and weapons of an armory!  What a distinct and memorable revelation of ancient Greece is the Venus or Apollo, a Parthenon frieze or a fateful drama!  The best political essays on the French Revolution are based on the economical and social facts recorded in the Travels of Arthur Young.  The equivocal action of Massena, when he commanded Paris against the Allies, is explained in the recently published letter of Joseph Bonaparte, wherein we learn his deficiency of muskets.  Humboldt accounted for the defects of Prescott’s “Conquest of Mexico” by the fact that the historian had never visited that country.  Napoleon gave a key to the misfortunes of Italy, when he said, “It is a peninsula too long for its breadth.”  And the significance of the Seven Years’ War is expressed in a single phrase by Milton’s last biographer, when he defines it as the “consummation politically and the attenuation spiritually of the movement begun in Europe by the Lutheran Reformation.”

Indeed, so intimate is the connection between private life and public events, between political and social phenomena, that the historical mind finds material in all literature, and the very attempt to keep to a high strain and to bend facts to theory limits the authenticity of professed annalists.  What Macaulay says of an eminent party-leader is modified to those who have studied the character through his memoirs or writings.  The charming narrative of Robertson, the characterization of Hume, the stately periods of Gibbon, fail to win implicit confidence, when the scene, the age, or the personages described are known to the reader through original authorities.  When Bancroft declares a treaty of Colonial governors against Indian ravages the germ of democratic government, we know that it is his attachment to a theory, and not the actual circumstances, which leads to such an inference; for the very authority he cites merely indicates a defensive alliance among rulers, not a coalition of the ruled.  And so when to an account of the Battle of Lexington he appends a rhetorical argument connecting that event, so meagre and simple in itself and so wonderful in its consequences, with the progress of truth and humanity in political science and reformed religion, we feel that the reasoning is forced and irrelevant,—­more an experiment in fine writing than an evolution of absolute truth.

Thus continually is the independent reader of history taught eclecticism:  he makes allowance for the want of careful research in this writer, for the love of effect in that,—­for the skepticism of one, and the credulity of another,—­for enthusiasm here, and fastidiousness there,—­and especially for the greater or less attachment to certain opinions, and the absence or presence of strong convictions and genuine sympathies.  Hence, to read history aright, we must read human nature as well; we must bring the light of philosophy and of faith, the calmness of judgment and the insight of love, to the record;