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lament that, from the frailty of human nature, a man who could perform so great an exploit could repent of it.

berty 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 every thing which The writings of these men, and of their momakes liberty valuable, for measures which dern imitators, have produced effects which stifled discussion, corrupted the administration deserve some notice. The English have been of justice, and discouraged the accumulation so long accustomed to political speculation, of property. The writers, whose works we and have enjoyed so large a measure of pracare considering, confounded the sound with the tical liberty, that such works have produced substance, and the means with the end. Their little effect on their minds. We have classical imaginations were inflamed by mystery. They associations and great names of our own, conceived of liberty as monks conceive of love, which we can confidently oppose to the most as Cockneys conceive of the happiness and in- splendid of ancient times. Senate has not to nocence of rural life, as novel-reading semp-our ears a sound so venerable as Parliament. stresses conceive of Almack's and Grosvenor We respect the Great Charter more than the Square, accomplished Marquesses and hand- laws of Solon. The Capitol and the Forum some Colonels of the Guards. In the relation impress us with less awe than our own Westof events, and the delineation of characters, minster Hall and Westminster Abbey, the they have paid little attention to facts, to the place where the great men of twenty generacostume of the times of which they pretend to tions have contended, the place where they treat, or to the general principles of human na-sleep together! The list of warriors and ture. They have been faithful only to their statesmen by whom our constitution was foundown puerile and extravagant doctrines. Gene-ed or preserved, from De Monfort down to Fox, rals and Statesmen are metamorphosed into may well stand a comparison with the Fasti magnanimous coxcombs, from whose fulsome of Rome. The dying thanksgiving of Sidney virtues we turn away with disgust. The fine is as noble as the libation which Thrasea sayings and exploits of their heroes reminds poured to Liberating Jove: and we think with us of the insufferable perfections of Sir Charles | far less pleasure of Cato tearing out his entrails, Grandison, and affect us with a nausea similar than of Russel saying, as he turned away from to that which we feel when an actor, in one of his wife, that the bitterness of death was past. Morton's or Kotzebue's plays, lays his hand on-Even those parts of our history, over which, 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.

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.

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 Here, therefore, the effect of books, such as those who approve them consider as excep- those which we have been considering, has tions to laws of almost universal application— been harmless. They have, indeed, given cur which bear so close an affinity to the most atro-rency to many very erroneous opinions with cious crimes, that even where it may be unjust respect to ancient history. They have heated to censure them, it is unsafe to praise them. It the imagination of boys. They have misled is not strange, therefore, that some flagitious the judgment, and corrupted the taste of some instances of perfidy and cruelty should have men of letters, such as Akenside and Sir Wil been passed unchallenged in such company, liam Jones. But on persons engaged in pub that grave moralists, with no personal interest lic affairs they have had very little influence. at stake, should have extolled, in the highest | The foundations of our constitution were laid terms, deeds of which the atrocity appalled by men who knew nothing of the Greeks, but even the infuriated factions in whose cause that they denied the orthodox procession, and 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 me centuries later to discover that his conduet was a glorious display of virtue, and to

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cheated the Crusaders; and nothing of Rome, but that the Pope lived there. Those who fol lowed, contented themselves with improving on the original plan. They found n. dels at home; and therefore they did not look for them abroad. But when enlightened men on the continent began to think about political re

formation, having no patterns before their "is laid in moral paradoxes. All those ineyes in their domestic history, they naturally stances to be found in history, whether real or had recourse to those remains of antiquity, fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which the study of which is considered throughout morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and Europe as an important part of education. from which affrighted nature recoils, are their The historians of whom we have been speak- chosen and almost sole examples for the ining had been members of large communities, struction of their youth." This evil, we be and subjects of absolute sovereigns. Hence lieve, is to be directly ascribed to the influence i is, as we have already said, that they com- of the historians whom we have mentioned, mit such gross errors in speaking of the little and their modern imitators. republics of antiquity. Their works were now Livy had some faults in common with these read in the spirit in which they had been writ- writers. But on the whole he must be consiten. They were read by men placed in cir- dered as forming a class by himself. No hiscumstances closely resembling their own, un- torian with whom we are acquainted has acquainted with the real nature of liberty, but shown so complete an indifference to truth. inclined to believe every thing good which He seems to have cared only about the pictucould be told respecting it. How powerfully resque effect of his book and the honour of his these books impressed these speculative re- country. On the other hand, we do not know, formers, is well known to all who have paid in the whole range of literature, an instance any attention to the French literature of the of a bad thing so well done. The painting of last century. But, perhaps, the writer on the narrative is beyond description vivid and whom they produced the greatest effect, was graceful. The abundance of interesting sentiVittorio Alfieri. In some of his plays, particu- ments and splendid imagery in the speeches is larly in Virginia, Timoleon, and Brutus the almost miraculous. His mind is a soil which Younger, he has even caricatured the extrava-is never overteemed, a fountain which never gance of his masters.

seems to trickle. It pours forth profusely; yet it gives no sign of exhaustion. It was proba bly to this exhuberance 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

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. With out the assistance of these works, indeed, a revolution would have taken place-a revolution productive of much good and much evil, tremendous, but short-lived 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 diploma-gods above him. He, therefore, looked back tists, would not have been disgraced by rants worthy only of a college of 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 feasts 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 dubicus. Mr. Burke has touched on this subject with great felicity of expression: The gradation of their republic," says he,

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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 contem plated the past with interest and delight, not because it furnished a contrast to the present, but because it had led to the present. He re curred 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 nature 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 Cesar little can be said. They are incomparable models for military despatches. But histories they are not, and de not pretend to be.

The ancient critics placed Sallust in the

speeches of Cicero sufficiently prove, that some persons considered the shocking and atrocious parts of the plot as mere inventions of the government, designed to excuse its unconstitu tional measures. We must confess ourselves to be of that opinion. There was, undoubtedly, a strong party desirous to change the adminis

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

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 in-tration. While Pompey held the command of consistencies, which, unexplained as they are, an army, they could not effect their purpose necessarily excite doubts as to the fairness of without preparing means for repelling force, the narrative. It is true, that many circum- if necessary, by force. In all this there is no stances now forgotten may have been familiar thing different from the ordinary practice of to his contemporaries, and may have rendered Roman factions. The other charges brought passages clear to them which to us appear du- against the conspirators are so inconsistent bions and perplexing. But a great historian and improbable, that we give no credit what should remember that he writes for distant ever to them. If our readers think this skepgenerations, for men who will perceive the ap- ticism unreasonable, let them turn to the conparent contradictions, and will possess no temporary account of the Popish plot. Let means of reconciling them. We can only vin- them look over the votes of Parliament, and dicate the fidelity of Sallust at the expense of the speeches of the king; the charges of his skill. But in fact all the information Scroggs, and the harangues of the managers which we have from contemporaries respect-employed against Strafford. A person, who ing this famous plot is liable to the same ob- should form his judgment from these pieces jection, and is read by discerning men with alone, would believe that London was set on the same incredulity. It is all on one side. fire by the Papists, and that Sir Edmondbury No answer has reached our times. Yet, on the Godfrey was murdered for his religion. Yet showing of the accusers, the accused seem en- these stories are now altogether exploded. titled to acquittal. Catiline, we are told, in- They have been abandoned by statesmen to trigued with a Vestal virgin, and murdered his aldermen, by aldermen to clergymen, by clerown son. His house was a den of gamblers gymen to old women, and by old women to and debauchees. No young man could cross Sir Harcourt Lees. 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 termi-carries his love of effect far beyond the limits nation 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 high-setting gives additional lustre to the brilliants. est functionaries for the destruction of all or- There are passages in the narrative of Tacitus der; that Crassus, Cæsar, the prætor Lentulus, superior to the best which can be quoted from one of the consuls of the year, one of the con- Thucydides. But they are not enchased and suls elect, were proved or suspected to be en-relieved with the same skill. They are far gaged 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, est, as Sallust himself expresses it, "he should seem to identify their cause with that of the eitizens." 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

of moderation. He tells a fine story finely: but he cannot tell a plain story plainly. He stimulates till all stimulants lose their power. Thucydides, as we have already observed, relates ordinary transactions with the unpretending clearness and succinctness of the gazette. His great powers of painting he reserves for events, of which the slightest details are interesting. The simplicity of the

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 cata logues of good and bad qualities, and append ing 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 a meir words and actions. We know them as if we had lived with them. Claudius, Nero, Otho, both the Agrippinas, are masterpieces. Tiberius is a still higher miracle of art. The historian undertook to make us intimately ac

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inclined to pass sentence on them in masses. We shall, therefore, instead of pointing out the defects and merits of the different modern his torians, state generally in what particulars they have surpassed their predecessors, and in what we conceive them to have failed.

quainted with a man singularly dark and library, to be tired with taking down books one inscrutable-with a man whose real disposi- after another for separate judgment, and feel tion 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."

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 sub

He was to mark the gradual effect of advanc. ing 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 penetrat-sided, this absurd practice was abandoned. In ing 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.

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 improve ment, this natural growth of knowledge, will not altogether account for the immense superi ority 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 ex-, erted. It is not that at one time the human in

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 ad-tellect should have made but small progress, ventures 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 generai air and expression is caught.

We begin, like the priest in Don Quixote's

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 philoso phers, 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. | 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.

judice 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 ele gance in the dialect of the state which he ruled.

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 The spirit of the two most famous nations preferred the honour of becoming an Athenian, of antiquity was remarkably exclusive. In the by intellectual naturalization, to all the distinc time of Homer, the Greeks had not begun to tions which were to be acquired in the politiconsider themselves as a distinct race. They cal contests of Rome. His great friend comstill looked with something of childish wonder posed Greek poems and memoirs. It is well and awe on the riches and wisdom of Sidon known that Petrarch considered that beautiful and Egypt. From what causes, and by what language in which his sonnets are written, as gradations, their feelings underwent a change, a barbarous jargon, and intrusted his fame to it is not easy to determine. Their history, from those wretched Latin hexameters, which, durthe Trojan to the Persian war, is covered with ing the last four centuries, have scarcely found an obscurity broken only by dim and scattered four readers. Many eminent Romans appear gleams of truth. But it is certain that a great to have felt the same contempt for their native alteration took place. They regarded them-tongue as compared with the Greek. The preselves 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 Cesar, they were well acquainted. But the nouons 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 unno. ticed 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 erro neously. 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 thenF

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