History presents itself to the student in two forms:  The first is chronicle, or a simple relation of facts and statistics; and the second, philosophical history, in which we use these facts and statistics in the consideration of cause and effect, and endeavor to extract a moral from the actions and events recorded.  From pregnant causes the philosophic historian traces, at long distances, the important results; or, conversely, from the present condition of things—­the good and evil around him—­he runs back, sometimes remotely, to the causes from which they have sprung.  Chronicle is very pleasing to read, and the reader may be, to some extent, his own philosopher; but the importance of history as a study is found in its philosophy.

As far down as the eighteenth century, almost everything in history partakes of the nature of chronicle.  In that century, in obedience to the law of human progress, there sprang up in England and on the Continent the men who first made chronicle material for philosophy, and used philosophy to teach by example what to imitate and what to shun.

What were the circumstances which led, in the eighteenth century, to the simultaneous appearance of Hume, Gibbon, and Robertson, as the originators of a new school of history?  Some of them have been already mentioned in treating of the antiquarian age.  We have endeavored to show how the English literati—­novelists, essayists, and poets—­have been in part unconscious historians.  It will also appear that the professed historians themselves have been, in a great measure, the creatures of English history.  The fifteenth century was the period when the revival of letters took place, and a great spur was given to mental activity; but the world, like a child, was again learning rudiments, and finding out what it was, and what it possessed at that present time:  it received the new classical culture presented to it at the fall of the lower empire, and was content to learn the existing, without endeavoring to create the new, or even to recompose the scattered fragments of the past.  The eighteenth century saw a new revival:  the world had become a man; great progress was reported in arts, in inventions, and in discoveries; science began to labor at the arduous but important task of classification; new theories of government and laws were propounded; the past was consulted that its experience might be applied; the partisan chronicles needed to be united and compared that truth might be elicited; the philosophic historian was required, and the people were ready to learn, and to criticize, what he produced.