any historical prejudice on the subject, it is in favour of the priesthood. They leave the opinions of David Hume on ecclesiastical history, to the exclusive patronage (we are sorry to say) of Protestant writers in Great Britain.

With respect to the charge so often made against French historians, of superficiality and want of research, it is a strange accusation against the country which produced the Benedictines. France has at all times possessed a class of studious and accurate érudits, as numerous as any other country except Germany; and her popular writers are not more superficial than our own. Voltaire gave false views of history in many respects, but not falser than Hume's; Thiers is inaccurate, but less so than Sir Walter Scott. France has done more for even English history than England has. The very first complete history of England, and to this day not wholly superseded by any other, was the production of a French emigrant, Rapin de Thoyras. Of Mr Turner's really learned works on our early ages-works standing almost alone among us in extent of original research-it is, after all, the greatest merit to have served as preparatory studies for the Norman Conquest' of Augustin Thierry.* The histories and historical memoirs of the Commonwealth period, never yet collected in our own country, have been translated and published at Paris in an assembled form, under the superintendence of M. Guizot; to whom also we owe the best history, both in thought and in composition, of the times of Charles I. The reigns of the last two Stuarts have been written, with the mind of a statesman and the hand of a vigorous writer, by Armand Carrel, in his Histoire

de la Contre-révolution en Angleterre ;' and at greater length, with much research and many new facts, by M. Mazure. To call these writings, and numerous others which have lately appeared in France, superficial, would only prove an entire unacquaintance with them.

Among the French writers now labouring in the historical field, we must at present confine ourselves to those who have narrated as well as philosophized; who have written history, as well as written about history. Were we to include in our survey those general speculations which aim at connecting together the facts of universal history, we could point to some which we deem even more instructive, because of a more comprehensive and far-reaching character, than any which will now fall under our notice. Restricting ourselves, however, to histo

And (we may add) for the Histoire de France' of M. Michelet, who has derived important aid from Mr Turner's review of the Lancastrian period of our history.

rians in the received sense of the word, and among them to those who have done enough to be regarded as the chiefs and representatives of the new tendency, we should say that the three great historical minds of France, in our time, are Thierry, Guizot, and the writer whose name, along with that of his most important production, stands at the beginning of the present article.

To assist our appreciation of these writers, and of the improved ideas on the use and study of history, which their writings exemplify and diffuse, we may observe that there are three distinct stages in historical enquiry.

The type of the first stage is Larcher, the translator of Herodotus, who, as remarked by Paul Louis Courier, carries with him. to the durbar of Darius the phraseology of the Court of Louis Quatorze ;* and, nowise behind him, an English translator of

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* Figurez-vous un truchement qui, parlant au sénat de Rome pour le paysan du Danube, au lieu de ce début,

"Romains, et vous Sénat, assis pour m'écouter," commencerait: Messieurs, puisque vous me faites l'honneur de vouloir bien entendre votre humble serviteur, j'aurai celui de vous dire. Voilà exactement ce que font les interprêtes d'Hérodote. La version de Larcher, pour ne parler que de celle qui est la plus connue, nes'écarte jamais de cette civilité: on ne saurait dire que ce soit le laquais de Madame de Sévigné, auquel elle compare les traducteurs d'alors; car celui-là rendait dans son langage bas, le style de la cour, tandis que Larcher, au contraire, met en style de la cour ce qu'a dit l'homme d'Halicarnasse. Hérodote, dans Larcher, ne parle que de princes, de princesses, de seigneurs, et de gens de qualité; ces princes montent sur le trône, s'emparent de la couronne, ont une cour, des ministres et de grands officiers, faisant, comme on peut croire, le bonheur des sujets; pendant que les princesses, les dames de la cour, accordent leurs faveurs à ces jeunes seigneurs. Or est-il qu'Hérodote ne se doute jamais de ce que nous appelons princes, trône et couronne, ni de ce qu'à l'académie on nomme faveurs des dames et bonheur des sujets. Chez lui, les dames, les princesses mènent boire leurs vaches, ou celles du roi leur père, à la fontaine voisine, trouvent là des jeunes gens, et font quelque sottise, toujours exprimée dans l'auteur avec le mot propre: on est esclave ou libre, mais on n'est point sujet dans Hérodote. . . Larcher ne nommera pas le boulanger de Crésus, le palefrenier de Cyrus, le chaudronnier Macistos; il dit grand panetier, écuyer, armurier, avertissant en note que cela est plus noble.-Prospectus d'une Traduction Nouvelle d'Hérodote, Euvres de P. L. Courier, iii. 262.

For another specimen, we may instance the Abbé Velly, the most popular writer of French history in the last century. We quote from M. Thierry's third Letter on the History of France :

S'agit-il d'exprimer la distinction que la conquête des barbares établissait entre eux et les vaincus, distinction grave et triste, par

the Anabasis, who renders avdges TeaTiara, by gentlemen of the army.' The character of this school is to transport present feelings and notions back into the past, and refer all ages and forms of human life to the standard of that in which the writer himself lives. Whatever cannot be translated into the language of their own time, whatever they cannot represent to themselves by some fancied modern equivalent, is nothing to them, calls up no ideas in their minds at all. They cannot imagine any thing different from their own everyday experience. They assume that words mean the same thing to a monkish chronicler as to a modern member of parliament. If they find the term rex applied to Clovis or Clotaire, they already talk of the French monarchy,' or the kingdom of France. If among a tribe of savages newly escaped from the woods, they find mention of a council of leading men, or an assembled multitude giving its sanction to some matter of general concernment, their imagination jumps to a system of free institutions, and a wise contrivance of constitutional balances and checks. If, at other times, they find the chief killing and plundering without this sanction, they

laquelle la vie d'un indigène n'était estimée, d'après le taux des amendes, qu'à la moitié du prix mis à celle de l'étranger, ce sont de pures préférences de cour, les faveurs de nos rois s'addressent surtout aux vainqueurs. S'agit-il de présenter le tableau de ces grandes assemblées, où tous les hommes de race Germanique se rendaient en armes, où chacun était consulté depuis le premier jusqu'au dernier; l'Abbé Velly nous parle d'une espèce de parlément ambulatoire et des cours plénières, qui étaient (après la chasse) une partie des amusemens de nos rois. "Nos rois," ajoute l'aimable abbé, " ne se trouvèrent bientôt plus en état de donner ces superbes fêtes. On peut dire que le règne des Carlovingiens fut celui des cours plénières. Il y eut cependant toujours des fêtes à la cour; mais, avec plus de galanterie, plus de politesse, plus de goût, on n'y retrouva ni cette grandeur ni cette richesse."

"Hilderic," dit Grégoire de Tours, "regnant sur la nation des Franks et se livrant à une extrême dissolution, se prit à abuser de leurs filles; et eux, indignés de cela, le destituèrent de la royauté. Informé, en outre, qu'ils voulaient le mettre à mort, il partit et s'en alla en Thuringe." Ce récit est d'un écrivain qui vivait un siècle après l'événement. Voici maintenant les paroles de l'abbé Velly, qui se vante, dans sa préface, de puiser aux sources anciennes et de peindre exactement les mœurs, les usages, et les coutumes: "Childéric fut un prince à grandes aventures; c'était l'homme le mieux fait de son royaume. Il avait de l'esprit, du courage; mais, né avec un cœur tendre, il s'abandonnait trop à l'amour ce fut la cause de sa perte. Les seigneurs Français, aussi sensibles à l'outrage que leurs femmes l'avaient été aux charmes de ce prince, se liguèrent pour le détrôner. Contraint de céder à leur fureur, il se retira en Allémagne.'”

just as promptly figure to themselves an acknowledged despotism. In this manner they antedate not only modern ideas, but the essential characters of the modern mind; and imagine their ancestors to be very like their next neighbours, saving a few eccentricities, occasioned by being still Pagans or Catholics, by having no habeas corpus act, and no Sunday schools. If an historian of this stamp takes a side in controversy, and passes judgment upon actions or personages that have figured in history, he applies to them in the crudest form the canons of some modern party or creed. If he is a Tory, and his subject is Greece, every thing Athenian must be cried down, and Philip and Dionysius must be washed white as snow, lest Pericles and Demosthenes should not be sufficiently black. If he be a Liberal, Cæsar and Cromwell, and all usurpers similar to them, are ' damned to everlasting fame.' Is he an unbeliever? a pedantic narrow-minded Julian becomes his pattern of a prince, and the heroes and martyrs of Christianity objects of scornful pity. If he is of the Church of England, Gregory VII. must be an ambitious impostor, because Leo X. was a self-indulgent voluptuary; John Knox nothing but a coarse-minded fanatic, because the historian does not like John Wesley. Humble as our estimate must be of this kind of writers, it would be unjust to forget, that even their mode of treating history is an improvement upon the unenquiring credulity which contented itself with copying or translating the ancient authorities, without ever bringing the writer's own mind in contact with the subject. It is better to conceive Demosthenes even under the image of Anacharsis Clootz, than not as a living being at all, but a figure in a puppetshow, of which Plutarch is the showman; and Mitford, so far, is a better historian than Rollin. He does give a sort of reality to historical personages: he ascribes to them passions and purposes, which, though not those of their age or position, are still human; and enables us to form a tolerably distinct, though, in general, an exceedingly false notion of their qualities and circumstances. This is a first step; and, that step made, the reader, once in motion, is not likely to stop there.

Accordingly, the second stage of historical study attempts to regard former ages not with the eye of a modern, but, as far as possible, with that of a contemporary; to realize a true and living picture of the past time, clothed in its circumstances and peculiarities. This is not an easy task: the knowledge of any amount of dry generalities, or even of the practical life and business of his own time, go a very little way to qualify a writer for it. He needs some of the characteristics of the poet. He has to body forth the forms of things unknown.' He must have the faculty to see, in the ends and fragments which are preserved

of some element of the past, the consistent whole to which they once belonged; to discern, in the individual fact which some monument hands down, or to which some chronicler testifies, the general, and for that very reason unrecorded, facts which it presupposes. Such gifts of imagination he must possess; and, what is rarer still, he must forbear to abuse them. He must have the conscience and self-command to assert no more than can be vouched for, or deduced by legitimate inference from what is vouched for. With the genius for producing a great historical romance, he must have the virtue to add nothing to what can be proved to be true: What wonder if so rare a combination is not often realized?

Realized, of course, in its ideal perfection, it never is; but many now aim at it, and some approach it, according to the measure of their faculties. Of the sagacity which detects the meaning of small things, and drags to light the forgotten elements of a gone-by state of society, from scattered evidences which the writers themselves who recorded them did not understand, the world has now, in Niebuhr, an imperishable model. The reproduction of past events in the colours of life, and with all the complexity and bustle of a real scene, can hardly be carried to a higher pitch than by Mr Carlyle. But to find a school of writers, and among them several of the first rank, who systematically direct their aims towards this ideal of history, we must look to the French historians of the present day.

There is yet a third and the highest stage of historical investigation, in which the aim is not simply to compose histories, but to construct a science of history. In this view, the whole of the events which have befallen the human race, and the states through which it has passed, are regarded as a series of phenomena, produced by causes, and susceptible of explanation. All history is conceived as a progressive chain of causes and effects; or (by an apter metaphor) as a gradually unfolding web, in which every fresh part that comes to view is a prolongation of the part previously unrolled, whether we can trace the separate threads from the one into the other, or not. The facts of each generation are looked upon as one complex phenomenon, caused by those of the generation preceding, and causing, in its turn, those of the next in order. That these states must follow one another according to some law, is considered certain how to read that law, is deemed the fundamental problem of the science of history. To find on what principles, derived from the nature of man and the system of the universe, each state of society and of the human mind produced that which came after it; and whether there can be traced any order of production sufficiently defi