formation, having no patterns before their "is laid in moral paradoxes. All those in eyes in their domestic history, they naturally stances to be found in history, whether rea. of 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 beand 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 consi ten. 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 pictu could 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 was not strange that the blind, thus led it gives no sign of exhaustion. It was proba by the blind, should stumble. The transactions bly to this exhuberance of thought and lanof the French Revolution, in some measure, guage, always fresh, always sweet, always took their character from these works. With-pure, no sooner yielded than repaired, that the 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 diplomatists, 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 raparity, 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,| 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 na tion. 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 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 Cæsar little can be said. They are incomparable models for military de spatches. But histories they are not, and de not pretend to be. The ancient critics placed Sallust in the Let an army, they could not effect their purpose same rank with Livy; and unquestionably the speeches of Cicero sufficiently prove, that som small portion of his works which has come persons considered the shocking and atrocious down to us, is calculated to give a high opi-parts of the plot as mere inventions of the go. nion of his talents. But his style is not very vernment, designed to excuse its unconstitupleasant; and his most powerful work, the ac- tional measures. We must confess ourselves count of the Conspiracy of Catiline, has ra- to be of that opinion. There was, undoubtedly, ther the air of a clever party pamphlet than a strong party desircus to change the adminis that of a history. It abounds with strange in-tration. While Pompey held the command of consistencies, 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, Cæsar, the prætor 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, est, 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. Of the Latin historians, Tacitus was cer tainly 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 all stimulants lose their power. Thucydides, as we have already observed, relates ordinary transactions with the unpre tending 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 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 cată. 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 an then words and actions. We know them as if we had lived with them. Claudius, Nero, Ocho. both the Agrippinas, are masterpieces. Bu Tiberius is a still higher miracle of art. The Sallust tel.s u. what, indeed, the letters and historian undertook to make us intimately ac quainted 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 his. torians, 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 imagina. tion. This improvement was gradually introduced. History ccnmenced 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 twc centuries tell more truth than those of anti quity, may perhaps be doubted. But it is quite certain that they tell fewer falsehoods. In the philosophy of history, the moderns have very far urpassed the ancients. It is not, indeed, strange that the Greeks and Ro mans 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 under. stood in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth, and in the eighteenth century thau 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 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 station. ary, 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. | 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 political economy, were better understood in the time of Augustus Cæsar 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, systemalized, 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. 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 pur pose 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. 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 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 distinctime 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, dur the Trojan to the Persian war, is covered withing the last four centuries, have scarcely found 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 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 ›ne 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 Æmilius, Sylla, and Cæsar, they were well acquainted. But the notions which they entertained respecting Cieero and Virgil were, probably, not unlike Even those Latin writers, who did not carry this affectation so far, looked on Greece as the only fount of knowledge. From Greece they derive 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 litera. ture 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 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. Juve nal 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 Scrip tures as the rule of their faith and practice, this indifference is astonishing. The fact seems to be, that the Greeks admired only them elves, and that the Romans admired only them- a stormy democracy in the quiet and listless selves and the Greeks. Literary men turned population of an overgrown empire. The fear away with disgust from modes of thought and of heresy did what the sense of oppression expression so widely different from all that could not do; it changed men, accustomed to they had been accustomed to admire. The ef- be turned over like sheep from tyrant to tyrant, fect was narrowness and sameness of thought. into devoted partisans and obstinate rebels. Their minds, if we may so express ourselves, The tones of an eloquence which had been bred in and in, and were accordingly cursed silent for ages resounded from the pulpit of with barrerness, and degeneracy. No extra- Gregory. A spirit which had been extinguished neous beauty or vigour was engrafted on the on the plains of Philippi revived in Athanasius decaying stock. By an exclusive attention to and Ambrose. 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 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 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 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 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 nor 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 rystem 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 nines depths. It excited all the passions of 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 scarce. ly 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 the progress of the intellect. But here they ter mented 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 Em pire 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 ac complished; and the second civilization 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 ccnnection 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 infuence, 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. |