No More Learning

At the distance
of three-and-twenty centuries, we feel for him the same sort of pitying
fondness which Fontaine and Gay are said to have inspired in society.
He has written an incomparable book. He has written something better
perhaps than the best history; but he has not written a good history;
he is, from the first to the last chapter, an inventor. We do not here
refer merely to those gross fictions with which he has been reproached
by the critics of later times. We speak of that colouring which is
equally diffused over his whole narrative, and which perpetually leaves
the most sagacious reader in doubt what to reject and what to receive.
The most authentic parts of his work bear the same relation to his
wildest legends which Henry the Fifth bears to the Tempest. There was
an expedition undertaken by Xerxes against Greece; and there was an
invasion of France. There was a battle at Plataea; and there was
a battle at Agincourt. Cambridge and Exeter, the Constable and the
Dauphin, were persons as real as Demaratus and Pausanias. The harangue
of the Archbishop on the Salic Law and the Book of Numbers differs much
less from the orations which have in all ages proceeded from the right
reverend bench than the speeches of Mardonius and Artabanus from those
which were delivered at the council-board of Susa. Shakspeare gives us
enumerations of armies, and returns of killed and wounded, which are
not, we suspect, much less accurate than those of Herodotus. There are
passages in Herodotus nearly as long as acts of Shakspeare, in which
everything is told dramatically, and in which the narrative serves only
the purpose of stage-directions. It is possible, no doubt, that the
substance of some real conversations may have been reported to the
historian. But events which, if they ever happened, happened in ages and
nations so remote that the particulars could never have been known to
him, are related with the greatest minuteness of detail. We have all
that Candaules said to Gyges, and all that passed between Astyages and
Harpagus. We are, therefore, unable to judge whether, in the account
which he gives of transactions respecting which he might possibly have
been well informed, we can trust to anything beyond the naked outline;
whether, for example, the answer of Gelon to the ambassadors of the
Grecian confederacy, or the expressions which passed between Aristides
and Themistocles at their famous interview, have been correctly
transmitted to us. The great events are, no doubt, faithfully related.
So, probably, are many of the slighter circumstances; but which of them
it is impossible to ascertain. The fictions are so much like the facts,
and the facts so much like the fictions, that, with respect to many most
interesting particulars, our belief is neither given nor withheld, but
remains in an uneasy and interminable state of abeyance. We know that
there is truth; but we cannot exactly decide where it lies.

The faults of Herodotus are the faults of a simple and imaginative
mind. Children and servants are remarkably Herodotean in their style of
narration. They tell everything dramatically. Their "says hes" and "says
shes" are proverbial. Every person who has had to settle their disputes
knows that, even when they have no intention to deceive, their reports
of conversation always require to be carefully sifted. If an educated
man were giving an account of the late change of administration, he
would say--"Lord Goderich resigned; and the King, in consequence, sent
for the Duke of Wellington. " A porter tells the story as if he had been
hid behind the curtains of the royal bed at Windsor: "So Lord Goderich
says, 'I cannot manage this business; I must go out. ' So the
King says,--says he, 'Well, then, I must send for the Duke of
Wellington--that's all. '" This is in the very manner of the father of
history.

Herodotus wrote as it was natural that he should write. He wrote for a
nation susceptible, curious, lively, insatiably desirous of novelty
and excitement; for a nation in which the fine arts had attained their
highest excellence, but in which philosophy was still in its infancy.
His countrymen had but recently begun to cultivate prose composition.
Public transactions had generally been recorded in verse. The first
historians might, therefore, indulge without fear of censure in the
license allowed to their predecessors the bards. Books were few. The
events of former times were learned from tradition and from popular
ballads; the manners of foreign countries from the reports of
travellers. It is well known that the mystery which overhangs what is
distant, either in space or time, frequently prevents us from censuring
as unnatural what we perceive to be impossible. We stare at a dragoon
who has killed three French cuirassiers, as a prodigy; yet we read,
without the least disgust, how Godfrey slew his thousands, and Rinaldo
his ten thousands. Within the last hundred years, stories about China
and Bantam, which ought not to have imposed on an old nurse, were
gravely laid down as foundations of political theories by eminent
philosophers. What the time of the Crusades is to us, the generation of
Croesus and Solon was to the Greeks of the time of Herodotus. Babylon
was to them what Pekin was to the French academicians of the last
century.

For such a people was the book of Herodotus composed; and, if we may
trust to a report, not sanctioned indeed by writers of high authority,
but in itself not improbable, it was composed, not to be read, but to
be heard. It was not to the slow circulation of a few copies, which the
rich only could possess, that the aspiring author looked for his reward.
The great Olympian festival,--the solemnity which collected multitudes,
proud of the Grecian name, from the wildest mountains of Doris, and the
remotest colonies of Italy and Libya,--was to witness his triumph. The
interest of the narrative, and the beauty of the style, were aided
by the imposing effect of recitation,--by the splendour of the
spectacle,--by the powerful influence of sympathy. A critic who could
have asked for authorities in the midst of such a scene must have been
of a cold and sceptical nature; and few such critics were there. As was
the historian, such were the auditors,--inquisitive, credulous, easily
moved by religious awe or patriotic enthusiasm. They were the very
men to hear with delight of strange beasts, and birds, and trees,--of
dwarfs, and giants, and cannibals--of gods, whose very names it was
impiety to utter,--of ancient dynasties, which had left behind them
monuments surpassing all the works of later times,--of towns like
provinces,--of rivers like seas,--of stupendous walls, and temples, and
pyramids,--of the rites which the Magi performed at daybreak on the tops
of the mountains,--of the secrets inscribed on the eternal obelisks of
Memphis. With equal delight they would have listened to the
graceful romances of their own country. They now heard of the exact
accomplishment of obscure predictions, of the punishment of crimes over
which the justice of heaven had seemed to slumber,--of dreams, omens,
warnings from the dead,--of princesses, for whom noble suitors contended
in every generous exercise of strength and skill,--of infants, strangely
preserved from the dagger of the assassin, to fulfil high destinies.

As the narrative approached their own times, the interest became still
more absorbing. The chronicler had now to tell the story of that
great conflict from which Europe dates its intellectual and political
supremacy,--a story which, even at this distance of time, is the most
marvellous and the most touching in the annals of the human race,--a
story abounding with all that is wild and wonderful, with all that is
pathetic and animating; with the gigantic caprices of infinite wealth
and despotic power--with the mightier miracles of wisdom, of virtue,
and of courage. He told them of rivers dried up in a day,--of
provinces famished for a meal,--of a passage for ships hewn through the
mountains,--of a road for armies spread upon the waves,--of monarchies
and commonwealths swept away,--of anxiety, of terror, of confusion, of
despair! --and then of proud and stubborn hearts tried in that extremity
of evil, and not found wanting,--of resistance long maintained against
desperate odds,--of lives dearly sold, when resistance could be
maintained no more,--of signal deliverance, and of unsparing revenge.
Whatever gave a stronger air of reality to a narrative so well
calculated to inflame the passions, and to flatter national pride, was
certain to be favourably received.

Between the time at which Herodotus is said to have composed his
history, and the close of the Peloponnesian war, about forty years
elapsed,--forty years, crowded with great military and political events.
The circumstances of that period produced a great effect on the
Grecian character; and nowhere was this effect so remarkable as in the
illustrious democracy of Athens. An Athenian, indeed, even in the
time of Herodotus, would scarcely have written a book so romantic and
garrulous as that of Herodotus. As civilisation advanced, the citizens
of that famous republic became still less visionary, and still less
simple-hearted. They aspired to know where their ancestors had been
content to doubt; they began to doubt where their ancestors had thought
it their duty to believe. Aristophanes is fond of alluding to this
change in the temper of his countrymen. The father and son, in the
Clouds, are evidently representatives of the generations to which they
respectively belonged. Nothing more clearly illustrates the nature of
this moral revolution than the change which passed upon tragedy. The
wild sublimity of Aeschylus became the scoff of every young Phidippides.
Lectures on abstruse points of philosophy, the fine distinctions of
casuistry, and the dazzling fence of rhetoric, were substituted for
poetry. The language lost something of that infantine sweetness which
had characterised it. It became less like the ancient Tuscan, and more
like the modern French.

The fashionable logic of the Greeks was, indeed, far from strict. Logic
never can be strict where books are scarce, and where information is
conveyed orally. We are all aware how frequently fallacies, which, when
set down on paper, are at once detected, pass for unanswerable arguments
when dexterously and volubly urged in Parliament, at the bar, or in
private conversation. The reason is evident. We cannot inspect them
closely enough to perceive their inaccuracy. We cannot readily compare
them with each other. We lose sight of one part of the subject before
another, which ought to be received in connection with it, comes before
us; and as there is no immutable record of what has been admitted and
of what has been denied, direct contradictions pass muster with little
difficulty. Almost all the education of a Greek consisted in talking and
listening. His opinions on government were picked up in the debates of
the assembly. If he wished to study metaphysics, instead of shutting
himself up with a book, he walked down to the market-place to look for
a sophist. So completely were men formed to these habits, that even
writing acquired a conversational air. The philosophers adopted the form
of dialogue, as the most natural mode of communicating knowledge. Their
reasonings have the merits and the defects which belong to that species
of composition, and are characterised rather by quickness and subtilty
than by depth and precision. Truth is exhibited in parts, and by
glimpses. Innumerable clever hints are given; but no sound and durable
system is erected. The argumentum ad hominem, a kind of argument most
efficacious in debate, but utterly useless for the investigation of
general principles, is among their favourite resources. Hence, though
nothing can be more admirable than the skill which Socrates displays in
the conversations which Plato has reported or invented, his victories,
for the most part, seem to us unprofitable. A trophy is set up; but no
new province is added to the dominions of the human mind.

Still, where thousands of keen and ready intellects were constantly
employed in speculating on the qualiies of actions and on the principles
of government, it was impossible that history should retain its whole
character. It became less gossiping and less picturesque; but much more
accurate, and somewhat more scientific.

The history of Thucydides differs from that of Herodotus as a portrait
differs from the representation of an imaginary scene; as the Burke or
Fox of Reynolds differs from his Ugolino or his Beaufort. In the former
case, the archetype is given: in the latter it is created. The faculties
which are required for the latter purpose are of a higher and rarer
order than those which suffice for the former, and indeed necessarily
comprise them. He who is able to paint what he sees with the eye of the
mind will surely be able to paint what he sees with the eye of the body.
He who can invent a story, and tell it well, will also be able to tell,
in an interesting manner, a story which he has not invented. If, in
practice, some of the best writers of fiction have been among the worst
writers of history, it has been because one of their talents had merged
in another so completely that it could not be severed; because, having
long been habituated to invent and narrate at the same time, they found
it impossible to narrate without inventing.

Some capricious and discontented artists have affected to consider
portrait-painting as unworthy of a man of genius. Some critics have
spoken in the same contemptuous manner of history. Johnson puts the case
thus: The historian tells either what is false or what is true: in the
former case he is no historian: in the latter he has no opportunity for
displaying his abilities: for truth is one: and all who tell the truth
must tell it alike.

It is not difficult to elude both the horns of this dilemma. We will
recur to the analogous art of portrait-painting. Any man with eyes and
hands may be taught to take a likeness. The process, up to a certain
point, is merely mechanical. If this were all, a man of talents might
justly despise the occupation. But we could mention portraits which are
resemblances,--but not mere resemblances; faithful,--but much more than
faithful; portraits which condense into one point of time, and exhibit,
at a single glance, the whole history of turbid and eventful lives--in
which the eye seems to scrutinise us, and the mouth to command us--in
which the brow menaces, and the lip almost quivers with scorn--in which
every wrinkle is a comment on some important transaction. The account
which Thucydides has given of the retreat from Syracuse is, among
narratives, what Vandyke's Lord Strafford is among paintings.

Diversity, it is said, implies error: truth is one, and admits of no
degrees. We answer, that this principle holds good only in abstract
reasonings. When we talk of the truth of imitation in the fine arts, we
mean an imperfect and a graduated truth. No picture is exactly like
the original; nor is a picture good in proportion as it is like the
original. When Sir Thomas Lawrence paints a handsome peeress, he does
not contemplate her through a powerful microscope, and transfer to the
canvas the pores of the skin, the blood-vessels of the eye, and all the
other beauties which Gulliver discovered in the Brobdingnagian maids
of honour. If he were to do this, the effect would not merely be
unpleasant, but, unless the scale of the picture were proportionably
enlarged, would be absolutely FALSE. And, after all, a microscope of
greater power than that which he had employed would convict him of
innumerable omissions. The same may be said of history. Perfectly and
absolutely true it cannot be: for, to be perfectly and absolutely
true, it ought to record ALL the slightest particulars of the slightest
transactions--all the things done and all the words uttered during
the time of which it treats. The omission of any circumstance, however
insignificant, would be a defect. If history were written thus, the
Bodleian Library would not contain the occurrences of a week. What is
told in the fullest and most accurate annals bears an infinitely small
proportion to what is suppressed. The difference between the copious
work of Clarendon and the account of the civil wars in the abridgment
of Goldsmith vanishes when compared with the immense mass of facts
respecting which both are equally silent.

No picture, then, and no history, can present us with the whole truth:
but those are the best pictures and the best histories which exhibit
such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole.
He who is deficient in the art of selection may, by showing nothing
but the truth, produce all the effect of the grossest falsehood. It
perpetually happens that one writer tells less truth than another,
merely because he tells more truths. In the imitative arts we constantly
see this. There are lines in the human face, and objects in landscape,
which stand in such relations to each other, that they ought either to
be all introduced into a painting together or all omitted together. A
sketch into which none of them enters may be excellent; but, if some
are given and others left out, though there are more points of likeness,
there is less likeness. An outline scrawled with a pen, which seizes the
marked features of a countenance, will give a much stronger idea of it
than a bad painting in oils. Yet the worst painting in oils that ever
hung at Somerset House resembles the original in many more particulars.
A bust of white marble may give an excellent idea of a blooming face.
Colour the lips and cheeks of the bust, leaving the hair and eyes
unaltered, and the similarity, instead of being more striking, will be
less so.

History has its foreground and its background: and it is principally in
the management of its perspective that one artist differs from another.
Some events must be represented on a large scale, others diminished; the
great majority will be lost in the dimness of the horizon; and a general
idea of their joint effect will be given by a few slight touches.

In this respect no writer has ever equalled Thucydides. He was a perfect
master of the art of gradual diminution. His history is sometimes as
concise as a chronological chart; yet it is always perspicuous. It
is sometimes as minute as one of Lovelace's letters; yet it is never
prolix. He never fails to contract and to expand it in the right place.

Thucydides borrowed from Herodotus the practice of putting speeches of
his own into the mouths of his characters. In Herodotus this usage is
scarcely censurable. It is of a piece with his whole manner. But it is
altogether incongruous in the work of his successor, and violates, not
only the accuracy of history, but the decencies of fiction. When once
we enter into the spirit of Herodotus, we find no inconsistency. The
conventional probability of his drama is preserved from the beginning
to the end. The deliberate orations, and the familiar dialogues, are
in strict keeping with each other. But the speeches of Thucydides are
neither preceded nor followed by anything with which they harmonise.
They give to the whole book something of the grotesque character of
those Chinese pleasure-grounds in which perpendicular rocks of granite
start up in the midst of a soft green plain. Invention is shocking where
truth is in such close juxtaposition with it.

Thucydides honestly tells us that some of these discourses are purely
fictitious. He may have reported the substance of others correctly, but
it is clear from the internal evidence that he has preserved no more
than the substance. His own peculiar habits of thought and expression
are everywhere discernible. Individual and national peculiarities are
seldom to be traced in the sentiments, and never in the diction. The
oratory of the Corinthians and Thebans is not less Attic, either in
matter or in manner, than that of the Athenians. The style of Cleon is
as pure, as austere, as terse, and as significant, as that of Pericles.

In spite of this great fault, it must be allowed that Thucydides has
surpassed all his rivals in the art of historical narration, in the
art of producing an effect on the imagination, by skilful selection
and disposition, without indulging in the license of invention. But
narration, though an important part of the business of a historian, is
not the whole. To append a moral to a work of fiction is either useless
or superfluous. A fiction may give a more impressive effect to what
is already known; but it can teach nothing new. If it presents to us
characters and trains of events to which our experience furnishes
us with nothing similar, instead of deriving instruction from it, we
pronounce it unnatural. We do not form our opinions from it; but we
try it by our preconceived opinions. Fiction, therefore, is essentially
imitative. Its merit consists in its resemblance to a model with which
we are already familiar, or to which at least we can instantly refer.
Hence it is that the anecdotes which interest us most strongly in
authentic narrative are offensive when introduced into novels; that what
is called the romantic part of history is in fact the least romantic. It
is delightful as history, because it contradicts our previous notions
of human nature, and of the connection of causes and effects. It is, on
that very account, shocking and incongruous in fiction. In fiction,
the principles are given, to find the facts: in history, the facts are
given, to find the principles; and the writer who does not explain the
phenomena as well as state them, performs only one half of his office.
Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which
interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them like gold in the ore,
that the mass derives its whole value: and the precious particles are
generally combined with the baser in such a manner that the separation
is a task of the utmost difficulty.

Here Thucydides is deficient: the deficiency, indeed, is not
discreditable to him. It was the inevitable effect of circumstances. It
was in the nature of things necessary that, in some part of its progress
through political science, the human mind should reach that point which
it attained in his time. Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.
The axioms of an English debating club would have been startling and
mysterious paradoxes to the most enlightened statesmen of Athens. But
it would be as absurd to speak contemptuously of the Athenian on this
account as to ridicule Strabo for not having given us an account of
Chili, or to talk of Ptolemy as we talk of Sir Richard Phillips. Still,
when we wish for solid geographical information, we must prefer the
solemn coxcombry of Pinkerton to the noble work of Strabo. If we wanted
instruction respecting the solar system, we should consult the silliest
girl from a boarding-school, rather than Ptolemy.

Thucydides was undoubtedly a sagacious and reflecting man. This clearly
appears from the ability with which he discusses practical questions.
But the talent of deciding on the circumstances of a particular case is
often possessed in the highest perfection by persons destitute of
the power of generalisation. Men skilled in the military tactics
of civilised nations have been amazed at the far-sightedness and
penetration which a Mohawk displays in concerting his stratagems, or in
discerning those of his enemies. In England, no class possesses so much
of that peculiar ability which is required for constructing ingenious
schemes, and for obviating remote difficulties, as the thieves and the
thief-takers. Women have more of this dexterity than men. Lawyers have
more of it than statesmen: statesmen have more of it than philosophers.
Monk had more of it than Harrington and all his club. Walpole had more
of it than Adam Smith or Beccaria. Indeed, the species of discipline
by which this dexterity is acquired tends to contract the mind, and to
render it incapable of abstract reasoning.

The Grecian statesmen of the age of Thucydides were distinguished by
their practical sagacity, their insight into motives, their skill in
devising means for the attainment of their ends. A state of society in
which the rich were constantly planning the oppression of the poor,
and the poor the spoliation of the rich, in which the ties of party
had superseded those of country, in which revolutions and
counter-revolutions were events of daily occurrence, was naturally
prolific in desperate and crafty political adventurers. This was the
very school in which men were likely to acquire the dissimulation of
Mazarin, the judicious temerity of Richelieu, the penetration, the
exquisite tact, the almost instinctive presentiment of approaching
events which gave so much authority to the counsel of Shaftesbury, that
"it was as if a man had inquired of the oracle of God. " In this school
Thucydides studied; and his wisdom is that which such a school would
naturally afford. He judges better of circumstances than of principles.
The more a question is narrowed, the better he reasons upon it. His
work suggests many most important considerations respecting the first
principles of government and morals, the growth of factions, the
organisation of armies, and the mutual relations of communities. Yet
all his general observations on these subjects are very superficial. His
most judicious remarks differ from the remarks of a really philosophical
historian, as a sum correctly cast up by a bookkeeper from a general
expression discovered by an algebraist. The former is useful only in a
single transaction; the latter may be applied to an infinite number of
cases.

This opinion will, we fear, be considered as heterodox. For, not to
speak of the illusion which the sight of a Greek type, or the sound of
a Greek diphthong, often produces, there are some peculiarities in the
manner of Thucydides which in no small degree have tended to secure to
him the reputation of profundity. His book is evidently the book of a
man and a statesman; and in this respect presents a remarkable contrast
to the delightful childishness of Herodotus. Throughout it there is
an air of matured power, of grave and melancholy reflection, of
impartiality and habitual self-command. His feelings are rarely
indulged, and speedily repressed. Vulgar prejudices of every kind,
and particularly vulgar superstitions, he treats with a cold and
sober disdain peculiar to himself. His style is weighty, condensed,
antithetical, and not unfrequently obscure. But, when we look at his
political philosophy, without regard to these circumstances, we find
him to have been, what indeed it would have been a miracle if he had not
been, simply an Athenian of the fifth century before Christ.

Xenophon is commonly placed, but we think without much reason, in the
same rank with Herodotus and Thucydides.
He resembles them, indeed,
in the purity and sweetness of his style; but in spirit, he rather
resembles that later school of historians whose works seem to be fables
composed for a moral, and who, in their eagerness to give us warnings
and examples, forget to give us men and women. The Life of Cyrus,
whether we look upon it as a history or as a romance, seems to us a
very wretched performance. The Expedition of the Ten Thousand, and the
History of Grecian Affairs, are certainly pleasant reading; but they
indicate no great power of mind. In truth, Xenophon, though his taste
was elegant, his disposition amiable, and his intercourse with the world
extensive, had, we suspect, rather a weak head. Such was evidently the
opinion of that extraordinary man to whom he early attached himself,
and for whose memory he entertained an idolatrous veneration. He came in
only for the milk with which Socrates nourished his babes in philosophy.
A few saws of morality, and a few of the simplest doctrines of natural
religion, were enough for the good young man. The strong meat, the bold
speculations on physical and metaphysical science, were reserved for
auditors of a different description. Even the lawless habits of a
captain of mercenary troops could not change the tendency which the
character of Xenophon early acquired. To the last, he seems to have
retained a sort of heathen Puritanism. The sentiments of piety and
virtue which abound in his works are those of a well-meaning man,
somewhat timid and narrow-minded, devout from constitution rather than
from rational conviction. He was as superstitious as Herodotus, but in
a way far more offensive. The very peculiarities which charm us in
an infant, the toothless mumbling, the stammering, the tottering, the
helplessness, the causeless tears and laughter, are disgusting in
old age. In the same manner, the absurdity which precedes a period
of general intelligence is often pleasing; that which follows 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, omens, 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 Camarilla. An alarmist by nature, an aristocrat
by party, he carried to an unreasonable excess his horror of popular
turbulence. The quiet atrocity of Sparta did not shock him in the same
manner; for he hated tumult more than crimes. He was desirous 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 head.
For the historians of this class we must confess that we entertain a
peculiar aversion. They seem to have been pedants, who, though destitute
of those valuable qualities which are frequently found in conjunction
with pedantry, thought themselves great philosophers and great
politicians. They not only mislead their readers in every page, as to
particular facts, but they appear to have altogether misconceived the
whole character of the times of which they write. They were inhabitants
of an empire bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Euphrates, by the
ice of Scythia and the sands of Mauritania; composed of nations whose
manners, whose languages, whose religion, whose countenances and
complexions, were widely different; governed by one mighty despotism,
which had risen on the ruins of a thousand commonwealths and kingdoms.
Of liberty, such as it is in small democracies, of patriotism, such as
it is in small independent communities of any kind, they had, and they
could have, no experimental knowledge. But they had read of men who
exerted themselves in the cause of their country with an energy unknown
in later times, who had violated the dearest of domestic charities, or
voluntarily devoted themselves to death for the public good; and they
wondered at the degeneracy of their contemporaries. It never occurred to
them that the feelings which they so greatly admired sprung from local
and occasional causes; that they will always grow up spontaneously in
small societies; and that, in large empires, though they may be forced
into existence for a short time by peculiar circumstances, they cannot
be general or permanent. It is impossible that any man should feel 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 corn
fields in his neighbourhood.

The writers of whom we speak should have considered this. They should
have considered that in patriotism, such as it existed amongst the
Greeks, there was nothing essentially and eternally good; that an
exclusive attachment to a particular society, though a natural,
and, under 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 liberty a plea
for cutting off the favourites of the people. In almost all the little
commonwealths of antiquity, liberty was used as a pretext for measures
directed against everything 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 sempstresses
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. Generals and statesmen are
metamorphosed into magnanimous coxcombs, from whose fulsome virtues we
turn away with disgust. The fine sayings and exploits of their heroes
remind 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 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.

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 those
who approve them consider as exceptions to laws of almost universal
application--which bear so close an affinity to the most atrocious
crimes that, even where it may be unjust to censure them, it is unsafe
to praise them. It is not strange, therefore, that some flagitious
instances of perfidy and cruelty should have been passed unchallenged in
such company, that grave moralists, with no personal interest at stake,
should have extolled, in the highest terms, deeds of which the
atrocity appalled even the infuriated factions in whose cause they were
perpetrated. The part which Timoleon took in the assassination of his
brother shocked many of his own partisans. The recollection of it preyed
long on his own mind. But it was reserved for historians who lived some
centuries later to discover that his conduct was a glorious display of
virtue, and to lament that, from the frailty of human nature, a man who
could perform so great an exploit could repent of it.

The writings of these men, and of their modern 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 practical 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 our ears a sound so venerable as Parliament. We
respect to 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 founded or
preserved, from De Montfort down to Fox, 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 Russell
saying, as he turned away from his wife, that the bitterness of death
was past. Even those parts of our history over which, 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.

Here, therefore, the effect of books such as those which we have been
considering has been harmless. They have, indeed, given currency to
many very erroneous opinions with respect to ancient history. They
have heated the imaginations of boys. They have misled the judgment and
corrupted the taste of some men of letters, such as Akenside and Sir
William Jones. But on persons engaged in public affairs they have had
very little influence. The foundations of our constitution were laid
by men who knew nothing of the Greeks but that they denied the orthodox
procession and cheated the Crusaders; and nothing of Rome, but that
the Pope lived there. Those who followed, contented themselves with
improving on the original plan. They found models at home and therefore
they did not look for them abroad. But, when enlightened men on the
Continent began to think about political reformation, having no patterns
before their eyes in their domestic history, they naturally had
recourse to those remains of antiquity, the study of which is considered
throughout Europe as an important part of education. The historians of
whom we have been speaking had been members of large communities, and
subjects of absolute sovereigns. Hence it is, as we have already said,
that they commit such gross errors in speaking of the little 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 everything 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.

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, tremendous but shortlived, 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 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 feast with which the Doctor in Peregrine Pickle
turned the stomachs of all his guests resembled one of the suppers of
Lucullus in the Hall of Apollo.

These were mere follies. But the spirit excited by these writers
produced more serious effects. The greater part of the crimes which
disgraced the revolution sprung indeed from the relaxation of law, from
popular ignorance, from the remembrance of past oppression, from
the fear of foreign conquest, from rapacity, from ambition, from
party-spirit. But many atrocious proceedings must, doubtless, be
ascribed to heated imagination, to perverted principle, to a distaste
for what was vulgar in morals, and a passion for what was startling and
dubious. Mr Burke has touched on this subject with great felicity of
expression: "The gradation of their republic," says he, "is laid in
moral paradoxes. All those instances to be found in history, whether
real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality
is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted nature
recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction
of their youth. " This evil, we believe, is to be directly ascribed to
the influence of the historians whom we have mentioned, and their modern
imitators.

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 over-teemed, a
fountain which never seems to trickle. It pours forth profusely; yet
it gives no sign of exhaustion. It was probably to this exuberance of
thought and language, always fresh, always sweet, always pure, no sooner
yielded than repaired, that the critics applied that expression which
has been so much discussed lactea ubertas.

All the merits and all the defects of Livy take a colouring from the
character of his nation. He was a writer peculiarly Roman; the proud
citizen of a commonwealth which had indeed lost the reality of liberty,
but which still sacredly preserved its forms--in fact, the subject of
an arbitrary prince, but in his own estimation one of the masters of the
world, with a hundred kings below him, and only the 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 naturae 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 Caesar little
can be said. They are incomparable models for military despatches. But
histories they are not, and do not pretend to be.

The ancient critics placed Sallust in the 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 inconsistencies, 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, Caesar, the Praetor
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, lest, 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 speeches of Cicero
sufficiently prove, that some persons consider the shocking, and
atrocious parts of the plot as mere inventions of the government,
designed to excuse its unconstitutional measures. We must confess
ourselves to be of that opinion. There was, undoubtedly, a strong party
desirous to change the administration. While Pompey held the command of
an army, they could not effect their purpose without preparing means for
repelling force, if necessary, by force. In all this there is nothing
different from the ordinary practice of Roman factions. The other
charges brought against the conspirators are so inconsistent and
improbable, that we give no credit whatever to them. If our readers
think this scepticism unreasonable, let them turn to the contemporary
accounts of the Popish plot. Let them look over the votes of Parliament,
and the speeches of the king; the charges of Scroggs, and the harangues
of the managers employed against Strafford. A person who 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
clergymen to old women, and by old women to Sir Harcourt Lees.

Of the Latin historians, Tacitus was certainly the greatest. His
style, indeed, is not only faulty in itself, but is, in some respects,
peculiarly unfit for historical composition. He 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
stimulants lose their power. Thucydides, as we have already observed,
relates ordinary transactions with the unpretending clearness and
succinctness of a 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 catalogues of good and bad qualities, and appending 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 all their words and actions. We know
them as if we had lived with them. Claudius, Nero, Otho, both the
Agrippinas, are masterpieces. But Tiberius is a still higher miracle of
art. The historian undertook to make us intimately acquainted 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
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.