, and birds, and trees,--of

dwarfs, and giants, and cannibals--of gods, whose very names it was

impiety to utter,--of ancient dynasties, which had left behind them

monuments surpassing all the works of later times,--of towns like

provinces,--of rivers like seas,--of stupendous walls, and temples, and

pyramids,--of the rites which the Magi performed at daybreak on the tops

of the mountains,--of the secrets inscribed on the eternal obelisks of

Memphis. With equal delight they would have listened to the

graceful romances of their own country. They now heard of the exact

accomplishment of obscure predictions, of the punishment of crimes over

which the justice of heaven had seemed to slumber,--of dreams, omens,

warnings from the dead,--of princesses, for whom noble suitors contended

in every generous exercise of strength and skill,--of infants, strangely

preserved from the dagger of the assassin, to fulfil high destinies.

As the narrative approached their own times, the interest became still

more absorbing. The chronicler had now to tell the story of that

great conflict from which Europe dates its intellectual and political

supremacy,--a story which, even at this distance of time, is the most

marvellous and the most touching in the annals of the human race,--a

story abounding with all that is wild and wonderful, with all that is

pathetic and animating; with the gigantic caprices of infinite wealth

and despotic power--with the mightier miracles of wisdom, of virtue,

and of courage. He told them of rivers dried up in a day,--of

provinces famished for a meal,--of a passage for ships hewn through the

mountains,--of a road for armies spread upon the waves,--of monarchies

and commonwealths swept away,--of anxiety, of terror, of confusion, of

despair!--and then of proud and stubborn hearts tried in that extremity

of evil, and not found wanting,--of resistance long maintained against

desperate odds,--of lives dearly sold, when resistance could be

maintained no more,--of signal deliverance, and of unsparing revenge.

Whatever gave a stronger air of reality to a narrative so well

calculated to inflame the passions, and to flatter national pride, was

certain to be favourably received.

Between the time at which Herodotus is said to have composed his

history, and the close of the Peloponnesian war, about forty years

elapsed,--forty years, crowded with great military and political events.

The circumstances of that period produced a great effect on the

Grecian character; and nowhere was this effect so remarkable as in the

illustrious democracy of Athens. An Athenian, indeed, even in the

time of Herodotus, would scarcely have written a book so romantic and

garrulous as that of Herodotus. As civilisation advanced, the citizens

of that famous republic became still less visionary, and still less

simple-hearted. They aspired to know where their ancestors had been

content to doubt; they began to doubt where their ancestors had thought

it their duty to believe. Aristophanes is fond of alluding to this

change in the temper of his countrymen. The father and son, in the

Clouds, are evidently representatives of the generations to which they

respectively belonged. Nothing more clearly illustrates the nature of

this moral revolution than the change which passed upon tragedy. The

wild sublimity of Aeschylus became the scoff of every young Phidippides.

Lectures on abstruse points of philosophy, the fine distinctions of

casuistry, and the dazzling fence of rhetoric, were substituted for

poetry. The language lost something of that infantine sweetness which

had characterised it. It became less like the ancient Tuscan, and more

like the modern French.

The fashionable logic of the Greeks was, indeed, far from strict. Logic

never can be strict where books are scarce, and where information is

conveyed orally. We are all aware how frequently fallacies, which, when

set down on paper, are at once detected, pass for unanswerable arguments

when dexterously and volubly urged in Parliament, at the bar, or in

private conversation. The reason is evident. We cannot inspect them

closely enough to perceive their inaccuracy. We cannot readily compare

them with each other. We lose sight of one part of the subject before

another, which ought to be received in connection with it, comes before

us; and as there is no immutable record of what has been admitted and

of what has been denied, direct contradictions pass muster with little

difficulty. Almost all the education of a Greek consisted in talking and

listening. His opinions on government were picked up in the debates of

the assembly. If he wished to study metaphysics, instead of shutting

himself up with a book, he walked down to the market-place to look for

a sophist. So completely were men formed to these habits, that even

writing acquired a conversational air. The philosophers adopted the form

of dialogue, as the most natural mode of communicating knowledge. Their

reasonings have the merits and the defects which belong to that species

of composition, and are characterised rather by quickness and subtilty

than by depth and precision. Truth is exhibited in parts, and by

glimpses. Innumerable clever hints are given; but no sound and durable

system is erected. The argumentum ad hominem, a kind of argument most

efficacious in debate, but utterly useless for the investigation of

general principles, is among their favourite resources. Hence, though

nothing can be more admirable than the skill which Socrates displays in

the conversations which Plato has reported or invented, his victories,

for the most part, seem to us unprofitable. A trophy is set up; but no

new province is added to the dominions of the human mind.

Still, where thousands of keen and ready intellects were constantly

employed in speculating on the qualiies of actions and on the principles

of government, it was impossible that history should retain its whole

character. It became less gossiping and less picturesque; but much more

accurate, and somewhat more scientific.

The history of Thucydides differs from that of Herodotus as a portrait

differs from the representation of an imaginary scene; as the Burke or

Fox of Reynolds differs from his Ugolino or his Beaufort. In the former

case, the archetype is given: in the latter it is created. The faculties

which are required for the latter purpose are of a higher and rarer

order than those which suffice for the former, and indeed necessarily

comprise them. He who is able to paint what he sees with the eye of the

mind will surely be able to paint what he sees with the eye of the body.

He who can invent a story, and tell it well, will also be able to tell,

in an interesting manner, a story which he has not invented. If, in

practice, some of the best writers of fiction have been among the worst

writers of history, it has been because one of their talents had merged

in another so completely that it could not be severed; because, having

long been habituated to invent and narrate at the same time, they found

it impossible to narrate without inventing.

Some capricious and discontented artists have affected to consider

portrait-painting as unworthy of a man of genius. Some critics have

spoken in the same contemptuous manner of history. Johnson puts the case

thus: The historian tells either what is false or what is true: in the

former case he is no historian: in the latter he has no opportunity for

displaying his abilities: for truth is one: and all who tell the truth

must tell it alike.

It is not difficult to elude both the horns of this dilemma. We will

recur to the analogous art of portrait-painting. Any man with eyes and

hands may be taught to take a likeness. The process, up to a certain

point, is merely mechanical. If this were all, a man of talents might

justly despise the occupation. But we could mention portraits which are

resemblances,--but not mere resemblances; faithful,--but much more than

faithful; portraits which condense into one point of time, and exhibit,

at a single glance, the whole history of turbid and eventful lives--in

which the eye seems to scrutinise us, and the mouth to command us--in

which the brow menaces, and the lip almost quivers with scorn--in which

every wrinkle is a comment on some important transaction. The account

which Thucydides has given of the retreat from Syracuse is, among

narratives, what Vandyke's Lord Strafford is among paintings.

Diversity, it is said, implies error: truth is one, and admits of no

degrees. We answer, that this principle holds good only in abstract

reasonings. When we talk of the truth of imitation in the fine arts, we

mean an imperfect and a graduated truth. No picture is exactly like

the original; nor is a picture good in proportion as it is like the

original. When Sir Thomas Lawrence paints a handsome peeress, he does

not contemplate her through a powerful microscope, and transfer to the

canvas the pores of the skin, the blood-vessels of the eye, and all the

other beauties which Gulliver discovered in the Brobdingnagian maids

of honour. If he were to do this, the effect would not merely be

unpleasant, but, unless the scale of the picture were proportionably

enlarged, would be absolutely FALSE. And, after all, a microscope of

greater power than that which he had employed would convict him of

innumerable omissions. The same may be said of history. Perfectly and

absolutely true it cannot be: for, to be perfectly and absolutely

true, it ought to record ALL the slightest particulars of the slightest

transactions--all the things done and all the words uttered during

the time of which it treats. The omission of any circumstance, however

insignificant, would be a defect. If history were written thus, the

Bodleian Library would not contain the occurrences of a week. What is

told in the fullest and most accurate annals bears an infinitely small

proportion to what is suppressed. The difference between the copious

work of Clarendon and the account of the civil wars in the abridgment

of Goldsmith vanishes when compared with the immense mass of facts

respecting which both are equally silent.

No picture, then, and no history, can present us with the whole truth:

but those are the best pictures and the best histories which exhibit

such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole.

He who is deficient in the art of selection may, by showing nothing

but the truth, produce all the effect of the grossest falsehood. It

perpetually happens that one writer tells less truth than another,

merely because he tells more truths. In the imitative arts we constantly

see this. There are lines in the human face, and objects in landscape,

which stand in such relations to each other, that they ought either to

be all introduced into a painting together or all omitted together. A

sketch into which none of them enters may be excellent; but, if some

are given and others left out, though there are more points of likeness,

there is less likeness. An outline scrawled with a pen, which seizes the

marked features of a countenance, will give a much stronger idea of it

than a bad painting in oils. Yet the worst painting in oils that ever

hung at Somerset House resembles the original in many more particulars.

A bust of white marble may give an excellent idea of a blooming face.

Colour the lips and cheeks of the bust, leaving the hair and eyes

unaltered, and the similarity, instead of being more striking, will be

less so.

History has its foreground and its background: and it is principally in

the management of its perspective that one artist differs from another.

Some events must be represented on a large scale, others diminished; the

great majority will be lost in the dimness of the horizon; and a general

idea of their joint effect will be given by a few slight touches.

In this respect no writer has ever equalled Thucydides. He was a perfect

master of the art of gradual diminution. His history is sometimes as

concise as a chronological chart; yet it is always perspicuous. It

is sometimes as minute as one of Lovelace's letters; yet it is never

prolix. He never fails to contract and to expand it in the right place.

Thucydides borrowed from Herodotus the practice of putting speeches of

his own into the mouths of his characters. In Herodotus this usage is

scarcely censurable. It is of a piece with his whole manner. But it is

altogether incongruous in the work of his successor, and violates, not

only the accuracy of history, but the decencies of fiction. When once

we enter into the spirit of Herodotus, we find no inconsistency. The

conventional probability of his drama is preserved from the beginning

to the end. The deliberate orations, and the familiar dialogues, are

in strict keeping with each other. But the speeches of Thucydides are

neither preceded nor followed by anything with which they harmonise.

They give to the whole book something of the grotesque character of

those Chinese pleasure-grounds in which perpendicular rocks of granite

start up in the midst of a soft green plain. Invention is shocking where

truth is in such close juxtaposition with it.

Thucydides honestly tells us that some of these discourses are purely

fictitious. He may have reported the substance of others correctly, but

it is clear from the internal evidence that he has preserved no more

than the substance. His own peculiar habits of thought and expression

are everywhere discernible. Individual and national peculiarities are

seldom to be traced in the sentiments, and never in the diction. The

oratory of the Corinthians and Thebans is not less Attic, either in

matter or in manner, than that of the Athenians. The style of Cleon is

as pure, as austere, as terse, and as significant, as that of Pericles.

In spite of this great fault, it must be allowed that Thucydides has

surpassed all his rivals in the art of historical narration, in the

art of producing an effect on the imagination, by skilful selection

and disposition, without indulging in the license of invention. But

narration, though an important part of the business of a historian, is

not the whole. To append a moral to a work of fiction is either useless

or superfluous. A fiction may give a more impressive effect to what

is already known; but it can teach nothing new. If it presents to us

characters and trains of events to which our experience furnishes

us with nothing similar, instead of deriving instruction from it, we

pronounce it unnatural. We do not form our opinions from it; but we

try it by our preconceived opinions. Fiction, therefore, is essentially

imitative. Its merit consists in its resemblance to a model with which

we are already familiar, or to which at least we can instantly refer.

Hence it is that the anecdotes which interest us most strongly in

authentic narrative are offensive when introduced into novels; that what

is called the romantic part of history is in fact the least romantic. It

is delightful as history, because it contradicts our previous notions

of human nature, and of the connection of causes and effects. It is, on

that very account, shocking and incongruous in fiction. In fiction,

the principles are given, to find the facts: in history, the facts are

given, to find the principles; and the writer who does not explain the

phenomena as well as state them, performs only one half of his office.

Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which

interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them like gold in the ore,

that the mass derives its whole value: and the precious particles are

generally combined with the baser in such a manner that the separation

is a task of the utmost difficulty.

Here Thucydides is deficient: the deficiency, indeed, is not

discreditable to him. It was the inevitable effect of circumstances. It

was in the nature of things necessary that, in some part of its progress

through political science, the human mind should reach that point which

it attained in his time. Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.

The axioms of an English debating club would have been startling and

mysterious paradoxes to the most enlightened statesmen of Athens. But

it would be as absurd to speak contemptuously of the Athenian on this

account as to ridicule Strabo for not having given us an account of

Chili, or to talk of Ptolemy as we talk of Sir Richard Phillips. Still,

when we wish for solid geographical information, we must prefer the

solemn coxcombry of Pinkerton to the noble work of Strabo. If we wanted

instruction respecting the solar system, we should consult the silliest

girl from a boarding-school, rather than Ptolemy.

Thucydides was undoubtedly a sagacious and reflecting man. This clearly

appears from the ability with which he discusses practical questions.

But the talent of deciding on the circumstances of a particular case is

often possessed in the highest perfection by persons destitute of

the power of generalisation. Men skilled in the military tactics

of civilised nations have been amazed at the far-sightedness and

penetration which a Mohawk displays in concerting his stratagems, or in

discerning those of his enemies. In England, no class possesses so much

of that peculiar ability which is required for constructing ingenious

schemes, and for obviating remote difficulties, as the thieves and the

thief-takers. Women have more of this dexterity than men. Lawyers have

more of it than statesmen: statesmen have more of it than philosophers.

Monk had more of it than Harrington and all his club. Walpole had more

of it than Adam Smith or Beccaria. Indeed, the species of discipline

by which this dexterity is acquired tends to contract the mind, and to

render it incapable of abstract reasoning.

The Grecian statesmen of the age of Thucydides were distinguished by

their practical sagacity, their insight into motives, their skill in

devising means for the attainment of their ends. A state of society in

which the rich were constantly planning the oppression of the poor,

and the poor the spoliation of the rich, in which the ties of party

had superseded those of country, in which revolutions and

counter-revolutions were events of daily occurrence, was naturally

prolific in desperate and crafty political adventurers. This was the

very school in which men were likely to acquire the dissimulation of

Mazarin, the judicious temerity of Richelieu, the penetration, the

exquisite tact, the almost instinctive presentiment of approaching

events which gave so much authority to the counsel of Shaftesbury, that

"it was as if a man had inquired of the oracle of God." In this school

Thucydides studied; and his wisdom is that which such a school would

naturally afford. He judges better of circumstances than of principles.

The more a question is narrowed, the better he reasons upon it. His

work suggests many most important considerations respecting the first

principles of government and morals, the growth of factions, the

organisation of armies, and the mutual relations of communities. Yet

all his general observations on these subjects are very superficial. His

most judicious remarks differ from the remarks of a really philosophical

historian, as a sum correctly cast up by a bookkeeper from a general

expression discovered by an algebraist. The former is useful only in a

single transaction; the latter may be applied to an infinite number of

cases.

This opinion will, we fear, be considered as heterodox. For, not to

speak of the illusion which the sight of a Greek type, or the sound of

a Greek diphthong, often produces, there are some peculiarities in the

manner of Thucydides which in no small degree have tended to secure to

him the reputation of profundity. His book is evidently the book of a

man and a statesman; and in this respect presents a remarkable contrast

to the delightful childishness of Herodotus. Throughout it there is

an air of matured power, of grave and melancholy reflection, of

impartiality and habitual self-command. His feelings are rarely

indulged, and speedily repressed. Vulgar prejudices of every kind,

and particularly vulgar superstitions, he treats with a cold and

sober disdain peculiar to himself. His style is weighty, condensed,

antithetical, and not unfrequently obscure. But, when we look at his

political philosophy, without regard to these circumstances, we find

him to have been, what indeed it would have been a miracle if he had not

been, simply an Athenian of the fifth century before Christ.

Xenophon is commonly placed, but we think without much reason, in the

same rank with Herodotus and Thucydides. He resembles them, indeed,

in the purity and sweetness of his style; but in spirit, he rather

resembles that later school of historians whose works seem to be fables

composed for a moral, and who, in their eagerness to give us warnings

and examples, forget to give us men and women. The Life of Cyrus,

whether we look upon it as a history or as a romance, seems to us a

very wretched performance. The Expedition of the Ten Thousand, and the

History of Grecian Affairs, are certainly pleasant reading; but they

indicate no great power of mind. In truth, Xenophon, though his taste

was elegant, his disposition amiable, and his intercourse with the world

extensive, had, we suspect, rather a weak head. Such was evidently the

opinion of that extraordinary man to whom he early attached himself,

and for whose memory he entertained an idolatrous veneration. He came in

only for the milk with which Socrates nourished his babes in philosophy.

A few saws of morality, and a few of the simplest doctrines of natural

religion, were enough for the good young man. The strong meat, the bold

speculations on physical and metaphysical science, were reserved for

auditors of a different description. Even the lawless habits of a

captain of mercenary troops could not change the tendency which the

character of Xenophon early acquired. To the last, he seems to have

retained a sort of heathen Puritanism. The sentiments of piety and

virtue which abound in his works are those of a well-meaning man,

somewhat timid and narrow-minded, devout from constitution rather than

from rational conviction. He was as superstitious as Herodotus, but in

a way far more offensive. The very peculiarities which charm us in

an infant, the toothless mumbling, the stammering, the tottering, the

helplessness, the causeless tears and laughter, are disgusting in

old age. In the same manner, the absurdity which precedes a period

of general intelligence is often pleasing; that which follows it is

contemptible. The nonsense of Herodotus is that of a baby. The nonsense

of Xenophon is that of a dotard. His stories about dreams, omens, and

prophecies, present a strange contrast to the passages in which the

shrewd and incredulous Thucydides mentions the popular superstitions.

It is not quite clear that Xenophon was honest in his credulity; his

fanaticism was in some degree politic. He would have made an excellent

member of the Apostolic Camarilla. An alarmist by nature, an aristocrat

by party, he carried to an unreasonable excess his horror of popular

turbulence. The quiet atrocity of Sparta did not shock him in the same

manner; for he hated tumult more than crimes. He was desirous to find

restraints which might curb the passions of the multitude; and he

absurdly fancied that he had found them in a religion without

evidences or sanction, precepts or example, in a frigid system of

Theophilanthropy, supported by nursery tales.

Polybius and Arrian have given us authentic accounts of facts; and here

their merit ends. They were not men of comprehensive minds; they had

not the art of telling a story in an interesting manner. They have

in consequence been thrown into the shade by writers who, though less

studious of truth than themselves, understood far better the art of

producing effect,--by Livy and Quintus Curtius.

Yet Polybius and Arrian deserve high praise when compared with the

writers of that school of which Plutarch may be considered as the head.

For the historians of this class we must confess that we entertain a

peculiar aversion. They seem to have been pedants, who, though destitute

of those valuable qualities which are frequently found in conjunction

with pedantry, thought themselves great philosophers and great

politicians. They not only mislead their readers in every page, as to

particular facts, but they appear to have altogether misconceived the

whole character of the times of which they write. They were inhabitants

of an empire bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Euphrates, by the

ice of Scythia and the sands of Mauritania; composed of nations whose

manners, whose languages, whose religion, whose countenances and

complexions, were widely different; governed by one mighty despotism,

which had risen on the ruins of a thousand commonwealths and kingdoms.

Of liberty, such as it is in small democracies, of patriotism, such as

it is in small independent communities of any kind, they had, and they

could have, no experimental knowledge. But they had read of men who

exerted themselves in the cause of their country with an energy unknown

in later times, who had violated the dearest of domestic charities, or

voluntarily devoted themselves to death for the public good; and they

wondered at the degeneracy of their contemporaries. It never occurred to

them that the feelings which they so greatly admired sprung from local

and occasional causes; that they will always grow up spontaneously in

small societies; and that, in large empires, though they may be forced

into existence for a short time by peculiar circumstances, they cannot

be general or permanent. It is impossible that any man should feel for

a fortress on a remote frontier as he feels for his own house; that he

should grieve for a defeat in which ten thousand people whom he never

saw have fallen as he grieves for a defeat which has half unpeopled the

street in which he lives; that he should leave his home for a military

expedition in order to preserve the balance of power, as cheerfully as

he would leave it to repel invaders who had begun to burn all the corn

fields in his neighbourhood.

The writers of whom we speak should have considered this. They should

have considered that in patriotism, such as it existed amongst the

Greeks, there was nothing essentially and eternally good; that an

exclusive attachment to a particular society, though a natural,

and, under certain restrictions, a most useful sentiment, implies

no extraordinary attainments in wisdom or virtue; that, where it has

existed in an intense degree, it has turned states into gangs of robbers

whom their mutual fidelity has rendered more dangerous, has given a

character of peculiar atrocity to war, and has generated that worst of

all political evils, the tyranny of nations over nations.

Enthusiastically attached to the name of liberty, these historians

troubled themselves little about its definition. The Spartans, tormented

by ten thousand absurd restraints, unable to please themselves in the

choice of their wives, their suppers, or their company, compelled to

assume a peculiar manner, and to talk in a peculiar style, gloried in

their liberty. The aristocracy of Rome repeatedly made liberty a plea

for cutting off the favourites of the people. In almost all the little

commonwealths of antiquity, liberty was used as a pretext for measures

directed against everything which makes liberty valuable, for measures

which stifled discussion, corrupted the administration of justice, and

discouraged the accumulation of property. The writers, whose works we

are considering, confounded the sound with the substance, and the

means with the end. Their imaginations were inflamed by mystery. They

conceived of liberty as monks conceive of love, as cockneys conceive of

the happiness and innocence of rural life, as novel-reading sempstresses

conceive of Almack's and Grosvenor Square, accomplished Marquesses and

handsome Colonels of the Guards. In the relation of events, and the

delineation of characters, they have paid little attention to facts,

to the costume of the times of which they pretend to treat, or to the

general principles of human nature. They have been faithful only to

their own puerile and extravagant doctrines. Generals and statesmen are

metamorphosed into magnanimous coxcombs, from whose fulsome virtues we

turn away with disgust. The fine sayings and exploits of their heroes

remind us of the insufferable perfections of Sir Charles Grandison, and

affect us with a nausea similar to that which we feel when an actor,

in one of Morton's or Kotzebue's plays, lays his hand on his heart,

advances to the ground-lights, and mouths a moral sentence for the

edification of the gods.

These writers, men who knew not what it was to have a country, men who

had never enjoyed political rights, brought into fashion an offensive

cant about patriotism and zeal for freedom. What the English Puritans

did for the language of Christianity, what Scuderi did for the language

of love, they did for the language of public spirit. By habitual

exaggeration they made it mean. By monotonous emphasis they made it

feeble. They abused it till it became scarcely possible to use it with

effect.

Their ordinary rules of morality are deduced from extreme cases. The

common regimen which they prescribe for society is made up of those

desperate remedies which only its most desperate distempers require.

They look with peculiar complacency on actions which even those

who approve them consider as exceptions to laws of almost universal

application--which bear so close an affinity to the most atrocious

crimes that, even where it may be unjust to censure them, it is unsafe

to praise them. It is not strange, therefore, that some flagitious

instances of perfidy and cruelty should have been passed unchallenged in

such company, that grave moralists, with no personal interest at stake,

should have extolled, in the highest terms, deeds of which the

atrocity appalled even the infuriated factions in whose cause they were

perpetrated. The part which Timoleon took in the assassination of his

brother shocked many of his own partisans. The recollection of it preyed

long on his own mind. But it was reserved for historians who lived some

centuries later to discover that his conduct was a glorious display of

virtue, and to lament that, from the frailty of human nature, a man who

could perform so great an exploit could repent of it.

The writings of these men, and of their modern imitators, have produced

effects which deserve some notice. The English have been so long

accustomed to political speculation, and have enjoyed so large a measure

of practical liberty, that such works have produced little effect on

their minds. We have classical associations and great names of our own

which we can confidently oppose to the most splendid of ancient times.

Senate has not to our ears a sound so venerable as Parliament. We

respect to the Great Charter more than the laws of Solon. The Capitol

and the Forum impress us with less awe than our own Westminster Hall and

Westminster Abbey, the place where the great men of twenty generations

have contended, the place where they sleep together! The list of

warriors and statesmen by whom our constitution was founded or

preserved, from De Montfort down to Fox, may well stand a comparison

with the Fasti of Rome. The dying thanksgiving of Sidney is as noble as

the libation which Thrasea poured to Liberating Jove: and we think

with far less pleasure of Cato tearing out his entrails than of Russell

saying, as he turned away from his wife, that the bitterness of death

was past. Even those parts of our history over which, on some accounts,

we would gladly throw a veil may be proudly opposed to those on which

the moralists of antiquity loved most to dwell. The enemy of English

liberty was not murdered by men whom he had pardoned and loaded with

benefits. He was not stabbed in the back by those who smiled and cringed

before his face. He was vanquished on fields of stricken battle; he was

arraigned, sentenced, and executed in the face of heaven and earth. Our

liberty is neither Greek nor Roman; but essentially English. It has

a character of its own,--a character which has taken a tinge from

the sentiments of the chivalrous ages, and which accords with the

peculiarities of our manners and of our insular situation. It has a

language, too, of its own, and a language singularly idiomatic, full of

meaning to ourselves, scarcely intelligible to strangers.

Here, therefore, the effect of books such as those which we have been

considering has been harmless. They have, indeed, given currency to

many very erroneous opinions with respect to ancient history. They

have heated the imaginations of boys. They have misled the judgment and

corrupted the taste of some men of letters, such as Akenside and Sir

William Jones. But on persons engaged in public affairs they have had

very little influence. The foundations of our constitution were laid

by men who knew nothing of the Greeks but that they denied the orthodox

procession and cheated the Crusaders; and nothing of Rome, but that

the Pope lived there. Those who followed, contented themselves with

improving on the original plan. They found models at home and therefore

they did not look for them abroad. But, when enlightened men on the

Continent began to think about political reformation, having no patterns

before their eyes in their domestic history, they naturally had

recourse to those remains of antiquity, the study of which is considered

throughout Europe as an important part of education. The historians of

whom we have been speaking had been members of large communities, and

subjects of absolute sovereigns. Hence it is, as we have already said,

that they commit such gross errors in speaking of the little republics

of antiquity. Their works were now read in the spirit in which they

had been written. They were read by men placed in circumstances closely

resembling their own, unacquainted with the real nature of liberty, but

inclined to believe everything good which could be told respecting it.

How powerfully these books impressed these speculative reformers, is

well known to all who have paid any attention to the French literature

of the last century. But, perhaps, the writer on whom they produced the

greatest effect was Vittorio Alfieri. In some of his plays, particularly

in Virginia, Timoleon, and Brutus the Younger, he has even caricatured

the extravagance of his masters.

It was not strange that the blind, thus led by the blind, should

stumble. The transactions of the French Revolution, in some measure,

took their character from these works. Without the assistance of these

works, indeed, a revolution would have taken place,--a revolution

productive of much good and much evil, tremendous but shortlived, evil

dearly purchased, but durable good. But it would not have been exactly

such a revolution. The style, the accessories, would have been in many

respects different. There would have been less of bombast in language,

less of affectation in manner, less of solemn trifling and ostentatious

simplicity. The acts of legislative assemblies, and the correspondence

of diplomatists, would not have been disgraced by rants worthy only of a

college declamation. The government of a great and polished nation would

not have rendered itself ridiculous by attempting to revive the usages

of a world which had long passed away, or rather of a world which

had never existed except in the description of a fantastic school of

writers. These second-hand imitations resembled the originals about as

much as the classical feast with which the Doctor in Peregrine Pickle

turned the stomachs of all his guests resembled one of the suppers of

Lucullus in the Hall of Apollo.

These were mere follies. But the spirit excited by these writers

produced more serious effects. The greater part of the crimes which

disgraced the revolution sprung indeed from the relaxation of law, from

popular ignorance, from the remembrance of past oppression, from

the fear of foreign conquest, from rapacity, from ambition, from

party-spirit. But many atrocious proceedings must, doubtless, be

ascribed to heated imagination, to perverted principle, to a distaste

for what was vulgar in morals, and a passion for what was startling and

dubious. Mr Burke has touched on this subject with great felicity of

expression: "The gradation of their republic," says he, "is laid in

moral paradoxes. All those instances to be found in history, whether

real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality

is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted nature

recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction

of their youth." This evil, we believe, is to be directly ascribed to

the influence of the historians whom we have mentioned, and their modern

imitators.

Livy had some faults in common with these writers. But on the whole he

must be considered as forming a class by himself: no historian with whom

we are acquainted has shown so complete an indifference to truth. He

seems to have cared only about the picturesque effect of his book, and

the honour of his country. On the other hand, we do not know, in the

whole range of literature, an instance of a bad thing so well done. The

painting of the narrative is beyond description vivid and graceful. The

abundance of interesting sentiments and splendid imagery in the speeches

is almost miraculous. His mind is a soil which is never over-teemed, a

fountain which never seems to trickle. It pours forth profusely; yet

it gives no sign of exhaustion. It was probably to this exuberance of

thought and language, always fresh, always sweet, always pure, no sooner

yielded than repaired, that the critics applied that expression which

has been so much discussed lactea ubertas.

All the merits and all the defects of Livy take a colouring from the

character of his nation. He was a writer peculiarly Roman; the proud

citizen of a commonwealth which had indeed lost the reality of liberty,

but which still sacredly preserved its forms--in fact, the subject of

an arbitrary prince, but in his own estimation one of the masters of the

world, with a hundred kings below him, and only the gods above him. He,

therefore, looked back on former times with feelings far different from

those which were naturally entertained by his Greek contemporaries, and

which at a later period became general among men of letters throughout

the Roman Empire. He contemplated the past with interest and delight,

not because it furnished a contrast to the present, but because it

had led to the present. He recurred to it, not to lose in proud

recollections the sense of national degradation, but to trace the

progress of national glory. It is true that his veneration for antiquity

produced on him some of the effects which it produced on those who

arrived at it by a very different road. He has something of their

exaggeration, something of their cant, something of their fondness for

anomalies and lusus naturae in morality. Yet even here we perceive

a difference. They talk rapturously of patriotism and liberty in the

abstract. He does not seem to think any country but Rome deserving of

love; nor is it for liberty as liberty, but for liberty as a part of the

Roman institutions, that he is zealous.

Of the concise and elegant accounts of the campaigns of Caesar little

can be said. They are incomparable models for military despatches. But

histories they are not, and do not pretend to be.

The ancient critics placed Sallust in the same rank with Livy; and

unquestionably the small portion of his works which has come down to us

is calculated to give a high opinion of his talents. But his style

is not very pleasant: and his most powerful work, the account of the

Conspiracy of Catiline, has rather the air of a clever party pamphlet

than that of a history. It abounds with strange inconsistencies, which,

unexplained as they are, necessarily excite doubts as to the fairness

of the narrative. It is true, that many circumstances now forgotten may

have been familiar to his contemporaries, and may have rendered passages

clear to them which to us appear dubious and perplexing. But a great

historian should remember that he writes for distant generations, for

men who will perceive the apparent contradictions, and will possess no

means of reconciling them. We can only vindicate the fidelity of Sallust

at the expense of his skill. But in fact all the information which we

have from contemporaries respecting this famous plot is liable to the

same objection, and is read by discerning men with the same incredulity.

It is all on one side. No answer has reached our times. Yet on the

showing of the accusers the accused seem entitled to acquittal.

Catiline, we are told, intrigued with a Vestal virgin, and murdered his

own son. His house was a den of gamblers and debauchees. No young man

could cross his threshold without danger to his fortune and reputation.

Yet this is the man with whom Cicero was willing to coalesce in a

contest for the first magistracy of the republic; and whom he described,

long after the fatal termination of the conspiracy, as an accomplished

hypocrite, by whom he had himself been deceived, and who had acted with

consummate skill the character of a good citizen and a good friend. We

are told that the plot was the most wicked and desperate ever known,

and, almost in the same breath, that the great body of the people, and

many of the nobles, favoured it; that the richest citizens of Rome were

eager for the spoliation of all property, and its highest functionaries

for the destruction of all order; that Crassus, Caesar, the Praetor

Lentulus, one of the consuls of the year, one of the consuls elect,

were proved or suspected to be engaged in a scheme for subverting

institutions to which they owed the highest honours, and introducing

universal anarchy. We are told that a government, which knew all this,

suffered the conspirator, whose rank, talents, and courage rendered

him most dangerous, to quit Rome without molestation. We are told that

bondmen and gladiators were to be armed against the citizens. Yet we

find that Catiline rejected the slaves who crowded to enlist in his

army, lest, as Sallust himself expresses it, "he should seem to identify

their cause with that of the citizens." Finally, we are told that the

magistrate, who was universally allowed to have saved all classes of

his countrymen from conflagration and massacre, rendered himself so

unpopular by his conduct that a marked insult was offered to him at

the expiration of his office, and a severe punishment inflicted on him

shortly after.

Sallust tells us, what, indeed, the letters and speeches of Cicero

sufficiently prove, that some persons consider the shocking, and

atrocious parts of the plot as mere inventions of the government,

designed to excuse its unconstitutional measures. We must confess

ourselves to be of that opinion. There was, undoubtedly, a strong party

desirous to change the administration. While Pompey held the command of

an army, they could not effect their purpose without preparing means for

repelling force, if necessary, by force. In all this there is nothing

different from the ordinary practice of Roman factions. The other

charges brought against the conspirators are so inconsistent and

improbable, that we give no credit whatever to them. If our readers

think this scepticism unreasonable, let them turn to the contemporary

accounts of the Popish plot. Let them look over the votes of Parliament,

and the speeches of the king; the charges of Scroggs, and the harangues

of the managers employed against Strafford. A person who should form his

judgment from these pieces alone would believe that London was set on

fire by the Papists, and that Sir Edmondbury Godfrey was murdered for

his religion. Yet these stories are now altogether exploded. They have

been abandoned by statesmen to aldermen, by aldermen to clergymen, by

clergymen to old women, and by old women to Sir Harcourt Lees.

Of the Latin historians, Tacitus was certainly the greatest. His

style, indeed, is not only faulty in itself, but is, in some respects,

peculiarly unfit for historical composition. He carries his love of

effect far beyond the limits of moderation. He tells a fine story

finely, but he cannot tell a plain story plainly. He stimulates till

stimulants lose their power. Thucydides, as we have already observed,

relates ordinary transactions with the unpretending clearness and

succinctness of a gazette. His great powers of painting he reserves for

events of which the slightest details are interesting. The simplicity

of the setting gives additional lustre to the brilliants. There are

passages in the narrative of Tacitus superior to the best which can be

quoted from Thucydides. But they are not enchased and relieved with the

same skill. They are far more striking when extracted from the body of

the work to which they belong than when they occur in their place, and

are read in connection with what precedes and follows.

In the delineation of character, Tacitus is unrivalled among historians,

and has very few superiors among dramatists and novelists. By the

delineation of character, we do not mean the practice of drawing up

epigrammatic catalogues of good and bad qualities, and appending them

to the names of eminent men. No writer, indeed, has done this more

skilfully than Tacitus; but this is not his peculiar glory. All the

persons who occupy a large space in his works have an individuality of

character which seems to pervade all their words and actions. We know

them as if we had lived with them. Claudius, Nero, Otho, both the

Agrippinas, are masterpieces. But Tiberius is a still higher miracle of

art. The historian undertook to make us intimately acquainted with a man

singularly dark and inscrutable,--with a man whose real disposition long

remained swathed up in intricate folds of factitious virtues, and over

whose actions the hypocrisy of his youth, and the seclusion of his old

age, threw a singular mystery. He was to exhibit the specious qualities

of the tyrant in a light which might render them transparent, and enable

us at once to perceive the covering and the vices which it concealed. He

was to trace the gradations by which the first magistrate of a republic,

a senator mingling freely in debate, a noble associating with his

brother nobles, was transformed into an Asiatic sultan; he was to

exhibit a character, distinguished by courage, self-command, and

profound policy, yet defiled by all

"th' extravagancy

And crazy ribaldry of fancy."

He was to mark the gradual effect of advancing age and approaching death

on this strange compound of strength and weakness; to exhibit the old

sovereign of the world sinking into a dotage which, though it rendered

his appetites eccentric, and his temper savage, never impaired the

powers of his stern and penetrating mind--conscious of failing strength,

raging with capricious sensuality, yet to the last the keenest of

observers, the most artful of dissemblers, and the most terrible of

masters. The task was one of extreme difficulty. The execution is almost

perfect.

The talent which is required to write history thus bears a considerable

affinity to the talent of a great dramatist. There is one obvious

distinction. The dramatist creates; the historian only disposes.

The difference is not in the mode of execution, but in the mode

of conception. Shakspeare is guided by a model which exists in his

imagination; Tacitus, by a model furnished from without. Hamlet is to

Tiberius what the Laocoon is to the Newton of Roubilliac.

In this part of his art Tacitus certainly had neither equal nor second

among the ancient historians. Herodotus, though he wrote in a dramatic

form, had little of dramatic genius. The frequent dialogues which he

introduces give vivacity and movement to the narrative, but are not

strikingly characteristic. Xenophon is fond of telling his readers, at

considerable length, what he thought of the persons whose adventures he

relates. But he does not show them the men, and enable them to judge for

themselves. The heroes of Livy are the most insipid of all beings, real

or imaginary, the heroes of Plutarch always excepted. Indeed, the

manner of Plutarch in this respect reminds us of the cookery of those

continental inns, the horror of English travellers, in which a certain

nondescript broth is kept constantly boiling, and copiously poured,

without distinction, over every dish as it comes up to table.

Thucydides, though at a wide interval, comes next to Tacitus.

His Pericles, his Nicias, his Cleon, his Brasidas, are happily

discriminated. The lines are few, the colouring faint: but the general

air and expression is caught.

We begin, like the priest in Don Quixote's library, to be tired with

taking down books one after another for separate judgment, and feel

inclined to pass sentence on them in masses. We shall therefore,

instead of pointing out the defects and merits of the different modern

historians, state generally in what particulars they have surpassed

their predecessors, and in what we conceive them to have failed.

They have certainly been, in one sense, far more strict in their

adherence to truth than most of the Greek and Roman writers. They do

not think themselves entitled to render their narrative interesting by

introducing descriptions, conversations, and harangues which have no

existence but in their own imagination. This improvement was gradually

introduced. History commenced among the modern nations of Europe, as it

had commenced among the Greeks, in romance. Froissart was our Herodotus.

Italy was to Europe what Athens was to Greece. In Italy, therefore,

a more accurate and manly mode of narration was early introduced.

Machiavelli and Guicciardini, in imitation of Livy and Thucydides,

composed speeches for their historical personages. But, as the classical

enthusiasm which distinguished the age of Lorenzo and Leo gradually

subsided, this absurd practice was abandoned. In France, we fear, it

still, in some degree, keeps its ground. In our own country, a writer

who should venture on it would be laughed to scorn. Whether the

historians of the last two centuries tell more truth than those of

antiquity, may perhaps be doubted. But it is quite certain that they

tell fewer falsehoods.

In the philosophy of history, the moderns have very far surpassed the

ancients. It is not, indeed, strange that the Greeks and Romans should

not have carried the science of government, or any other experimental

science, so far as it has been carried in our time; for the experimental

sciences are generally in a state of progression. They were better

understood in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth, and in

the eighteenth century than in the seventeenth. But this constant

improvement, this natural growth of knowledge, will not altogether

account for the immense superiority of the modern writers. The

difference is a difference not in degree, but of kind. It is not merely

that new principles have been discovered, but that new faculties seem to

be exerted. It is not that at one time the human intellect should have

made but small progress, and at another time have advanced far: but

that at one time it should have been stationary, and at another time

constantly proceeding. In taste and imagination, in the graces of style,

in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the

ancients were at least our equals. They reasoned as justly as ourselves

on subjects which required pure demonstration. But in the moral sciences

they made scarcely any advance. During the long period which elapsed

between the fifth century before the Christian era and the fifth century

after it little perceptible progress was made. All the metaphysical

discoveries of all the philosophers, from the time of Socrates to the

northern invasion, are not to be compared in importance with those which

have been made in England every fifty years since the time of Elizabeth.

There is not the least reason to believe that the principles of

government, legislation, and political economy, were better understood

in the time of Augustus Caesar than in the time of Pericles. In our

own country, the sound doctrines of trade and jurisprudence have

been, within the lifetime of a single generation, dimly hinted, boldly

propounded, defended, systematised, adopted by all reflecting men of all

parties, quoted in legislative assemblies, incorporated into laws and

treaties.

To what is this change to be attributed? Partly, no doubt, to the

discovery of printing, a discovery which has not only diffused knowledge

widely, but, as we have already observed, has also introduced into

reasoning a precision unknown in those ancient communities, in which

information, was, for the most part, conveyed orally. There was, we

suspect, another cause, less obvious, but still more powerful.

The spirit of the two most famous nations of antiquity was remarkably

exclusive. In the time of Homer the Greeks had not begun to consider

themselves as a distinct race. They still looked with something of

childish wonder and awe on the riches and wisdom of Sidon and Egypt.

From what causes, and by what gradations, their feelings underwent a

change, it is not easy to determine. Their history, from the Trojan to

the Persian war, is covered with an obscurity broken only by dim and

scattered gleams of truth. But it is certain that a great alteration

took place. They regarded themselves as a separate people. They had

common religious rites, and common principles of public law, in which

foreigners had no part. In all their political systems, monarchical,

aristocratical, and democratical, there was a strong family likeness.

After the retreat of Xerxes and the fall of Mardonius, national pride

rendered the separation between the Greeks and the barbarians complete.

The conquerors considered themselves men of a superior breed, men who,

in their intercourse with neighbouring nations, were to teach, and

not to learn. They looked for nothing out of themselves. They borrowed

nothing. They translated nothing. We cannot call to mind a single

expression of any Greek writer earlier than the age of Augustus,

indicating an opinion that anything worth reading could be written in

any language except his own. The feelings which sprung from national

glory were not altogether extinguished by national degradation. They

were fondly cherished through ages of slavery and shame. The literature

of Rome herself was regarded with contempt by those who had fled before

her arms, and who bowed beneath her fasces. Voltaire says, in one of his

six thousand pamphlets, that he was the first person who told the French

that England had produced eminent men besides the Duke of Marlborough.

Down to a very late period, the Greeks seem to have stood in need of

similar information with respect to their masters. With Paulus Aemilius,

Sylla, and Caesar, they were well acquainted. But the notions which

they entertained respecting Cicero and Virgil were, probably, not unlike

those which Boileau may have formed about Shakspeare. Dionysius lived

in the most splendid age of Latin poetry and eloquence. He was a

critic, and, after the manner of his age, an able critic. He studied

the language of Rome, associated with its learned men, and compiled its

history. Yet he seems to have thought its literature valuable only for

the purpose of illustrating its antiquities. His reading appears to have

been confined to its public records, and to a few old annalists. Once,

and but once, if we remember rightly, he quotes Ennius, to solve a

question of etymology. He has written much on the art of oratory: yet he

has not mentioned the name of Cicero.

The Romans submitted to the pretensions of a race which they despised.

Their epic poet, while he claimed for them pre-eminence in the arts of

government and war, acknowledged their inferiority in taste, eloquence,

and science. Men of letters affected to understand the Greek language

better than their own. Pomponius preferred the honour of becoming an

Athenian, by intellectual naturalisation, to all the distinctions which

were to be acquired in the political contests of Rome. His great

friend composed Greek poems and memoirs. It is well-known that Petrarch

considered that beautiful language in which his sonnets are written,

as a barbarous jargon, and intrusted his fame to those wretched Latin

hexameters which, during the last four centuries, have scarcely found

four readers. Many eminent Romans appear to have felt the same contempt

for their native tongue as compared with the Greek. The prejudice

continued to a very late period. Julian was as partial to the Greek

language as Frederic the Great to the French: and it seems that he could

not express himself with elegance in the dialect of the state which he

ruled.

Even those Latin writers who did not carry this affectation so far

looked on Greece as the only fount of knowledge. From Greece they

derived the measures of their poetry, and, indeed, all of poetry that

can be imported. From Greece they borrowed the principles and the

vocabulary of their philosophy. To the literature of other nations they

do not seem to have paid the slightest attention. The sacred books

of the Hebrews, for example, books which, considered merely as human

compositions, are invaluable to the critic, the antiquarian, and

the philosopher, seem to have been utterly unnoticed by them. The

peculiarities of Judaism, and the rapid growth of Christianity,

attracted their notice. They made war against the Jews. They made

laws against the Christians. But they never opened the books of Moses.

Juvenal quotes the Pentateuch with censure. The author of the treatise

on "the Sublime" quotes it with praise: but both of them quote it

erroneously. When we consider what sublime poetry, what curious history,

what striking and peculiar views of the Divine nature and of the

social duties of men, are to be found in the Jewish scriptures, when

we consider that two sects on which the attention of the government was

constantly fixed appealed to those scriptures as the rule of their faith

and practice, this indifference is astonishing. The fact seems to be,

that the Greeks admired only themselves, and that the Romans admired

only themselves and the Greeks. Literary men turned away with disgust

from modes of thought and expression so widely different from all

that they had been accustomed to admire. The effect was narrowness and

sameness of thought. Their minds, if we may so express ourselves, bred

in and in, and were accordingly cursed with barrenness and degeneracy.

No extraneous beauty or vigour was engrafted on the decaying stock. By

an exclusive attention to one class of phenomena, by an exclusive

taste for one species of excellence, the human intellect was stunted.

Occasional coincidences were turned into general rules. Prejudices were

confounded with instincts. On man, as he was found in a particular state

of society--on government, as it had existed in a particular corner

of the world, many just observations were made; but of man as man,

or government as government, little was known. Philosophy remained

stationary. Slight changes, sometimes for the worse and sometimes for

the better, were made in the superstructure. But nobody thought of

examining the foundations.

The vast despotism of the Caesars, gradually effacing all national

peculiarities, and assimilating the remotest provinces of the empire to

each other, augmented the evil. At the close of the third century after

Christ, the prospects of mankind were fearfully dreary. A system of

etiquette, as pompously frivolous as that of the Escurial, had been

established. A sovereign almost invisible; a crowd of dignitaries

minutely distinguished by badges and titles; rhetoricians who said

nothing but what had been said ten thousand times; schools in which

nothing was taught but what had been known for ages: such was the

machinery provided for the government and instruction of the most

enlightened part of the human race. That great community was then in

danger of experiencing a calamity far more terrible than any of

the quick, inflammatory, destroying maladies, to which nations are

liable,--a tottering, drivelling, paralytic longevity, the immortality

of the Struldbrugs, a Chinese civilisation. It would be easy to indicate

many points of resemblance between the subjects of Diocletian and the

people of that Celestial Empire, where, during many centuries, nothing

has been learned or unlearned; where government, where education, where

the whole system of life, is a ceremony; where knowledge forgets to

increase and multiply, and, like the talent buried in the earth, or

the pound wrapped up in the napkin, experiences neither waste no

augmentation.

The torpor was broken by two great revolutions, the one moral, the other

political, the one from within, the other from without. The victory of

Christianity over Paganism, considered with relation to this subject

only, was of great importance. It overthrew the old system of morals;

and with it much of the old system of metaphysics. It furnished the

orator with new topics of declamation, and the logician with new points

of controversy. Above all, it introduced a new principle, of which the

operation was constantly felt in every part of society. It stirred the

stagnant mass from the inmost depths. It excited all the passions of a

stormy democracy in the quiet and listless population of an overgrown

empire. The fear of heresy did what the sense of oppression could not

do; it changed men, accustomed to be turned over like sheep from tyrant

to tyrant, into devoted partisans and obstinate rebels. The tones of an

eloquence which had been silent for ages resounded from the pulpit of

Gregory. A spirit which had been extinguished on the plains of Philippi

revived in Athanasius and Ambrose.

Yet even this remedy was not sufficiently violent for the disease. It

did not prevent the empire of Constantinople from relapsing, after a

short paroxysm of excitement, into a state of stupefaction, to which

history furnishes scarcely any parallel. We there find that a polished

society, a society in which a most intricate and elaborate system of

jurisprudence was established, in which the arts of luxury were well

understood, in which the works of the great ancient writers were

preserved and studied, existed for nearly a thousand years without

making one great discovery in science, or producing one book which

is read by any but curious inquirers. There were tumults, too, and

controversies, and wars in abundance: and these things, bad as they are

in themselves, have generally been favourable to the progress of the

intellect. But here they tormented without stimulating. The waters were

troubled; but no healing influence descended. The agitations resembled

the grinnings and writhings of a galvanised corpse, not the struggles of

an athletic man.

From this miserable state the Western Empire was saved by the fiercest

and most destroying visitation with which God has ever chastened

his creatures--the invasion of the Northern nations. Such a cure was

required for such a distemper. The fire of London, it has been observed

was a blessing. It burned down the city; but it burned out the plague.

The same may be said of the tremendous devastation of the Roman

dominions. It annihilated the noisome recesses in which lurked the seeds

of great moral maladies; it cleared an atmosphere fatal to the health

and vigour of the human mind. It cost Europe a thousand years of

barbarism to escape the fate of China.

At length the terrible purification was accomplished; and the second

civilisation of mankind commenced, under circumstances which afforded a

strong security that it would never retrograde and never pause. Europe

was now a great federal community. Her numerous states were united

by the easy ties of international law and a common religion. Their

institutions, their languages, their manners, their tastes in

literature, their modes of education, were widely different. Their

connection was close enough to allow of mutual observation and

improvement, yet not so close as to destroy the idioms of national

opinion and feeling.

The balance of moral and intellectual influence thus established

between the nations of Europe is far more important than the balance

of political power. Indeed, we are inclined to think that the latter

is valuable principally because it tends to maintain the former. The

civilised world has thus been preserved from a uniformity of character

fatal to all improvement. Every part of it has been illuminated with

light reflected from every other. Competition has produced activity

where monopoly would have produced sluggishness. The number of

experiments in moral science which the speculator has an opportunity of

witnessing has been increased beyond all calculation. Society and human

nature, instead of being seen in a single point of view, are presented

to him under ten thousand different aspects. By observing the manners of

surrounding nations, by studying their literature, by comparing it with

that of his own country and of the ancient republics, he is enabled to

correct those errors into which the most acute men must fall when they

reason from a single species to a genus. He learns to distinguish

what is local from what is universal: what is transitory from what is

eternal; to discriminate between exceptions and rules; to trace the

operation of disturbing causes; to separate those general principles

which are always true and everywhere applicable from the accidental

circumstances with which, in every community, they are blended, and

with which, in an isolated community, they are confounded by the most

philosophical mind.

Hence it is that, in generalisation, the writers of modern times have

far surpassed those of antiquity. The historians of our own country are

unequalled in depth and precision of reason; and, even in the works of

our mere compilers, we often meet with speculations beyond the reach of

Thucydides or Tacitus.

But it must, at the same time, be admitted that they have characteristic

faults, so closely connected with their characteristic merits, and of

such magnitude, that it may well be doubted whether, on the whole,

this department of literature has gained or lost during the last

two-and-twenty centuries.

The best historians of later times have been seduced from truth, not

by their imagination, but by their reason. They far excel their

predecessors in the art of deducing general principles from facts. But

unhappily they have fallen into the error of distorting facts to suit

general principles. They arrive at a theory from looking at some of the

phenomena; and the remaining phenomena they strain or curtail to suit

the theory. For this purpose it is not necessary that they should assert

what is absolutely false; for all questions in morals and politics

are questions of comparison and degree. Any proposition which does not

involve a contradiction in terms may by possibility be true; and, if all

the circumstances which raise a probability in its favour, be stated and

enforced, and those which lead to an opposite conclusion be omitted or

lightly passed over, it may appear to be demonstrated. In every human

character and transaction there is a mixture of good and evil: a little

exaggeration, a little suppression, a judicious use of epithets, a

watchful and searching scepticism with respect to the evidence on one

side, a convenient credulity with respect to every report or tradition

on the other, may easily make a saint of Laud, or a tyrant of Henry the

Fourth.

This species of misrepresentation abounds in the most valuable works of

modern historians. Herodotus tells his story like a slovenly witness,

who, heated by partialities and prejudices, unacquainted with the

established rules of evidence, and uninstructed as to the obligations

of his oath, confounds what he imagines with what he has seen and heard,

and brings out facts, reports, conjectures, and fancies, in one mass.

Hume is an accomplished advocate. Without positively asserting much more

than he can prove, he gives prominence to all the circumstances which

support his case; he glides lightly over those which are unfavourable to

it; his own witnesses are applauded and encouraged; the statements which

seem to throw discredit on them are controverted; the contradictions

into which they fall are explained away; a clear and connected abstract

of their evidence is given. Everything that is offered on the other side

is scrutinised with the utmost severity; every suspicious circumstance

is a ground for comment and invective; what cannot be denied is

extenuated, or passed by without notice; concessions even are sometimes

made: but this insidious candour only increases the effect of the vast

mass of sophistry.

We have mentioned Hume as the ablest and most popular writer of his

class; but the charge which we have brought against him is one to which

all our most distinguished historians are in some degree obnoxious.

Gibbon, in particular, deserves very severe censure. Of all the numerous

culprits, however, none is more deeply guilty than Mr Mitford. We

willingly acknowledge the obligations which are due to his talents

and industry. The modern historians of Greece had been in the habit of

writing as if the world had learned nothing new during the last sixteen

hundred years. Instead of illustrating the events which they narrated

by the philosophy of a more enlightened age, they judged of antiquity by

itself alone. They seemed to think that notions, long driven from every

other corner of literature, had a prescriptive right to occupy this

last fastness. They considered all the ancient historians as equally

authentic. They scarcely made any distinction between him who related

events at which he had himself been present and him who five hundred

years after composed a philosophic romance for a society which had in

the interval undergone a complete change. It was all Greek, and all

true! The centuries which separated Plutarch from Thucydides seemed

as nothing to men who lived in an age so remote. The distance of

time produced an error similar to that which is sometimes produced by

distance of place. There are many good ladies who think that all the

people in India live together, and who charge a friend setting out for

Calcutta with kind messages to Bombay. To Rollin and Barthelemi, in the

same manner, all the classics were contemporaries.

Mr Mitford certainly introduced great improvements; he showed us that

men who wrote in Greek and Latin sometimes told lies; he showed us that

ancient history might be related in such a manner as to furnish not only

allusions to schoolboys, but important lessons to statesmen. From that

love of theatrical effect and high-flown sentiment which had poisoned

almost every other work on the same subject his book is perfectly free.

But his passion for a theory as false, and far more ungenerous, led him

substantially to violate truth in every page. Statements unfavourable

to democracy are made with unhesitating confidence, and with the utmost

bitterness of language. Every charge brought against a monarch or an

aristocracy is sifted with the utmost care. If it cannot be denied, some

palliating supposition is suggested; or we are at least reminded that

some circumstances now unknown MAY have justified what at present

appears unjustifiable. Two events are reported by the same author in

the same sentence; their truth rests on the same testimony; but the one

supports the darling hypothesis, and the other seems inconsistent with

it. The one is taken and the other is left.

The practice of distorting narrative into a conformity with theory is

a vice not so unfavourable as at first sight it may appear to the

interests of political science. We have compared the writers who indulge

in it to advocates; and we may add, that their conflicting fallacies,

like those of advocates, correct each other. It has always been held,

in the most enlightened nations, that a tribunal will decide a judicial

question most fairly when it has heard two able men argue, as unfairly

as possible, on the two opposite sides of it; and we are inclined

to think that this opinion is just. Sometimes, it is true, superior

eloquence and dexterity will make the worse appear the better reason;

but it is at least certain that the judge will be compelled to

contemplate the case under two different aspects. It is certain that no

important consideration will altogether escape notice.

This is at present the state of history. The poet laureate appears for

the Church of England, Lingard for the Church of Rome. Brodie has moved

to set aside the verdicts obtained by Hume; and the cause in which

Mitford succeeded is, we understand, about to be reheard. In the midst

of these disputes, however, history proper, if we may use the term, is

disappearing. The high, grave, impartial summing up of Thucydides is

nowhere to be found.

While our historians are practising all the arts of controversy, they

miserably neglect the art of narration, the art of interesting the

affections and presenting pictures to the imagination. That a writer may

produce these effects without violating truth is sufficiently proved

by many excellent biographical works. The immense popularity which

well-written books of this kind have acquired deserves the serious

consideration of historians. Voltaire's Charles the Twelfth, Marmontel's

Memoirs, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Southey's account of Nelson, are

perused with delight by the most frivolous and indolent. Whenever

any tolerable book of the same description makes its appearance, the

circulating libraries are mobbed; the book societies are in commotion;

the new novel lies uncut; the magazines and newspapers fill their

columns with extracts. In the meantime histories of great empires,

written by men of eminent ability, lie unread on the shelves of

ostentatious libraries.

The writers of history seem to entertain an aristocratical contempt for

the writers of memoirs. They think it beneath the dignity of men who

describe the revolutions of nations to dwell on the details which

constitute the charm of biography. They have imposed on themselves a

code of conventional decencies as absurd as that which has been the

bane of the French drama. The most characteristic and interesting

circumstances are omitted or softened down, because, as we are told,

they are too trivial for the majesty of history. The majesty of history

seems to resemble the majesty of the poor King of Spain, who died a

martyr to ceremony because the proper dignitaries were not at hand to

render him assistance.

That history would be more amusing if this etiquette were relaxed will,

we suppose, be acknowledged. But would it be less dignified or less

useful? What do we mean when we say that one past event is important and

another insignificant? No past event has any intrinsic importance.

The knowledge of it is valuable only as it leads us to form just

calculations with respect to the future. A history which does not

serve this purpose, though it may be filled with battles, treaties, and

commotions, is as useless as the series of turnpike tickets collected by

Sir Matthew Mite.

Let us suppose that Lord Clarendon, instead of filling hundreds of folio

pages with copies of state papers, in which the same assertions

and contradictions are repeated till the reader is overpowered with

weariness, had condescended to be the Boswell of the Long Parliament.

Let us suppose that he had exhibited to us the wise and lofty

self-government of Hampden, leading while he seemed to follow, and

propounding unanswerable arguments in the strongest forms with the

modest air of an inquirer anxious for information; the delusions which

misled the noble spirit of Vane; the coarse fanaticism which concealed

the yet loftier genius of Cromwell, destined to control a motionless

army and a factious people, to abase the flag of Holland, to arrest

the victorious arms of Sweden, and to hold the balance firm between the

rival monarchies of France and Spain. Let us suppose that he had made

his Cavaliers and Roundheads talk in their own style; that he had

reported some of the ribaldry of Rupert's pages, and some of the cant of

Harrison and Fleetwood. Would not his work in that case have been more

interesting? Would it not have been more accurate?

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the

whole be false. The circumstances which have most influence on the

happiness of mankind, the changes of manners and morals, the transition

of communities from poverty to wealth, from knowledge to ignorance,

from ferocity to humanity--these are, for the most part, noiseless

revolutions. Their progress is rarely indicated by what historians are

pleased to call important events. They are not achieved by armies, or

enacted by senates. They are sanctioned by no treaties, and recorded

in no archives. They are carried on in every school, in every church,

behind ten thousand counters, at ten thousand firesides. The upper

current of society presents no certain criterion by which we can judge

of the direction in which the under current flows. We read of defeats

and victories. But we know that nations may be miserable amidst

victories and prosperous amidst defeats. We read of the fall of wise

ministers and of the rise of profligate favourites. But we must remember

how small a proportion the good or evil effected by a single statesman

can bear to the good or evil of a great social system.

Bishop Watson compares a geologist to a gnat mounted on an elephant,

and laying down theories as to the whole internal structure of the vast

animal, from the phenomena of the hide. The comparison is unjust to the

geologists; but is very applicable to those historians who write as

if the body politic were homogeneous, who look only on the surface of

affairs, and never think of the mighty and various organisation which

lies deep below.

In the works of such writers as these, England, at the close of the

Seven Years' War, is in the highest state of prosperity: at the close of

the American war she is in a miserable and degraded condition; as if

the people were not on the whole as rich, as well governed, and as

well educated at the latter period as at the former. We have read books

called Histories of England, under the reign of George the Second, in

which the rise of Methodism is not even mentioned. A hundred years hence

this breed of authors will, we hope, be extinct. If it should still

exist, the late ministerial interregnum will be described in terms which

will seem to imply that all government was at an end; that the social

contract was annulled; and that the hand of every man was against his

neighbour, until the wisdom and virtue of the new cabinet educed order

out of the chaos of anarchy. We are quite certain that misconceptions

as gross prevail at this moment respecting many important parts of our

annals.

The effect of historical reading is analogous, in many respects, to

that produced by foreign travel. The student, like the tourist, is

transported into a new state of society. He sees new fashions. He hears

new modes of expression. His mind is enlarged by contemplating the wide

diversities of laws, of morals, and of manners. But men may travel far,

and return with minds as contracted as if they had never stirred from

their own market-town. In the same manner, men may know the dates of

many battles and the genealogies of many royal houses, and yet be

no wiser. Most people look at past times as princes look at foreign

countries. More than one illustrious stranger has landed on our island

amidst the shouts of a mob, has dined with the king, has hunted with the

master of the stag-hounds, has seen the guards reviewed, and a knight

of the garter installed, has cantered along Regent Street, has visited

Saint Paul's, and noted down its dimensions; and has then departed,

thinking that he has seen England. He has, in fact, seen a few public

buildings, public men, and public ceremonies. But of the vast and

complex system of society, of the fine shades of national character, of

the practical operation of government and laws, he knows nothing. He who

would understand these things rightly must not confine his observations

to palaces and solemn days. He must see ordinary men as they appear in

their ordinary business and in their ordinary pleasures. He must mingle

in the crowds of the exchange and the coffee-house. He must obtain

admittance to the convivial table and the domestic hearth. He must bear

with vulgar expressions. He must not shrink from exploring even the

retreats of misery. He who wishes to understand the condition of mankind

in former ages must proceed on the same principle. If he attends only to

public transactions, to wars, congresses, and debates, his studies will

be as unprofitable as the travels of those imperial, royal, and serene

sovereigns who form their judgment of our island from having gone in

state to a few fine sights, and from having held formal conferences with

a few great officers.

The perfect historian is he in whose work the character and spirit of

an age is exhibited in miniature. He relates no fact, he attributes no

expression to his characters, which is not authenticated by sufficient

testimony. But, by judicious selection, rejection, and arrangement, he

gives to truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction.

In his narrative a due subordination is observed: some transactions are

prominent; others retire. But the scale on which he represents them is

increased or diminished, not according to the dignity of the persons

concerned in them, but according to the degree in which they elucidate

the condition of society and the nature of man. He shows us the court,

the camp, and the senate. But he shows us also the nation. He considers

no anecdote, no peculiarity of manner, no familiar saying, as too

insignificant for his notice which is not too insignificant to

illustrate the operation of laws, of religion, and of education, and to

mark the progress of the human mind. Men will not merely be described,

but will be made intimately known to us. The changes of manners will be

indicated, not merely by a few general phrases or a few extracts from

statistical documents, but by appropriate images presented in every

line.

If a man, such as we are supposing, should write the history of England,

he would assuredly not omit the battles, the sieges, the negotiations,

the seditions, the ministerial changes. But with these he would

intersperse the details which are the charm of historical romances. At

Lincoln Cathedral there is a beautiful painted window, which was made by

an apprentice out of the pieces of glass which had been rejected by

his master. It is so far superior to every other in the church, that,

according to the tradition, the vanquished artist killed himself from

mortification. Sir Walter Scott, in the same manner, has used those

fragments of truth which historians have scornfully thrown behind them

in a manner which may well excite their envy. He has constructed out of

their gleanings works which, even considered as histories, are scarcely

less valuable than theirs. But a truly great historian would reclaim

those materials which the novelist has appropriated. The history of the

government, and the history of the people, would be exhibited in

that mode in which alone they can be exhibited justly, in inseparable

conjunction and intermixture. We should not then have to look for the

wars and votes of the Puritans in Clarendon, and for their phraseology

in Old Mortality; for one half of King James in Hume, and for the other

half in the Fortunes of Nigel.

The early part of our imaginary history would be rich with colouring

from romance, ballad, and chronicle. We should find ourselves in the

company of knights such as those of Froissart, and of pilgrims such as

those who rode with Chaucer from the Tabard. Society would be shown from

the highest to the lowest,--from the royal cloth of state to the den of

the outlaw; from the throne of the legate to the chimney-corner where

the begging friar regaled himself. Palmers, minstrels, crusaders,--the

stately monastery, with the good cheer in its refectory and the

high-mass in its chapel,--the manor-house, with its hunting and

hawking,--the tournament, with the heralds and ladies, the trumpets and

the cloth of gold,--would give truth and life to the representation.

We should perceive, in a thousand slight touches, the importance of

the privileged burgher, and the fierce and haughty spirit which swelled

under the collar of the degraded villain. The revival of letters would

not merely be described in a few magnificent periods. We should discern,

in innumerable particulars, the fermentation of mind, the eager appetite

for knowledge, which distinguished the sixteenth from the fifteenth

century. In the Reformation we should see, not merely a schism which

changed the ecclesiastical constitution of England and the mutual

relations of the European powers, but a moral war which raged in every

family, which set the father against the son, and the son against the

father, the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the

mother. Henry would be painted with the skill of Tacitus. We should have

the change of his character from his profuse and joyous youth to his

savage and imperious old age. We should perceive the gradual progress

of selfish and tyrannical passions in a mind not naturally insensible or

ungenerous; and to the last we should detect some remains of that open

and noble temper which endeared him to a people whom he oppressed,

struggling with the hardness of despotism and the irritability of

disease. We should see Elizabeth in all her weakness and in all her

strength, surrounded by the handsome favourites whom she never trusted,

and the wise old statesmen whom she never dismissed, uniting in herself

the most contradictory qualities of both her parents,--the coquetry, the

caprice, the petty malice of Anne,--the haughty and resolute spirit of

Henry. We have no hesitation in saying that a great artist might produce

a portrait of this remarkable woman at least as striking as that in the

novel of Kenilworth, without employing a single trait not authenticated

by ample testimony. In the meantime, we should see arts cultivated,

wealth accumulated, the conveniences of life improved. We should see the

keeps, where nobles, insecure themselves, spread insecurity around them,

gradually giving place to the halls of peaceful opulence, to the oriels

of Longleat, and the stately pinnacles of Burleigh. We should see towns

extended, deserts cultivated, the hamlets of fishermen turned into

wealthy havens, the meal of the peasant improved, and his hut more

commodiously furnished. We should see those opinions and feelings which

produced the great struggle against the House of Stuart slowly growing

up in the bosom of private families, before they manifested themselves

in parliamentary debates. Then would come the civil war. Those

skirmishes on which Clarendon dwells so minutely would be told, as

Thucydides would have told them, with perspicuous conciseness. They are

merely connecting links. But the great characteristics of the age, the

loyal enthusiasm of the brave English gentry, the fierce licentiousness

of the swearing, dicing, drunken reprobates, whose excesses disgraced

the royal cause,--the austerity of the Presbyterian Sabbaths in the

city, the extravagance of the independent preachers in the camp, the

precise garb, the severe countenance, the petty scruples, the affected

accent, the absurd names and phrases which marked the Puritans,--the

valour, the policy, the public spirit, which lurked beneath these

ungraceful disguises,--the dreams of the raving Fifth-monarchy-man, the

dreams, scarcely less wild, of the philosophic republican, all these

would enter into the representation, and render it at once more exact

and more striking.

The instruction derived from history thus written would be of a vivid

and practical character. It would be received by the imagination as well

as by the reason. It would be not merely traced on the mind, but branded

into it. Many truths, too, would be learned, which can be learned in

no other manner. As the history of states is generally written, the

greatest and most momentous revolutions seem to come upon them like

supernatural inflictions, without warning or cause. But the fact is,

that such revolutions are almost always the consequences of moral

changes, which have gradually passed on the mass of the community, and

which originally proceed far before their progress is indicated by any

public measure. An intimate knowledge of the domestic history of nations

is therefore absolutely necessary to the prognosis of political events.

A narrative, defective in this respect, is as useless as a medical

treatise which should pass by all the symptoms attendant on the early

stage of a disease and mention only what occurs when the patient is

beyond the reach of remedies.

A historian, such as we have been attempting to describe, would indeed

be an intellectual prodigy. In his mind, powers scarcely compatible with

each other must be tempered into an exquisite harmony. We shall sooner

see another Shakspeare or another Homer. The highest excellence to which

any single faculty can be brought would be less surprising than such a

happy and delicate combination of qualities. Yet the contemplation of

imaginary models is not an unpleasant or useless employment of the mind.

It cannot indeed produce perfection; but it produces improvement

and nourishes that generous and liberal fastidiousness which is not

inconsistent with the strongest sensibility to merit, and which, while

it exalts our conceptions of the art, does not render us unjust to the

artist.

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