value to their labors:  Botta’s knowledge of American localities and civilization was meagre, but his sympathy with the patriots of the Revolution was strong, and this gave warmth and effect to his “Guerra Americana”; Niebuhr was specially gifted to develop what has been called the law of investigation, and hence he penetrates the Roman life, and lays bare much of its unapparent meaning and spirit.  So apt and patient are the Germans in research, that they have been justly said to “quarry” out the past; while so native are rhetoric, theorizing, and fancifulness to the French, that they make history, as they do life and government, theatrical and picturesque, rather than gravely real and practically suggestive.

A peculiar feature in the labors of modern historians is the research expended upon what the elder annalists regarded as purely incidental and extraneous.  The collation of archives, official correspondence, and state-papers is now but the rough basis of research; memoirs are equally consulted,—­localities minutely examined,—­the art and literature of a given era analyzed,—­the geography, climate, and ethnology of the scene made to illustrate the life and polity,—­social phases, educational facts estimated as not less valuable than statistics of armies and judicial enactments.  Michelet has some charming rural pictures and female portraits in his History of France; Macaulay thinks no custom or economy of a reign insignificant in the great historical aggregate.  Topography, botany, artistic knowledge are not less parts of the chronicler’s equipment than philology, rhetoric, and philosophy; a newspaper is not beneath nor a traveller’s gossip beyond his scope; architecture reveals somewhat which diplomacy conceals; an inscription is not more historical than the average temperature or the staple productions.  Whatever affects national character and destiny, whatever accounts for national manners or confirms individual sway, is brought into the record.  Diaries, like those of Pepys and Evelyn, the tithe-book of a county, the taste in portraiture, the costume and the play-bill yield authentic hints not less than the census, the parliamentary edicts, or the royal signatures; the popular poem, the social favorite, the cause celebre, what pulpit, bar, peasant and beau, doctor and lady a la mode do, say, and are, then and there, must coalesce with the battle, the legislation, and the treaty,—­or these last are but technical landmarks, instead of human interests.

Even our most generalized historical ideas are made emphatic only through association and observation.  How the vague sense of Roman dominion is deepened as we trace the outline of a camp, the massive ranges of a theatre, or the mouldy effigy on a coin, in some region far distant from the Imperial centre,—­as at Nismes or Chester!  How complete becomes the idea of mediaeval life, contemplated from the ramparts of a castle, in the “dim, religious light” of an old monastic chapel, or amid the obsolete trappings