to History as the most available vantage-ground, busy themselves with wars and councils that happened ages ago,—­with kings and soldiers, institutions and adventures, politics and dynasties, so far removed from the associations and interests of the hour, that only a scholar’s enthusiasm or ambition could sustain the research or keep alive the enterprise thus voluntarily assumed.  It is this objective method and motive that chiefly accounts for the numberless inert and the few vital histories.  Like any intellectual task assumed without special fitness therefor or motive thereto,—­without a comprehensive grasp of mind that impels to historic exploration,—­without a patriotic zeal that warms to national heroism,—­without, especially, a love of some principle, a conviction of some truth, an admiration of some national development, irresistibly urging the cultivated and ardent mind to seek for the facts, to celebrate the persons, to evolve the truth involved in and manifest through public events,—­the annals recorded are but dry chronology,—­a monotonous, more or less authentic, perhaps quite respectable, but far from a very important or peculiarly interesting work.  Thousands of such cumber the shelves of libraries and fill the pages of catalogues,—­dusted once a year, perhaps, to verify a date, to authenticate the details of a treaty, or fix the statistics of a war, but never read consecutively and with zest, because there was no genuine relation between the writer and his book.  He undertook the latter in the spirit of a mechanical job; industry and learning may be embodied therein, but no moral life, no human charm; yet the work is cited with respect, the author enrolled with honor;—­whereas, had he sought in poetry or philosophy, in a novel or a drama, thus to occupy and celebrate himself with literature, the failure would have been signal, the attempt ignominious.  There is, indeed, no safer investment for middling literary abilities than History; for, if it fail to yield any large harvest of renown, it is comparatively secure from the assaults of ridicule, such as make pretension in other spheres of writing conspicuous.

Even in what are considered the successful exemplars in this department of literature, the errors incident to artificiality, the conventional forms of writing, are patent.  Only in passages do we recognize that beauty or truth, that reality and genuineness, which so often wholly pervade a poem, a story, a memoir, or even a disquisition:  at some point, the flow incident to wilful instead of soulful utterance becomes apparent;—­ambition, pride of opinion, love of display somewhere manifest themselves.  It has been said that the chief element of Hume’s mental power was skepticism; and, singular as it may appear, his doubts about what are deemed the vital interests of humanity gave a charm to his record of her political vicissitudes; while he made capital of touching “situations,” he displayed his own strength of intellect; but, with all this, did