the estimate of Napoleon's greatness based upon the violent revolution which he accomplished, and exposes in his usual harsh way the idolatry of which he was the subject, perhaps the victim. For saving France, and with it Europe, from the dark shadow of that fearful anarchy which threatened it, Schlosser felt a certain gratitude to Napoleon. If he looked too favorably upon him, it was because he remembered too gloomily the French Revolution. The collections of Buchez and Roux, however, have supplied us in these days with a basis of documentary evidence which was in part wanting to the history of Schlosser, and wholly to the romance of Thiers.

His History of the Eighteenth Century, of which we now come to speak, was the legitimate conclusion of his former labors. Study, observation, and experience, in the midst of a tumultuous time, had revealed to him practically and distinctly the controlling influence of a people's culture upon the course of political affairs. Hitherto those affairs had constituted the chief burden of history; and the coming time will hardly discover a more decisive instance of the imbecility to which a long submission to tradition, false at the outset, will reduce any branch of literature, than is manifest in the prevailing treatment of history hitherto. Mr. Buckle's great work deserves at least our recognition,

whatever we may

think of his philosophy, as an honest effort to emancipate an important, perhaps after religion the most important, subject of human contemplation - for it is our total result, our final explanation of all facts, our last marshalling of all causes from the slavery of inherited falsehood and the perversions of theological prejudice. Schlosser undertook to show the influence of literature upon the progress of events; - how it is that the thinkers and the writers change the course of men's opinions, and so control men's actions; how the outward striving is but the expression of the inward craving which proceeds from the few to the many; how political events are results not less than causes, and how in the writings of an age you read the thoughts which govern it. Yet it was not his purpose to write a great literary history, like that of Wachler. With the artistic merit of writings he had nothing to do, only with the effect of them upon the age. The temper of his mind

and the course of his thinking wholly unfitted him, even if he had been disposed, to enter upon the sterile and thorny fields of literary criticism. His measure of a writer had always been, not to what degree he was a classic, but to what degree he was a power in the world. The inner beauty of the thought, the outward grace of the words, the harmony and the skill of the grouping, these things were of no account with him, who did not look into the work, but outside of it, to trace its course as a firebrand in setting the smouldering wrath of a nation in a blaze, or as a voice of admonition to still its fevered hopes, or of cheer to console its weary suffering.

Schlosser had reached the age of sixty when he began the publication of the work by which he will ever be best known, or indeed practically known at all to us; we mean, of course, his "History of the Eighteenth Century, and of the Nineteenth to the Overthrow of the French Empire," published, in eight volumes, from 1836 to 1848. In Germany it met with vast success, unsurpassed, if ever equalled, in that country by any historical work of such extent. Schlosser, we have said, was the representative of the last age, in this work especially so. It stands in striking contrast with the tendencies of the present. Since the Congress of Vienna there has prevailed a spirit of reaction. The struggles of that stern period in which Schlosser ripened into manhood have given place to a certain indifference, even of doubt as to the good of it all. The great aims of the eighteenth seem to pall upon the nineteenth century, and Schlosser thought he saw the corruption extending from practical life to the silent domain of history, lamenting that the style of to-day was not the style of Schlözer or Müller or Schiller. So representing the fact to himself, and failing to understand it, Schlosser fought it, with all his strength and all his harshness not softened by the years. The tides of history, as of life, ebb and flow, each flood sweeping us farther on. Schlosser was borne into middle life on the flood, and stood gazing, heart-stricken and weary, as the waves retreated. He could not lift himself above his age and out of it; and so, while he hated, he was not consoled. His strong prejudices also made him unjust to contemporary talent. He clung to his own conceits as much as to the past. The power

of Ranke and the charm of Varnhagen von Ense were lost upon him. He could not understand the growing desire of his countrymen to learn how to write. But, with many faults, Schlosser was honest, and therefore with the truth-loving, deep-feeling German people popular. As Zittel said at his grave," he was the mouth-piece through which spoke the conscience of the German people." It was long his intention to continue this history down to the present time. "Younger persons dare not speak the truth," he said; "I must needs do it myself."

With the exception of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, which he afterwards treated, Schlosser had now traversed the whole course of human history up to 1815, in twenty-four volumes. He had satisfied the conditions which Schlözer and Johannes Müller impose upon the true historian, for he had compassed the whole domain of history substantially from original sources, not consulting all authorities, of course, for he was not a special historian, but in a large way surveying, as well as unfolding, the world's vast history.

In order to make his history of the world readable and useful to the people, the industrious Professor Kriegk, of Frankfort on the Main, undertook a revision of it, with Schlosser's help, in 1844. Thus arose the "History of the World for the German People," finished, in eighteen volumes, in 1856, of which, it is said, thirty thousand copies were sold. The history of the three centuries which we have just mentioned as alone wanting to complete the circle of his vast activity, was finally written and published between 1849 and 1854.

The last years had come now, but they found him intent upon his earthly work. In 1856, on the brink of eighty, he wrote to a friend, with trembling hand, that he had resolved, after finishing his History of the World, to rest for a time, in order quietly to enjoy a not inconsiderable property in the last years of his life. "On the History of the Eighteenth Century I shall continue to work, but very slowly, and improve the opportunity of rest to read much which I have hitherto passed over, particularly the Mémoires du Roi Joseph, and the rhetorician Villemain's wretched Souvenirs. What most interests me in the former are the ipsissima verba of the Corsi

can, contained in the first part, who utters himself too characteristically for one to fail to read his true nature in his words. I have wondered a good deal," he adds, playfully alluding to his distinguished colleagues, "that Häusser's third volume has turned out so thick, and my colleague Gervinus's second volume so thin."

The successive editions of his History of the Eighteenth Century gave Schlosser an opportunity for revision which he did not neglect. It does not fall to us to indicate that revision at all in detail. We remark only that it was important and thorough. In his Preface, however, to the first volume of the fourth and last edition, in 1853, he says: "In the first three editions of the first half of his work (for the last half was not contained in the first edition) the author had fully accomplished his purpose; he did not desire to publish a fourth cdition. His sole object had been to deliver to the German people, sharply and with severity, the results of the studies of a long life, without any reference whatever to the opinions and disposition of the public. Of the great public, indeed, he had taken no account whatever, and he was not a little surprised when a learned Dutchman ventured to translate his work into Dutch, and an Englishman to publish also a translation in eight thick volumes. He had been willing to leave his work to its fate, since the public demands of its writers, and rightly, those qualities of polish, elegance, and mildness which he had intentionally rejected. And, however ridiculous a whim this may seem of his, considering the difficulty the people have, in an age like ours wholly devoted to externals, of understanding his mean opinion of literary reputation, his publisher, at least, will bear witness that it was simply to oblige him that he took the work in hand again. Wherever it is possible, therefore, without entire rewriting, he will soften and strike out what to a languid and servile generation is too rough, and too Scandinavian."

The last volume of this edition was published in 1860, and its Preface contains Schlosser's last printed words: "For the rest, in our eighty-fourth year, we abandon to others all criticism upon our age and our contemporaries, acknowledging that we are unequal to the task of longer exhorting, and

thereby improving, a generation in divers ways so corrupt. These last years and their culture are at variance with us, and we with them, so that we have ceased in a measure to be a contemporary of the events transpiring about us. It cannot, therefore, but be salutary for a writer, who has labored for so many years, to take his final leave of the public at a time when he is altogether ready also to end his life, putting his trust, not in himself or in any human being, but in that divine strength which has sustained him hitherto, and has not yet wholly deserted him. Therewith closeth the writer a work of many years of study." And so the patriarch, weary of earth, his work done, goes from us forever. Every life leaves behind it some trace of its existence, if we could but see it; and it is often the widest activities which become the hardest to follow. But when a life like that of Schlosser sets its results in the written letter, it becomes doubly dear to us; for thus it survives accident and defies decay, illustrating its age and forever blending with its story. The writer really classic stands out ever as an example and a possession. Schlosser was not a classic,-very far from it, a man only of great ability persistently applied. Hence he passes away with his age, which he has wrought on,- if so be an age can be said to pass away at all, and not rather draw closer to us ever, purified and at last intelligible. But to have helped to keep a nation's aims pure and high, to have fought its corruptions, and to have withstood its temptations, is a result which cannot be less brilliant because it sprang from a self-sacrificing and unselfish life. Schlosser's influence upon his age will be more apparent as the years recede; — when it is forgotten how success was ever thought to excuse and consecrate wrong; when the tide floods again, and the restless spirit of man takes courage, and Europe learns, at what price it will, that the final object of human institutions is not to minister to the few at the expense of the many; when also the true ideal of life becomes clear again to the blinded eyes of the people, and it learns there and here and everywhere that man does not live by bread alone. Schlosser's writings are not distinct from his life, but the expression of it in action. He was not in any sense an artist. He could not create. He could only examine and judge; VOL. LXXII. 5TH S. VOL. X. NO. II.

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