on that account to take an active part in public affairs, because they have a more comfortable consciousness that they are quite as well informed as the contemporaries, with whom they shall have to act, or to contend.  The quantulum at which Oxenstern admired would be a large allowance now.  For any such person to suspect himself of deficiency would, in this age of pretension, be a hopeful symptom; but should he endeavour to supply it, he is like a mail-coach traveller, who is to be conveyed over macadamised roads at the rate of nine miles an hour, including stoppages, and must therefore take at his minuted meals whatever food is readiest.  He must get information for immediate use, and with the smallest cost of time; and therefore it is sought in abstracts and epitomes, which afford meagre food to the intellect, though they take away the uneasy sense of inanition.  Tout abrege sur un bon livre est un sot abrege, says Montaigne; and of all abridgments there are none by which a reader is liable, and so likely, to be deceived as by epitomised histories.

Sir Thomas More.—­Call to mind, I pray you, my foliophagous friend, what was the extent of Michael Montaigne’s library; and that if you had passed a winter in his chateau you must, with that appetite of yours, have but yourself upon short allowance there.  Historical knowledge is not the first thing needful for a statesman, nor the second.  And yet do not hastily conclude that I am about to disparage its importance.  A sailor might as well put to sea without chart or compass as a minister venture to steer the ship of the State without it.  For as “the strong and strange varieties” in human nature are repeated in every age, so “the thing which hath been, it is that which shall be.  Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time which was before us.”

Montesinos.—­“For things forepast are precedents to us, Whereby we may things present now, discuss,”

as the old poet said who brought together a tragical collection of precedents in the mirror of magistrates.  This is what Lord Brooke calls

“the second light of government Which stories yield, and no time can disseason:” 

“the common standard of man’s reason,” he holds to be the first light which the founders of a new state, or the governors of an old one, ought to follow.

Sir Thomas More.—­Rightly, for though the most sagacious author that ever deduced maxims of policy from the experience of former ages has said that the misgovernment of States, and the evils consequent thereon, have arisen more from the neglect of that experience—­that is, from historical ignorance—­than from any other cause, the sum and substance of historical knowledge for practical purposes consists in certain general principles; and he who understands those principles, and has a due sense of their importance, has always, in the darkest circumstances, a star in sight by which he may direct his course surely.