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it as a history or as a romance, seems to us a head. For the historians of this class we must very wretched performance. The Expedition confess that we entertain a peculiar aversion. of the Ten Thousand, and the History of Gre- They seem to have been pedants, who, though cian Affairs, are certainly pleasant reading; destitute of those valuable qualities which are but they indicate no great power of mind. In frequently found in conjunction with pedantry, truth, Xenophon, though his taste was elegant, thought themselves great philosophers and great his dispositions amiable, and his intercourse politicians. They not only mislead their readwith the world extensive, had, we suspect, ra- ers in every page, as to particular facts, but ther a weak head. Such was evidently the they appear to have altogether misconceived opinion of that extraordinary man to whom he the whole character of the times of which they early attached himself, and for whose memory write. They were inhabitants of an empire he entertained an idolatrous veneration. He bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Euphracame in only for the milk with which Socrates tes, by the ice of Scythia and the sands of Maunourished his babes in philosophy. A few ritania; composed of nations whose manners, saws of morality, and a few of the simplest whose languages, whose religion, whose coundoctrines of natural religion, were enough for tenances and complexions, were widely differ. the good young man. The strong meat, the ent, governed by one mighty despotism, which bold speculations on physical and metaphysi- had risen on the ruins of a thousand commoncal science, were reserved for auditors of a wealths and kingdoms. Of liberty, such as it different description. Even the lawless habits is in small democracies, of patriotism, such as of a captain of mercenary troops, could not it is in small independent communities of any change the tendency which the character of kind, they had, and they could have, no experiXenophon early acquired. To the last, he mental knowledge. But they had read of men seems to have retained a sort of heathen Pu- who exerted themselves in the cause of their ritanism. The sentiments of piety and virtue, country, with an energy unknown in later which abound in his works, are those of a times, who had violated the dearest of domestic well-meaning man, somewhat timid and nar- charities, or voluntarily devoted themselves to row-minded, devout from constitution rather death for the public good; and they wondered than from rational conviction. He was as at the degeneracy of their contemporaries. It superstitious as Herodotus, but in a way far never occurred to them, that the feelings which more offensive. The very peculiarities which they so greatly admired sprung from local and charm us in an infant, the toothless mumbling, occasional causes; that they will always grow the stammering, the tottering, the helplessness, up spontaneously in small societies; and that, the causeless tears and laughter, are disgust- in large empires, though they may be forced ing in old age. In the same manner, the ab-into existence for a short time by peculiar cirsurdity which precedes a period of general cumstances, they cannot be general or permaintelligence, is often pleasing; that which fol-nent. It is impossible that any man should feel lows it is contemptible. The nonsense of Herodotus is that of a baby. The nonsense of Xenophon is that of a dotard. His stories about dreams, omers, and prophecies, present a strange contrast to the passages in which the shrewd and incredulous Thucydides mentions the popular superstitions. It is not quite clear that Xenophon was honest in his credulity; his fanaticism was in some degree politic. He would have made an excellent member of the Apostolic Comarilla. An alarmist by na- The writers of whom we speak should have ture, ar aristocrat by party, he carried to an considered this. They should have considered unreasonable excess his horror of popular that, in patriotism, such as it existed amongst turbulence. The quiet atrocity of Sparta did the Greeks, there was nothing essentially and not shock him in the same manner; for he eternally good; that an exclusive attachment to hated tumult more than crimes. He was de-a particular society, though a natural, and, under sirous to find restraints which might curb the passions of the multitude; and he absurdly fancied that he had found them in a religion without evidences or sanction, precepts or example, in a frigid system of Theophilanthropy, supported by nursery tales.

Polybius and Arrian have given us authentic accounts of facts, and here their merit ends. They were not men of comprehensive minds; they had not the art of telling a story in an interesting manner. They have in consequence been thrown into the shade by writers, who, though less studious of truth than themselves, understood far better the art of producing effect, by Livy and Quintus Curtius.

Yet Polybius and Arrian deserve high praise, when compared with the writers of that school of which Plutarch may be considered as the

for a fortress on a remote frontier, as he feels for his own house; that he should grieve for a defeat in which ten thousand people whom he never saw have fallen, as he grieves for a defeat which has half unpeopled the street in which he lives; that he should leave his home for a military expedition, in order to preserve the balance of power, as cheerfully as he would leave it to repel invaders who had begun to burn all the cornfields in his neighbourhood.

certain restrictions, a most useful sentiment, implies no extraordinary attainments in wisdom or virtue; that where it has existed in an intense degree, it has turned states into gangs of robbers, whom their mutual fidelity has rendered more dangerous, has given a character of peculiar atrocity to war, and has generated that worst of all political evils, the tyranny of nations over nations.

Enthusiastically attached to the name of liberty, these historians troubled themselves little about its definition. The Spartans, tormented by ten thousand absurd restraints, unable to please themselves in the choice of their wives, their suppers, or their company, compelled to assume a peculiar manner, and to talk in a peculiar style, gloried in their liberty. The aristocracy of Rome repeatedly made li

The writings of these men, and of their mo dern imitators, have produced effects which deserve some notice. The English have been so long accustomed to political speculation, and have enjoyed so large a measure of prac tical liberty, that such works have produced little effect on their minds. We have classical associations and great names of our own, which we can confidently oppose to the most splendid of ancient times. Senate has not to

berty a plea for cutting off the favourites of the | lament that, from the frailty of human nature, people. In almost all the little commonwealths a man who could perform so great an exploit of antiquity, liberty was used as a pretext for could repent of it. measures directed against every thing which makes liberty valuable, for measures which stifled discussion, corrupted the administration of justice, and discouraged the accumulation of property. The writers, whose works we are considering, confounded the sound with the substance, and the means with the end. Their imaginations were inflamed by mystery. They conceived of liberty as monks conceive of love, as Cockneys conceive of the happiness and innocence of rural life, as novel-reading semp-our ears a sound so venerable as Parliament. stresses conceive of Almack's and Grosvenor Square, accomplished Marquesses and handsome Colonels of the Guards. In the relation of events, and the delineation of characters, they have paid little attention to facts, to the costume of the times of which they pretend to treat, or to the general principles of human nature. They have been faithful only to their own puerile and extravagant doctrines. Gene-ed or preserved, from De Monfort down to Fox, rals and Statesmen are metamorphosed into magnanimous coxcombs, from whose fulsome virtues we turn away with disgust. The fine sayings and exploits of their heroes reminds us of the insufferable perfections of Sir Charles Grandison, and affect us with a nausea similar to that which we feel when an actor, in one of Morton's or Kotzebue's plays, lays his hand on-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.

We respect the Great Charter more than the laws of Solon. The Capitol and the Forum impress us with less awe than our own Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey, the place where the great men of twenty generations have contended, the place where they sleep together! The list of warriors and statesmen by whom our constitution was found

may well stand a comparison with the Fasti of Rome. The dying thanksgiving of Sidney is as noble as the libation which Thrasea poured to Liberating Jove: and we think with far less pleasure of Cato tearing out his entrails, than of Russel saying, as he turned away from his wife, that the bitterness of death was past.

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 Timo-cheated the Crusaders; and nothing of Rome, leon took in the assassination of his brother but that the Pope lived there. Those who fol shocked many of his own partisans. The re- lowed, contented themselves with improving collection of it preyed long on his own mind. on the original plan. They found n.dels at But it was reserved for historians who lived home; and therefore they did not look for them -me centuries later to discover that his con- abroad. But when enlightened men on the duet was a glorious display of virtue, and to continent began to think about political re VOL 1-8

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 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 read in the spirit in which they had been written. They were read by men placed in circumstances closely resembling their own, unacquainted with the real nature of liberty, but inclined to believe every thing good which could be told respecting it. How powerfully these books impressed these speculative reformers, is well known to all who have paid any attention to the French literature of the last century. But, perhaps, the writer on whom they produced the greatest effect, was Vittorio Alfieri. In some of his plays, particularly in Virginia, Timoleon, and Brutus the Younger, he has even caricatured the extravagance of his masters.

Livy had some faults in common with these writers. But on the whole he must be considered as forming a class by himself. No historian with whom we are acquainted has shown so complete an indifference to truth. He seems to have cared only about the picturesque effect of his book and the honour of his country. On the other hand, we do not know, in the whole range of literature, an instance of a bad thing so well done. The painting of the narrative is beyond description vivid and graceful. The abundance of interesting sentiments and splendid imagery in the speeches is almost miraculous. His mind is a soil which is never overteemed, a fountain which never seems to trickle. It pours forth profusely; yet it gives no sign of exhaustion. It was proba bly to this exhaberance 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.

It was not strange that the blind, thus led by the blind, should stumble. The transactions of the French Revolution, in some measure, took their character from these works. Without the assistance of these works, indeed, a revolution would have taken place-a revolution productive of much good and much evil, All the merits and all the defects of Livy tremendous, but short-lived evil, dearly pur- take a colouring from the character of his nachased, but durable good. But it would not tion. He was a writer peculiarly Roman; the have been exactly such a revolution. The proud citizen of a commonwealth which had style, the accessories, would have been in ma-indeed lost the reality of liberty, but which ny respects different. There would have been still sacredly preserved its forms-in fact the less of bombast in language, less of affectation subject of an arbitrary prince, but in his own in manner, less of solemn trifling and ostenta- estimation one of the masters of the world, tious simplicity. The acts of legislative as- with a hundred kings below him, and only the semblies, and the correspondence of diploma-gods above him. He, therefore, looked back tists, would not have been disgraced by rants on former times with feelings far different from worthy only of a college of declamation. The those which were naturally entertained by his government of a great and polished nation Greek contemporaries, and which at a later would not have rendered itself ridiculous by period became general among men of letters attempting to revive the usages of a world throughout the Roman Empire. He contemwhich had long passed away, or rather of a plated the past with interest and delight, not world which had never existed except in the because it furnished a contrast to the present, description of a fantastic school of writers. but because it had led to the present. He re These second-hand imitations resembled the curred to it, not to lose in proud recollections originals about as much as the classical feasts the sense of national degradation, but to trace with which the Doctor in Peregrine Pickle the progress of national glory. It is true that turned the stomachs of all his guests, resem- his veneration for antiquity produced on him bled one of the suppers of Lucullus in the some of the effects which it produced on those Hall of Apollo. who arrived at it by a very different road. 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.

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,|

He

Of the concise and elegant accounts of the campaigns of Cæsar 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

Let

should form his judgment from these pieces alone, would believe that London was set on fire by the Papists, and that Sir Edmondbury Godfrey was murdered for his religion. Yet these stories are now altogether exploded. They have been abandoned by statesmen to aldermen, by aldermen to clergymen, by cler. gymen to old women, and by old women to Sir Harcourt Lees.

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 nostances 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 whatshould remember that he writes for distant ever to them. If our readers think this skep. generations, 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. 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 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 Of the Latin historians, Tacitus was cerreputation. Yet this is the man with whom tainly the greatest. His style indeed is not Cicero was willing to coalesce in a contest only faulty in itself, but is, in some respects, for the first magistracy of the republic; and peculiarly unfit for historical composition. He whom he described, long after the fatal termi- carries his love of effect far beyond the limits nation of the conspiracy, as an accomplished of moderation. He tells a fine story finely: hypocrite, by whom he had himself been de- but he cannot tell a plain story plainly. He ceived, and who had acted with consummate stimulates till all stimulants lose their power. skill the character of a good citizen and a good Thucydides, as we have already observed, refriend. We are told that the plot was the most lates ordinary transactions with the unpre. wicked and desperate ever known, and almost tending clearness and succinctness of the in the same breath, that the great body of the gazette. His great powers of painting he people, and many of the nobles favoured it: reserves for events, of which the slightest that the richest citizens of Rome were eager details are interesting. The simplicity of the for the spoliation of all property, and its high-setting gives additional lustre to the brilliants. est 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.

Sallust tells us, what, indeed, the letters and

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 catălogues of good and bad qualities, and append ing them to the names of eminent men. Ne 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 ineir 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

But

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 as sociating 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."

library, to be tired with taking down books one after another for separate judgment, and feel inclined to pass sentence on them in masses. We shall, therefore, instead of pointing out the defects and merits of the different modern historians, state generally in what particulars they have surpassed their predecessors, and in what we conceive them to have failed.

They have certainly been, in one sense, far more strict in their adherence to truth than most of the Greek and Roman writers. They do not think themselves entitled to render their narrative interesting by introducing descriptions, conversations, and harangues, which have no existence but in their own imagination. This improvement was gradually introduced. History commenced among the modern nations of Europe, as it had commenced among the Greeks, in romance. Froissart was our Herodotus. Italy was to Europe what Athens was to Greece. In Italy, therefore, a more accurate and manly mode of narration was early introduced. Machiavelli and Guicciardini, in imitation of Livy and Thucydides, composed speeches for their historical personages. But as the classical enthusiasm which distinguished the age of Lorenzo and Leo gradually 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.

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 generai air and expression is caught.

We begin, like the priest in Don Quixote's

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 surpassed the ancients. It is not, indeed, strange that the Greeks and Romans should not have carried the science of government, or any other experimental science, so far as it has been carried in our time; for the experimental sciences are generally in a state of progression. They were better understood in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth, and in the eighteenth century than in the seventeenth. But this constant improvement, this natural growth of knowledge, will not altogether account for the immense superiority of the modern writers. The difference is a difference, not in degree, but of kind. It is not merely that new principles have been discovered, but that new faculties seem to be exerted. It is not that at one time the human intellect should have made but small progress, and at another time have advanced far; but that at one time it should have been stationary, and at another time constantly proceeding. In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals. They reasoned as justly as ourselves on subjects which required pure demonstration. But in the moral sciences they made scarcely any advance. During the long period which elapsed between the fifth century before the Christian era and the fifth century after it, little perceptible progress was made. All the metaphysical discoveries of all the philosophers, from the time of Socrates to the northern invasion, are not to be compared in importance with those which have been made in England

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