a story, that, with all its imperfection, his sketch still finds readers; while the rarely quoted work of Henry most conveniently enumerates, at the end of each reign, details economical and social which identify and illustrate both period and progress in Anglo-Saxon civilization.  As a copious and consecutive record of the salient incidents in modern Continental history,—­so needful now for reference, and the diverse phases of which are so widely chronicled in the memoirs, the journals, the diplomatic correspondence, and what may be called the incidental history of the period,—­the plan of Alison’s work might have achieved a triumph of industry and skill, valuable as well as interesting to general readers and professional writers:  but the political opinions, with the partial feelings they engender, continually distort the view and influence the estimate of this positive yet pleasant historian; while his almost wilful blunders, like the errors of Lord Mahon in regard to the American War, have been repeatedly demonstrated.  Mackintosh philosophized about events, measures, and men, better than he described either.  Sharon Turner nobly illustrates the value of intrepid research and patient collation.  Mitford represents the aristocratic as Grote the democratic element in Grecian history.  Tytler wrote of the past in the life of nations with the exclusive reliance on written proof that a conveyancer places upon title-deeds, and beside the glowing and harmonious pictures of later annalists such writing now appears obsolete.  Napier describes battles scientifically, and Carlyle revolutions melodramatically,—­each with original power, in their respective methods,—­while Miss Strickland brings to the record of queenly sorrows and duties a woman’s sympathetic prepossessions.

Since those quaintly simple and emphatic statements which, under the name of Froissart’s Chronicles, seem to perpetuate the instinctive notion of History, as an honest and earnest, but unadorned and unelaborate narrative of military and political facts,—­not only has there been a continual refinement of style and enlargement of scope and art, but a greater complexity and subdivision in the historian’s labors.  Abstract political ideas, purely intellectual phenomena, have found their annalists, as well as executive enterprise; events have been analyzed, as well as described,—­characters discussed, as well as pictured,—­the elements of society laid bare with as much zeal and scrutiny as its development has been traced and delineated.  European historical students read anew the records of the past by the light of philosophy; more subtile divisions than the geographer indicates organize the record; events are narrated with reference to a dominant idea; governments are chronicled through their ultimate results, and not exclusively with regard to their locality; rulers are considered in groups; a faith is made the nucleus of an historical development, instead of a nation.  Thus, we have Ranke’s