principles, neither does a warm and manifest sympathy with his subject delude him even into the passing extravagance of an undue praise.  If he comprehends the greatness of the national character he almost flings upon the canvas before us, he appreciates as profoundly its weaknesses too.  Strada’s history is a poison, which strikes at the very roots of society, and would wither all the fresh young leaves of its vigorous spring.  Motley’s is its powerful antidote, which restores the juices of life to the brittle fibres, smooths out the shriveled leaves, and clothes them again with the fresh green of hope and promise.  Strada is the slave of the victor; Motley is the champion of the vanquished.  Strada bends the dignity of Justice before the painted sceptre of Despotism; Motley exalts the honest title of the man above the will of the perjured monarch.  Strada gilds with the false gold of sophistry the very chains that gall his soul; Motley sharpens on the clear crystal of his unobtrusive logic, the two-handed sword of power, and cuts his way through an army of protocols and pacts to the fortress of Liberty.

It is, we believe, an exploded theory that the characters of modern times are inferior to those of antiquity.  ’Under the toga as under the modern dress,’ says Guizot, ’in the senate as in our councils, men were what they still are;’ and the old Jesuit takes a narrow view of the progress of mankind, who asserts that the masculine and vigorous treatment that was necessary to Thucydides and Livy is not required by the historians of our puny and degenerate day.  Even the Count Gobineau, who so ably and, to his followers, conclusively proves the fallacy of the dearest hope of every learned philanthropist and patriot, does not, in his most earnest antagonism to the doctrine of human progress, insinuate the existence of a principle urging the systematic and inevitable decline of individual power from age to age.  So far from exacting less of the historian, the present age demands even a firmer handling.  Our era has its Alexanders and Caesars; its Hannibals and Hectors; and if these men of antiquity rise before us with an unapproachable air of grandeur, it is because the light shining from our distant stand-point surrounds them with deeper shadows, and throws them in bolder relief against the background of their vanished ages.  It is a simple triumph of chiaro-scuro, and by no means the proof of the truth of an absurd theory.

It is mournful enough to see the dead nations that were once young and glorious pacing onward through an inferno like so many headless Bertrand de Borns, bearing by the hair

  ’The severed member, lantern-wise
  Pendent in hand.’