interpret quite diversely the influence and career of Roger Williams.  Nor are such discrepancies surprising, when we remember how the history which transpires now and here fails of harmonious report.  Every battle, diplomatic arrangement, political event, nay, each personal occurrence, which forms the staple of to-day’s journalism and talk, is regarded from so many different points of view, and stated under so many modifying influences, that only judicial minds have a prospect of reaching the exact truth.  Hence the true way to profit by History is eclectic.

Let the erudition of the German, the genial animation of the French, the Saxon good sense, the Italian grace be enjoyed, and whatsoever of glamour or of inadequacy these charms hide be duly estimated; reflection and sympathy will often separate the gold of truth from the alloy of prejudice or fantasy.  Above all, let this eclectic test be applied beyond nominal history,—­to the geological data on the ancient rock,—­the handwriting of the ages upon race, costume, language,—­the incidental, but genuine history innate in all true literature, vivid elements whereof live in passages of Milton’s controversial writings, in Petrarch’s sonnets, De Foe’s fictions, our Revolutionary correspondence, South’s sermons, Swift’s diaries, Burke’s speeches, French memoirs, Walpole’s letters, in the poems, plays, and epistles of the past, and every fact and person which society and life offer to our cognizance or sympathy.

“When we are much attached to our ideas, we endeavor to attach everything to them,” says Madame de Stael.  “The secret of writing well,” observes a Scotch professor, “is to write from a full mind.”  These two maxims seem to us to illustrate the whole subject of historical composition; an earnest votary thereof will instinctively find material in every interest and influence that sways events or moulds character, and from the assimilation of all these will educe a vital and harmonious picture and philosophy.  There is an historical as well as a judicial or poetic type of mind; and to such there is no object too trifling, no fact too remote, not directly or indirectly to minister to the unwritten history which vaguely shapes itself to his intelligence.  In his reading and travel it is by no means to the ostensible monuments and trophies of the past that his observation and inquiry are confined:  the Letters of Madame de Sevigne give him authentic hints for the social tendencies of France and their influence upon politics, as the blood-stains at Holyrood identify the place of Rizzio’s murder; the “Edinburgh Review” reveals the spirit of the Reform movement as clearly as the Parliamentary records its letter; the South-Sea House and the Temple are as suggestive as Whitehall and the Abbey,—­for trade and jurisprudence, in the retrospect, are as much a part of the by-gone life and present character of a nation, as the fate and the fame of her dead kings; and a Spanish ballad is as valuable an illustration as a Madrid state-paper; while the life of Harry Vane vindicates the Puritan nature as clearly as the letter of a Venetian ambassador exhibits the domestic life of a Pope.