Livy had some faults in common with these writers. But on the whole he must be considered as forming a class by himself. No his 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 it 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, 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 overtecmed, 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 lan of 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 critics applied that expression which has been revolution would have taken place-a revolu- so much discussed, lactea ubertas. tion 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 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. 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 These were mere follies. But the spirit ex- has something of their exaggeration, somecited by these writers produced more serious thing of their cant, something of their fondness effects. The greater part of the crimes which for anomalies and lusus nature in morality. disgraced the revolution, sprung indeed from Yet even here we perceive a difference. They, the relaxation of law, from popular ignorance, talk rapturously of patriotism and liberty in from the remembrance of past oppression, the abstract. He does not seem to think any from the fear of foreign conquest, from rapacity, from ambition, from party spirit. But many atrocious proceedings must, doubtless, ce 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, The ancient critics placed Sallust in the 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 do not pretend to be. 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 speeches of Cicero sufficiently prove, that some 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 unconstitu pleasant; 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 desirous to change the administhat 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 bious 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 consals 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 cou- In the delineation of character, Tacitus is rage rendered him most dangerous, to quit Rome unrivalled among historians, and has very few without molestation. We are told, that bond- superiors among dramatists and novelists. By men and gladiators were to be armed against the delineation of character, we do not mean the citizens. Yet we find that Catiline rejected the practice of drawing up epigrammatic catathe slaves who crowded to enlist in his army, logues of good and bad qualities, and appendlest, as Sallust himself expresses it, "he shoulding them to the names of eminent men. Ne seem to identify their cause with that of the citizens." Finally, we are told that the magisrate, 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. 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 au their words and actions. We know them as if we had lived with them. Claudius, Nero, Otho, both the Agrippinas, are masterpieces. Bul Tiberius is a still higher miracle of art. The 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." 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 Herodots. Italy was to Europe what Athens was to Greece. In Italy, therefore, a more ac He was to mark the gradual effect of advanc-curate and manly mode of narration was early ing age and approaching death on this strange introduced. Machiavelli and Guicciardini, in compound of strength and weakness; to exhi- imitation of Livy and Thucydides, composed bit the old sovereign of the world sinking into speeches for their historical personages. But a dotage which, though it rendered his appe- as the classical enthusiasm which distinguishtites eccentric and his temper savage, never ed the age of Lorenzo and Leo gradually subimpaired 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 general 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 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 improvement, 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 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 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 readtized, 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. ing 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. The Romans submitted to the pretensions of a race which they despised. Their epic poet, while he claimed for them pre-eminence in the arts of government and war, acknowledged their inferiority in taste, eloquence, and science. Men of letters affected to understand the Greek language better than their own. Pomponius preferred the honour of becoming an Athenian, by intellectual naturalization, to all the distinctions which were to be acquired in the political contests of Rome. His great friend composed Greek poems and memoirs. It is well known that Petrarch considered that beautiful language in which his sonnets are written, as a barbarous jargon, and intrusted his fame to those wretched Latin hexameters, which, during the last four centuries, have scarcely found four readers. Many eminent Romans appear to have felt the same contempt for their native tongue as compared with the Greek. The prejudice continued to a very late period. Julian was as partial to the Greek language as Frederick the Great to the French; and it seems that he could not express himself with elegance in the dialect of the state which he ruled. The spirit of the two most famous nations of antiquity was remarkably exclusive. In the time of Homer, the Greeks had not begun to consider themselves as a distinct race. They still looked with something of childish wonder and awe on the riches and wisdom of Sidon and Egypt. From what causes, and by what gradations, their feelings underwent a change, it is not easy to determine. Their history, from the Trojan to the Persian war, is covered with an obscurity broken only by dim and scattered gleams of truth. But it is certain that a great alteration took place. They regarded themselves as a separate people. They had common religious rites, and common principles of public law, in which foreigners had no part. In all their political systems, monarchical, aristocratical, and democratical, there was a strong family likeness. After the retreat of Xerxes Even those Latin writers, who did not carry and the fall of Mardonius, national pride ren- this affectation so far, looked on Greece as the dered the separation between the Greeks and only fount of knowledge. From Greece they the Barbarians complete. The conquerors con- derive the measures of their poetry, and indeed, sidered themselves men of a superior breed, all of poetry that can be imported. From men who, in their intercourse with neighbour- Greece they borrowed the principles and the ing nations, were to teach, and not to learn. vocabulary of their philosophy. To the literaThey 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 ex- of the Hebrews, for example, books which, conpression of any Greek writer earlier than the sidered merely as human compositions, are inage of Augustus, indicating an opinion that valuable to the critic, the antiquary, and the any thing worth reading could be written in philosopher, seem to have been utterly unnoany language except his own. The feelings ticed by them. The peculiarities of Judaism, which sprung from national glory were not and the rapid growth of Christianity, attracted altogether extinguished by national degrada- their notice. They made war against the Jews. tion. They were fondly cherished through They made laws against the Christians. But ages of slavery and shame. The literature of they never opened the books of Moses. JuveRome herself was regarded with contempt by nal quotes the Pentateuch with censure. The those who had fled before her arms, and who author of the treatise on the "Sublime" quotes bowed beneath her fasces. Voltaire says, in it with praise: but both of them quote it erroone of his six thousand pamphlets, that he was neously. When we consider what sublime the first person who told the French that Eng- poetry, what curious history, what striking and land had produced eminent men besides the peculiar views of the divine nature, and of the Duke of Marlborough. Down to a very late social duties of men, are to be found in the period, the Greeks seem to have stood in need Jewish Scriptures; when we consider the two of similar information with respect to their sects on which the attention of the government masters. With Paulus Emilius, Sylla, and was constantly fixed, appealed to those ScripCesar, they were well acquainted. But the tures as the rule of their faith and practice. notions which they entertained respecting Ci- this indifference is astonishing. cero and Virgil were, probably, not unlike seems to be, that the Greeks admired only them. F The fact population of an overgrown empire. The fear of heresy did what the sense of oppression could not do; it changed men, accustomed to be turned over like sheep from tyrant to tyrant, into devoted partisans and obstinate rebels. The tones of an eloquence which had been silent for ages resounded from the pulpit of Gregory. A spirit which had been extinguished on the plains of Philippi revived in Athanasius, and Ambrose. selves, and that the Romans admired only them- a stormy democracy in the quiet and listless. selves and the Greeks. Literary men turned away with disgust from modes of thought and expression so widely different from all that they had been accustomed to admire. The effect was narrowness and sameness of thought. Their minds, if we may so express ourselves, bred in and in, and were accordingly cursed with barrenness, and degeneracy. No extraneous beauty or vigour was engrafted on the decaying stock. By an exclusive attention to one class of phenomena, by an exclusive taste Yet even this remedy was not sufficiently for one species of excellence, the human intel-violent for the disease. It did not prevent the lect was stunted. Occasional coincidences empire of Constantinople from relapsing, after were turned into general rules. Prejudices a short paroxysm of excitement, into a state of 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 no-making one great discovery in science, or pro-, body 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 system of morals, and with it much of the old system of metaphysics. It furnished the orator with new topics of declamation, and the logician with new points of controversy. Above all, it introduced a new principle, of which the operation was constantly felt in every part of society. It stirred the stagnant mass from the inmost depths. It excited all the passions of stupefaction to which history furnishes scarcely any parallel. We there find that a polished, society, a society in which a most intricate and elaborate system of jurisprudence was established, in which the arts of luxury were well understood, in which the works of the great ancient writers were preserved and studied,, existed for nearly a thousand years without ducing 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 themselves, have generally been favourable to the progress of the intellect. But here they tormented 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 connection was close enough to allow of mutual observation and improvement, yet not so close as to destroy the idioms of natural opinion and feeling. The balance of moral and intellectual influence, thus established between the nations of Europe, is far more important than the balance. of political power. Indeed, we are inclined to think that the latter is valuable principally be, |