In statesmen, or those who have excelled in political writing, the ambition to write history, the desire to illustrate and record national events, is not only a natural, but an auspicious feeling; and so it is in educated poets in whom the sentiment of patriotism or the narrative art gives scope and glow to such an enterprise.  That Fox and Bacon, Milton and Swift, Mackintosh, Schiller, and Lamartine, should have partially adventured in this field seems but a legitimate result of their endowments and experience, however fragmentary or inadequate may have been some of the fruits of their historic studies.

When an enlightened and executive or speculative man is an obvious part of the history of his own times, his chronicle must have a certain significance and value.  Raleigh, when he wrote the “History of the World” in prison, gave hints by which subsequent and less obsolete annalists have wisely profited.  The scholar and the patriot coalesced in the mind of Camden, prompting him to rescue and conserve the materials of English history and note the fading traditions,—­a purely antiquarian service, which only those can appreciate who seek authentic data of the far past.  Such as cavil at the legal tone and crude arrangement of Clarendon are none the less his debtors for specific memoirs, the personal element of history; and while Burnet has been vigorously repudiated by standard historians, he continues, and justly, to be a prolific authority.  It is conceded by all candid explorers, that, as far as it goes, the account of England by Rapin is the best.  Franklin’s old friend Ralph was commended and quoted by Fox.  As the enterprise of historical writers enlarged and their style became elaborate, these and such as these lost in popularity what they gained in usefulness.  The charm of rhetorical elegance and broad generalizations gradually usurped the place of simple narrative and detailed statement.  In the very design of Gibbon there is a certain poetical attraction; his work may aptly be described as panoramic, unrolling a vast picture or succession of pictures, too vague in outline and too monotonous in color for minute impressions, yet, on this account, the more remarkable for general effect.  What Europe was in the Middle Ages we find more specifically in Hallam; the Moors in Spain have been more vividly painted by subsequent writers, whose aim was less comprehensive:  but how the imperial sway of Rome subsided into the Christian era, how a republican episode gleamed athwart her waning power in the casual triumph of Rienzi, the later emperors, and what occurred in their reign in Jerusalem and Constantinople, pass emphatically before us in the stately pages which once charmed readers of English as the model of historic eloquence, and now excite the admiration of scholars as a monument of erudition and elaborate but artificial writing.  There was a new attraction in the pleasing style of Robertson and the characterization of Hume; the winsome