“Popes” and D’Aubigne’s “Reformation,” Hallam’s “Middle Ages” and “English Constitution”; De Quincey treats of “The Caesars”; Vico demonstrates that History is a science with positive laws; Gervinus illustrates it as a development of certain inevitably progressive ideas; Niebuhr interprets it by fresh tests and ordeals; Dr. Arnold teaches it by an original method; Humboldt points out its naturalistic tendencies and origin; Herder and Hegel, De Tocqueville and Guizot, the eminent writers on Civilization, on Art, on Education, Political Economy, Literature, and Natural History, more and more exhibit the facts of humanity and of time under such new combinations, by so many parallel truths and principles, that it is difficult to conceive that History, as now understood by the educated and the reflective, is the same thing once crudely embodied in a ballad or mystically conserved by an inscription.  To multiply relations is the destiny of our age, and to converge all that is discovered through the laws of Science upon the records and relics of the past is a process now habitual and pervasive.

And yet how little positive satisfaction does the lover of truth, the aspirant for what is authentic and significant, find in current and even popular histories!  Certain general notions of the character of nations we, indeed, distinctly and correctly attain:  that Chinese civilization is stationary, the French instinctively a military race, the Swiss mercenary, and adventurous in engineering and religious reform,—­that modern German literature was as sudden as simultaneous in its development,—­that Holland redeemed her foundations from the sea,—­that Italy owes to art, and England to manufactures, her growth and grandeur.  These and such as these are problems which the history of the respective countries, however inadequately told, reveals with authenticity; but when we go beyond and below the patent facts of local civilization, to the analysis of character, and, through it, of destiny, few and far between are the satisfactory records whence we can draw legitimate materials for inference and conjecture.  The most attractive method is apt to be that upon which least reliance can be placed.  We seldom consult Sir Walter’s essays at serious history, while the novels he created out of historic material are as familiar as they are endeared; but their imaginative charm is in the inverse ratio of their authenticity.  With every new candidate for public favor in this sphere of literature, there arises a “mooted question” whereon the historian and his readers are irreconcilably divided.  The character of Penn, of Marlborough, and of the facts of the Massacre at Glencoe are still vehemently discussed, whenever Macaulay’s popular History is referred to.  Froude advances a new and plausible theory of the character of Henry VIII.; few of Bancroft’s American readers accept his estimate of John Jay, Sam Adams, or Dr. Johnson, or of the political character of the Virginia Colonists; and Palfrey and Arnold