with the style in which Livy uses, expands, and abridges his annals in those periods of which Polybius’ account has been preserved.  Johannes von Mueller, in the endeavor to remain faithful in his portraiture to the times he describes, has given a stiff, formal, pedantic aspect to his history.  We much prefer the narratives we find in old Tschudi; all is more naive and natural than when appearing in the garb of a fictitious and affected archaism.

A history which aspires to traverse long periods of time, or to be universal, must indeed forego the attempt to give individual representations of the past as it actually existed.  It must foreshorten its pictures by abstractions, and this includes not merely the omission of events and deeds, but whatever is involved in the fact that Thought is, after all, the most trenchant epitomist.  A battle, a great victory, a siege no longer maintains its original proportions, but is put off with a mere allusion.  When Livy, for instance, tells us of the war with the Volsci, we sometimes have the brief announcement:  “This year war was carried on with the Volsci.”

2.  A second species of Reflective history is what we may call the pragmatical.  When we have to deal with the past and occupy ourselves with a remote world, a present rises into being for the mind—­produced by its own activity, as the reward of its labor.  The occurrences are, indeed, various; but the idea which pervades them-their deeper import and connection—­is one.  This takes the occurrence out of the category of the past and makes it virtually present.  Pragmatical (didactic) reflections, though in their nature decidedly abstract, are truly and indefeasibly of the present, and quicken the annals of the dead past with the life of today.  Whether, indeed, such reflections are truly interesting and enlivening depends on the writer’s own spirit.  Moral reflections must here be specially noticed—­the moral teaching expected from history; the latter has not infrequently been treated with a direct view to the former.  It may be allowed that examples of virtue elevate the soul and are applicable in the moral instruction of children for impressing excellence upon their minds.  But the destinies of people and states, their interests, relations, and the complicated tissue of their affairs, present quite another field.  Rulers, statesmen, nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history; yet what experience and history teach is this-that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, nor have they acted on principles deduced from it.  Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.  Amid the pressure of great events a general principle gives no help.