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every fifty years since the time of Elizabeth. I those which Boileau may have formed about There is not the least reason to believe that the Shakspeare.. Dionysius lived in the most principles of government, legislation, and po- splendid age of Latin poetry and eloquence. litical economy, were better understood in the He was a critic, and, after the manner of his time of Augustus Cæsar than in the time of age, an able critic. He studied the language Pericles. In our own country, the sound doc- of Rome, associated with its learned men, and trines of trade and jurisprudence have been, compiled its history. Yet he seems to have within the lifetime of a single generation, dimly thought its literature valuable only for the purhinted, boldly propounded, defended, systema- pose of illustrating its antiquities. His read tized, adopted by all reflecting men of all ing appears to have been confined to its public parties, quoted in legislative assemblies, incor- records, and to a few old annalists. Once, and porated into laws and treaties. 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.

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 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 naturalization, 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 Frederick 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.

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 Even those Latin writers, who did not carry and the fall of Mardonius, national pride ren- this affectation so far, looked on Greece as the dered the separation between the Greeks and only fount of knowledge. From Greece they the Barbarians complete. The conquerors con- derive the measures of their poetry, and indeed, sidered themselves men of a superior breed, all of poetry that can be imported. From men who, in their intercourse with neighbour- Greece they borrowed the principles and the ing nations, were to teach, and not to learn. vocabulary of their philosophy. To the litera They looked for nothing out of themselves. ture of other nations they do not seem to have They borrowed nothing. They translated no-paid the slightest attention. The sacred books. thing. We cannot call to mind a single expression of any Greek writer earlier than the age of Augustus, indicating an opinion that any thing 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 Emilius, Sylla, and Caesar, they were well acquainted. But the notions which they entertained respecting Cicero and Virgil were, probably, not unlike

of the Hebrews, for example, books which, considered merely as human compositions, are invaluable to the critic, the antiquary, 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 the 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 themF

selves, 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.

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 paroxysin 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 them selves, have generally been favourable to he progress of the intellect. But here they termented without stimulating. The waters were troubled, but no healing influence descended. The agitations resembled the grinnings and writhings of a galvanized corpse, not the struggles of an athletic man.

From this miserable state the Western Einpire 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.)

The vast despotism of the Cæsars, gradually effacing all national peculiarities, and assimulating 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 enfightened 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 civilization. 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 educa- At length the terrible purification was ac tion, where the whole system of life is a cere- complished; and the second civilization of mony; where knowledge forgets to increase mankind commenced, under circumstances and multiply, and, like the talent buried in the which afforded a strong security that it would earth, or the pound wrapped up in the napkin, never retrograde and never pause. Europe experiences neither waste nor augmentation. was now a great federal community. Her The torpor was broken by two great revolu- numerous states were united by the easy ties tions, the one moral, the other political; the of international law and a common religion. one from within, the other from without. The Their institutions, their languages, their manvictory of Christianity over Paganism, consi-ners, their tastes in literature, their modes of dered 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 innost depths. It excited all the passions 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 natural 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 be

cause it tends to maintain the former. The saint of Laud, or a tyrant of Henry the civilized world has thus been preserved from Fourth. a uniformity of character fatal to all improvement. Every part of it has been illuminated with light reflected from every other. Competition has produeed 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 generalization, the writers of modern times have far surpassed those of antiquity. The historians of our own counury 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.

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. Every thing that is offered on the other side is scrutinized 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 illus

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-trating the events which they narrated by the and-twenty centuries.

The best nistorians 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 invoire 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 skepticism 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

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 philosophical 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 conteinporaries.

Mr. Mitford certainly introduced great im. provements; 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 | uncut; the magazines and newspapers fill their only allusions to schoolboys, but important columns with extracts. In the mean time hislessons to statesmen. From that love of the- tories of great empires, written by men of atrical effect and high flown sentiment which eminent ability, lie unread on the shelves of had poisoned almost every other work on the ostentatious libraries. 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 interest 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 cach 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 saine description makes its appearance, the circulating libraries are mobbed; the book rocieties are in commotion the new novel lies

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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 Mathew 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 mutinous 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 revo lutions. Their progress is rarely indicated by what historians are pleased to cal! 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.

its dimensions, and has then departed, think. ing 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 coffeehouse. 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 'etreats of Bishop Watson compares a geologist to a misery. He who wishes to understand the gnat mounted on an elephant, and laying down condition of mankind in former ages, must theories as to the whole internal structure of proceed on the same principle. If he attends the vast animal, from the phenomena of the only to public transactions, to wars, conhide. The comparison is unjust to the geolo-gresses, and debates, his studies will be as ungists; but it 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 organization which lies deep below.

profitable 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.

In the works of such writers as these, Eng- The perfect historian is he in whose work land, at the close of the Seven Years' War, is the character and spirit of an age is exhibited in the highest state of prosperity. At the in miniature. He relates no fact, he attributes close of the American War, she is in a mise- no expression to his characters, which is not rable and degraded condition; as if the people authenticated by sufficient testimony. But by were not on the whole as rich, as well go-judicious selection, rejection, and arrange verned, and as well educated, at the latter ment, he gives to truth those attractions which period as at the former. We have read have been usurped by fiction. In his narrabooks called Histories of England, under the tive, a due subordination is observed; some reign of George the Second, in which the rise transactions are prominent, others retire. But of Methodism is not even mentioned. A hun- the scale on which he represents them is indred years hence this breed of authors will, we creased or diminished, not according to the hope, be extinct. If it should still exist, the dignity of the persons concerned in them, but late ministerial interregnum will be described according to the degree in which they eluciin terms which will seem to imply that all go-date the condition of society and the nature of vernment was at an end; that the social con- man. He shows us the court, the camp, and tract was annulled, and that the hand of every the senate. But he shows us also the nation man was against his neighbour, until the wis-He considers no anecdote, no peculiarity of dom and virtue of the new cabinet educed manner, no familiar saying, as too insignifiorder out of the chaos of anarchy. We are cant for his notice, which is not too insigniquite certain that misconceptions as gross ficant to illustrate the operation of laws, of prevail at this moment, respecting many im-religion, and of education, and to mark the portant parts of our annals. progress of the human mind. Men will not The effect of historical reading is analogous, merely be described, but will be made intiin many respects, to that produced by foreign mately known to us. The changes of mantravel. The student, like the tourist, is trans-ners will be indicated, not merely by a few ported into a new state of society. He sees general phrases, or a few extracts from stanew fashions. He hears new modes of ex-tistical documents, but by appropriate images pression. His mind is enlarged by contem- presented in every line. plating 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 St. Paul's, and noted down VOL. I.-9

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 himselt from mortification. Sir Walter Scott, in the same manner, has used those fragments of truth which historians have F 2

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