firmly the series of events as they are narrated with little or no variation in the pages of every historian of England; and when you have done that, lay aside your primer, descend from the eminence, gird up your loins, and be in readiness to commence your pilgrimage to the Holy Land of truth. You must be steeled alike to menaces and to allurements; you must be indulgent to plain speaking, and deaf to the most elaborate eloquence; you must not reject the better cause although it may be disfigured by violence and excess; nor embrace the worse, because it comes graced under the exterior of romance, and commended to the passions by honourable sympathies with piety, honour, and misfortune. Do not deceive yourself into the belief that this is an easy undertaking; you will find it quite otherwise. It is difficult to be unmoved by Hume, to be unbiassed by Butler; but who has ever withstood Clarendon without a strong effort of resolution, or succeeded without coercing the feelings, and repressing the involuntary wishes of the heart? If I were disposed to yield up the truth to any one, I would yield it most willingly into the hands of Clarendon. He is a wise, a statesman-like, and a religious historian; he was himself a Christian philosopher, and, what is more remarkable, a Christian politician. His work is full of constitutional wisdom, imperfect, no doubt, as a system, and tinged with the strong antipathies which injury and final triumph naturally produce, but presenting nevertheless materials for profound reflection, and suggesting the most persuasive arguments and the amplest testimony as to one very important point in the political creed of every sober Englishman, namely, the necessary connexion, the thorough inter-communion, of the established church and the established form of civil government. We regret, but cannot be much surprised, that perfect justice is not done to the great characters of the Parliament; but there is no peevish withholding of due praise, no base insinuations against the fair fame of honourable antagonists. Burnet-of whom I am not disposed to speak lightly, and who has well deserved of the liberties of his country-does not treat his enemies with the forbearance so remarkable in Clarendon ; they seem to have been both men determined to be honest; but the Bishop of Sarum took it crossly that the powers of this world slighted or misused him; whereas, to Clarendon, the reward of a pure conscience was so exceeding great, that he could bear with placid equanimity whatever principalities or powers might do against him. The one was a clever honest man; the other a great honest man. "I have wandered from my theme; but I could not resist availing myself of the opportunity of paying my humble tribute to the admirable merits of Clarendon, a due perception of which will make you justly appreciate the necessity and the difficulty of of maintaining an impartial judgment under the influence of such an advocate. The substance of the foregoing admonition applies equally to every side and to every author. You must read all, that you may not be ignorant of any thing which may by possibility be of importance to the formation of a sound opinion; you must not believe all, lest you mingle truth with falsehood, confound the distinctions of right and wrong, and build upon a foundation composed of heterogeneous and inconsistent materials. But as you must read universally, so I cannot press upon you too often the propriety of reading cautiously; if you do not, the very extent your researches will prove pernicious to you, and be only a more extended source of error and delusion. If you were to take up a work, whether it be history or biography, and read it in utter ignorance of the author, his manner, temper, conduct, and especially the occasion upon which it was written, if it be of a controversial nature, you may depend upon it, that the information which you may acquire positively will prove relatively to be of no use; that it will remain, as it began, insulated and unconnected; and you will run the probable hazard of entertaining hypothesis for fact, of imbibing either what is not the truth, or only half the truth, or something beside the truth; in short of mistaking the animosity of the partizan for the censure of the critic, or the passions of the moment for the deliberate judgment of meditation and research. You must read all modern history with more or less wariness and suspicion; and bear in mind that a thousand causes concur in making it vain to expect, in these latter days, that passionless yet not insensible neutrality, which forms the hitherto unimitated characteristic of the ever-during remains of Thucydides, Polybius, and Sallust. It is difficult to mention an exception to the general charge against modern historians that they are party writers; and it is even curious to perceive what foreign and apparently unconnected events have proved motives, and, as it were, seminal principles of their gravest and most elaborate productions. The world owes the existence as well as the obvious errors of the best history of ancient Greece which it has, to the French Revolution. It can hardly be thought that modern historians have ever seriously intended their labours as a 'possession for all posterity;' because with such intention, and a perfect knowledge of the fugitive interest of all mere accidental fact, it is not credible that they would consume page after page in detailing minutiæ utterly useless except for story-books, or declaim with passion and acrimony upon imputed motives, which may turn out never to have existed, or, if they did exist, cannot be rendered one jot the better or the worse for the anger and the abuse. Why should motives be imputed at all? Is the imputation true because it is made? Does unfortunate or even faulty conduct necessarily presuppose vicious motives? Let the facts be told with out abuse or nicknames; and, if the facts be well and truly told, the voice of the whole world will limit the reprobation and stamp the title. The philosophy of history does not consist, as many seem to understand the phrase, in long diatribes ex cathedra auctoris and dissertations upon general principles; but, so far as the writer is concerned, in narrating those events only which shall carry on the chain of human knowledge, and in placing them in the light which their relative importance may demand; and with respect to the student, in extracting and condensing into short and pregnant maxims the essential spirit of essential history. In every great and complicated transaction there is something peculiar and something general; the first may be read and forgotten, the last must be digested and remembered for ever. Mr. Fox used to decry this half-essay, half-speech kind of history, and maintained that nothing should be introduced which did not properly form a part of the narration of events. He would, he said, tell the story of those times. "Under the conditions which are before mentioned or implied, it is not of much consequence in what order you peruse the various records of the history of your country. Yet it is not to be doubted that in this, as in every other science, a theory, grounded upon general and approved principles, will teach the path to knowledge with a more certain and reasonable assurance. Presuming you to be acquainted with the series of commonly known events, I would recommend you to begin your more intimate studies with the reign of Henry VII. Lord Bolingbroke and Mr. Fox both agree in fixing this æra as the crisis of modern, and, if I may so say, of existing history. Indeed, without such decisive authority, there are reasons for the advice which must be obvious to the most cursory observation. In the first place, England, which for more than a century had been torn to pieces by infuriate factions, reposed under the fortunate union of the Two Roses, and began to recover from the extreme exhaustion which the loss of her most precious lifeblood had nearly rendered fatal. Secondly, the foundations of a steady and principled system of internal and external policy were laid in this reign, by which, on the one hand, a fixed shape and tangibility were given to the measures of domestic government, and on the other hand, the futility of continental conquest was acknowledged, and the grand and fateful idea of a balanced republic of kingdoms, and England's international arbitration, was conceived, and its consequences predicted. But thirdly, and what is of profounder and more general importance, it was at this same period that the shadow began to pass off from the face of the earth, and some faint and intermitted shafts of the morning light lay across the bosom of the darkness; the spirit of human intellect moved under the agitations of approaching_wakefulness, and murmured oracles in its latter sleep. Martin Luther was born. The immortal champion of reason and religion was training himself unconsciously for the predestined combat; the Ithuriel spear of truth was even then quivering in his youthful grasp. O! if we were not bound in justice and humility to thank the Creator, rather than the creature, how deep should be our reverence, how intense our gratitude, towards that mighty and heroic Reformer! No mere man ever did, nor will the nature of things admit that any man ever should hereafter, effect such miracles for the advancement of the liberty and the happiness of mankind. The principles which he asserted were pregnant with life; they were not confined in their application to one country or one generation; they are adapted for all nations and all time; they are in very deed living things, which neither age nor power can ever extinguish or subdue ὑψίποδες, οὐρανίαν δι' αἰθέρα "Yet from the distinction with which I have treated the æra of Henry VII., you must be careful not to infer the inutility or the insignificance of an acquaintance with the history of the preceding and earlier ages of your country. You cannot perfectly understand the great theory of the birth, increment, and maturity of the national mind, unless you look back to that evanescent and hardly discernible point, when the old world expired, more in consequence of natural decrepitude than of external violence; unless you fix your eyes on the phoenix conception of the genius of the new world, and watch it through every successive mutation of its embryon state, up to the moment of its second and corporeal birth, about the period of the reformation; unless you continue to note the weakness of its infancy, the difficulties of its childhood, and especially the intemperance and misdirected strength of its youth; and unless you observe with intense carefulness the temporary exhaustion and reckless dissipation which followed, but which soon gave place again to a refreshed and sobered vigour, when its vices were repressed, its passion's chastened, and its powers levelled to the legitimate ends of reason and liberty, in the fullness and maturity of consummate manhood. As therefore the period at which the grand and cardinal principles of English policy were virtually promulgated, justifies your first and most serious consideration, so you cannot thoroughly understand the whole force and meaning of those very principles, unless you are acquainted with the feelings and the events of which they are the undoubted result. I would particularly direct your at tention to the examination of the reign of Henry II., and Lord Lyttleton's profound and elaborate history. When you have once mastered patiently and reflectingly the leading chain of moral and physical transactions up to the time of the dawn of the Reformation in this country; when you have observed their natural concatenation, and analyzed the productive power which is essentially inherent in every sound principle; when you have done this, you will have achieved the first and most difficult half of your labours; because, although what remains is in its immediate impression and associations incomparably more important and interesting, yet it is in the whole and in its parts so intimately consequent upon what has gone before, that to a mind pre-instructed as I have recommended, nothing seems to have happened but what deep reasoning might have foretold, and which now we may actually see to have happened by the necessity of cause and effect, and as legitimate conclusions from acknowledged premises. Hence the exertion of thought and speculation is much greater in the due study of primordial history in general, than of that which is more modern and notorious; because, although the latter is for the most part more complicated in its details by means of more numerous documents, yet the main points in it are such clear consequences of known principles, that in fact a constant recollection is almost all that is requisite. Now it is easier to remember a fact, than to understand and reason from a principle. "It is from a want of a deep persuasion that all things in this world depend upon fixed laws, and that there can be no effects without the agency of causes, and those causes also commensurate either intrinsically or by relation to the effects themselves, that it is common to hear opinions upon the origin and nature of the civil wars in Charles I.'s time, which are substantially so absurd and illogical as to make it a matter of extreme surprise that so many, and, in other respects, thinking persons, could have been blind to their worthlessness. The error, however, is very extensive, and lies at the bottom of more theories than that of history; it is the same mistaking of secondary causes for primary ones, that has produced two-thirds of the miserable materialism which, at different periods, has been the blot and the humiliation of the human intellect. No doubt the refusal of Hampden to pay ship-money, the act which made the Parliament indissoluble by the crown, and the attempt of the king to seize the five members, may all be said to have been causes of the war in a certain subordinate sense; that is, they were instrumental in accelerating the crisis; but to argue as if they were the sole and first causes, and that if they had not taken place, neither would the civil struggle, which ensued, have ever happened, is about as wise as to say that the spur of the jockey is the cause of the fleetness |