imaginations, does reserve one province for truth. He will not that it be invaded. He resents every trespass. He marks it out with fenced boundaries. He calls the enclosure-History.

His task is not of the day, the observation of the passing spectacle; he must read back the great revolutions and cycles of the former heavens to foretell, on comprehensive calculations, the phenomena of the We should form an imperfect estimate of new. His control of passion must be comliterature in this department, were we to plete. Sometimes he may not even be exconfine its merits to simple fidelity. The cited. The matter is not sufficiently seriannalist, with his tables and records, would ous to affect him. To separate the detritus then deserve the praise we award to the which surrounds him-to copy the ancient historian. We do not restrict it to the verse--to chronicle the ancient date-withhonors of an art. The term is not impro- out theory, without prepossession, is at perly applied, for it requires the skilfulness least possible, however it be rare. But of arrangement, of illustration, of relief. must all emotion be proscribed? He knows It demands the bold conception, the touch not the vulgar eagerness of strife and side. of nature, and the stroke of truth. But He leans to none in obsequiousness or hate. accuracy, method, grace, are not enough. He is so far raised above the earth, that It must be inspired by philosophy; yet, while he foregoes none of its sympathies, though always felt, this must not be ob- he is exalted higher than its disputes. There truded. It is wholesome instruction by is joy as well as calm in that elevation. censure and warning, by praise and blame. The process to which he subjects himself It turns back the veil of the past, that we is often painful, but to him it is an ample may turn aside the veil of the future. It recompense. He finds many a spoil among points to dangers, that we may escape them. It tells of opportunities which have been lost by others, but which we may timely seize. It marks the onward impulse which has reached us, that it may bear us forward 100. If it be not as much warmed by benevolence, as schooled by philosophy, it fails of its right impression. It must be the oracle, not only of wisdom, but of philanthropy.

He

the dim shadows which frown upon him. He rescues many a captivity of knowledge and excellence. He returns a trophy-laden conqueror. Yet this is not a mere retrcspect, though his materials lie in the past. He is the sage of the present. He is the seer of that which is to come. He teaches what man always was: he forewarns what man must always be. He has dug out of now withered fields the seeds of glorious And hence it is, that so few writers of improvement. He plucks from failure and this description have reached the height disaster the antidote to their recurrence. which the truly worthy are allowed, on all Surely such a master deserves all honorhands, to claim. Not lower than that of of former times, as their expositor; of present the bard is their challenged rank. Honor, times, as their instructor; of future times, the highest and most grateful, is due to as their diviner. He deals not in fictions, their labor. Theirs are not estimable sa- but in what is more amazing. He furnishes crifices. They wander back in old and de- the means of poetry and romance. serted paths, where there is only monu- sheds around him the light which the prism ment and inscription. The cheerful ways, of imagination catches and decomposes in the opening scenes of life, they leave for all its variegated colors. How poor was the long and gloomy galleries of the dead. song, but for his burden-how feeble statuTheir order of existence is inverted; for a ary, but for his relic-how trifling poetry, season, the instinct of the present and of but for his theme! The historical denotes the future must be, as with a monastic the highest order of art, as it ought of severity, repressed. Men think of such letters. Withal, the conviction is very self-denial with mingled awe and wonder, general, that the man who would rise to crowning these benefactors with no perish-greatness in this path, must be personally able leaf. But then the enrolment in that worthy. He commonly obtains a moral number is the more guarded and deliberate. homage. The temple receives his bust as The candidate is for evil, if not for good. He may paint what we would see purely reflected. He may flatter what we would hear inartificially rehearsed. Large and generous must be the qualities of his soul. He must never forget his responsibility.

willingly as the portico and hall. When this is not true of the individual, it is almost invariably certain that a corresponding flaw will be detected in his production, -some vein of the sinister, the ignoble, and unjust.

National affairs are the proper subject from battle and victory to still more conand the greatest department of history. summate retreat; in his affairs of Greece What is called universal, must, of neces- he completes the great Lacedæmonian sity, be wanting in every attribute of cor- struggle by bringing them to the battle of rect authentication, and of inspiring soul. Mantinea, and the death of Epaminondas. But the man, at frequent intervals, may be Can these united historians-and surely no found, who can, by the union of genius and country can challenge their equals-be condiligence, take a bold survey of his life- sidered to lay open the wonders of that time, and thence pursue into the depths of land, or the characteristics of that people? antiquity the rise of usages and the causes Rome must prefer even a lower title to a of events. This truth will often be as dis- clear account of what it was. It can name tinctly stamped on his recital and his in- illustrious chroniclers, but all its mighty ference, as on his actual observations. tale is broken into parts, which it is often Should he start from a distant point, avoid- hopeless to conjoin. Cæsar describes his ing all that is coeval, there is a straight military progresses, or rather flights. Salhigh-road for him to travel, if other ages lust sketches a single conspiracy and a have bequeathed (what civilization cannot foreign war. Even Tacitus, in his Annals, have existed without doing) some shape or merely draws the hideous monster, Timeasure of document or memorial. These berius: while his history is chiefly interhe will collate and set in order, giving cachesting for its pictures of Britain and Judea. its time and place and value. Biography lends not only a charm, but often a clavis, to the whole. The delineation must not be only of the general interests of that people there must be the lighter etching, and the passing episode. What is the rude shock of the undistinguished host? We love to witness the duel of heroes, the encounter of knightly arms. One noble river may intersect a country; but while we slavishly follow its banks, we lose the distant mountain and runnel and vale. And yet, were we asked what national histories exist? we should not know how to answer. We might search the volumes of Greece. But what large transparent view of its af fairs, its ordinary movements, its very life, do we thus obtain? It boasts, and most justly, its first three.' The information, more close and exact, which we seek, is not in them. Herodotus, in his wide range of nations and traditions, only indites the wars of Persia against the land of his celebrity, though not of his birth, from their beginning under Cyrus, until their termination under Xerxes, in the double and simultaneous fields of Platæa and Mycale. Thucydides has delivered to us the incidents and campaigns of the Peloponnesian war, down to its twenty-first year. He was for a time engaged in it. None can doubt his accuracy, nor resist his animation. But the eye-witness and the official partisan are not the best judges of the fact. What is gained in vividness of description is at the expense of sedate reflection and collective opinion. Xenophon bears us with him, in his Anabasis, from scene to scene, from mountain-pass to sterile plain,

Suetonius, amidst the portraitures of the imperial twelve, but little illustrates their respective times. Livy certainly finds room to expatiate between Romulus and Drusus, an interval of eight hundred years. But while other writers of history have lived too near the occurrences which they describe, he evidently lived too distant. He has met with hard justice from Niebuhr and many modern critics. It is even provoking, recalling our school-boy veneration of the old Paduan, to find his veracity so rigorously questioned. We often wondered how and whence he knew so much; but ours was most reverent credence. Alas! that a fabric so superstitiously venerated and adored, should crumble before the unimaginative temperament and mischievous acumen of those who deny their duty to believe, and their right to be convinced, save upon the laws of truth.

The volumes before us are the productions of an American. He is evidently a high-minded man. We know not prejudice against his country. We feel it, in all its great distinctions, to be our own. It has as much right to Milton and Shakspeare as ourselves it has no better right than we have to Edwards. As noble, correct, sterling English has come from its shores as any our own can boast. Other vulgar rivalries are not to our mind. If there be in any of our critical organs and confederacies a dispositiou to carp at transatlantic authorship, we eschew all sympathy with it. The tastes of the two people, as likewise their habits, may not always be the same. Each may abet its own. Still is it only just to say, that the writing of our

brethren is impressed with a warmth, afthey have left behind,-while on its northvigor, a freshness, which, with all its fre-ern range a nation lives so unlike all the oldquent inferiority of idiom and euphony, set en stock of this side the globe, so free, so inbefore us no mean rule and model. tense, so intellectual, so self-possessed, that Mr. Prescott has proved himself in this it can only be designed to counterpoise work to be most indefatigable. His in- tyranny every where, and by its grand exdustry has been immense. His sources of periment to convince the species that libinformation were widely scattered. To erty is social man's proper charter, as it is bring them together could be no common individual man's natural birthright! Who labor. For almost every statement, some- could have augured contrasts like these? times to the unimportant and even trivial, Who could have painted these counterfeit he is prepared with his corroboration. He presentments? Who could have imagined has taken nothing upon report and gen- that feeble, haggard parent-that higheral credulity. He works his way through minded juvenescent offspring? Who could mountains of conflicting testimony. For have thought of those far-distant dockten years he was employed in maturing his yards, and harbors with their powerful navy design. During some years of this term, and of a marine, the proudest of all he lost the powers of sight so far as any shores, the most powerful of all seas, shatuse could be made of it in reading, and in tered at a blow or mouldered by disuse? collecting materials. It is almost impossi- We welcome our author into this field,— ble to conceive the bitterness of such a dis-not only as his nation gives him every claim appointment and the seriousness of such a to be heard on such a matter, but as it endisadvantage to a man engaged in his high sures a strict impartiality. It is as though pursuit. What could an amanuensis do in deciphering differently spelt signatures, and complexities of character and figure, which almost every paper of ancient date presents? A calamity like this would have disarmed Zoilus. But we mark no inadvertence, no failure. It would seem, that conscious incapacity had only made him more wary. His step is only the more measured and sure. We have to excuse nothing as to his care, nor is he deficient in ardor. He feels his epic-theme. He is sometimes conscious of its glory to a manifest depression. It was very suitable that a Columbian,-for the claim to the discovery of that Continent by Amerigo Vespucci is ridiculously false-should under- -is not of that nursery illusion in which take the history of events in which, to this older people have been bound; they have hour, he inherits a vital stake. He owes achieved their romance by enterprises of his all to it. From his mighty sea-line, his intelligence and virtue. It is not a thing eye naturally fixes upon Spain, before any of indefinable fascination: their own deeds other European country. The coasts not create it. It is not fled: it yet lives on in a only stand opposite to each other, and glowing accumulation. It is not to dream nearest of all, but this physical geography of: it is nakedly clear. It is not a past it gave rise to their original connexion. How is rather present and to come. The danger strange their respective fortunes! The is of a certain precocity. The education monarchy which realized that new world, has been so manly that the mind may not so magnificent with valor and victory, so be sufficiently stout for it; it has been so adorned by art and learning-like one rapid, that it may not be properly inwrought gilded and elaborate pageant-still the or lastingly retained. clarion boast of fame,-sunk, feeble, creditless, ignoble, waned into insignificance, withered into decrepitude! The western hemisphere crowded, towards its south, with colonists of that monarchy, far nobler in character and spirit than the race which

he and his compatriots had been shut out of all this antiquity by the laws of space, and not only by those of time. There rises up before them a past, with which for ages they have had no interest or feeling intertwined. Diplomatic relations are now regularly established between these respective countries. The romance the more captivates them who see in their own land nothing which conventionally bears that name. It is altogether new. They need not, however, regret that their youth was not so trained. They were not led through the gorgeous fable of childhood. They came forth in more masculine maturity of mind. Their romance-for they have one

It might be asked, Why was not this History,-filled with exploits and discovery, the most marvellous page which succeeds medieval tales,-written long since? Robertson only glances at it, and that but as prologue to a later reign. Peter Martyr

that country, its picturesque scenes, its serried defences, its elaborate refinements, its haughty race, its warlike costume, its sumless wealth,-the citadel of nature, the school of knowledge, the storehouse of art,

this Apocryphist in most unnecessary colors of enchantment. Truth was the only imagination to be invoked for such a narrative. It is not without some advantage, some good fortune, that the legendary went first, and that there was preparing, as he scattered his fancies, a more sober and faithful witness who knows no bias but that of evidence, who regards no dictation except that of fact.

(always to be distinguished from a name familiar in the conduct of the English Reformation) has left many letters which supply much contemporary information. But these are only the means and helps of history. The curate of Los Palacios is rather have risen up beneath the talisman of a garrulous and magniloquent old man. Spain in her history was for centuries unknown. The state-intrigue was rigorously closed in cabinets, the literary document was as carefully guarded in libraries; she was jealous of all publicity, she shrunk into monastic loneliness and silence. Revolution is a great pick-lock. Bars and gates give way before it. If freedom be the reward, for alas, it is not a necessary sequence! then the people breathe. Their But our approbation of the present unspirit returns. They resolve, with deep dertaking is not unqualified. It is oftencuriosity and thirst, to explore their an- times cold and tame in its manner. Its cestral times. They will know the causes style wants breadth and vigor. There is of tyranny the moment they reap the bless- not enough of the right enthusiasm; a ings of release. Perhaps never, until now, stronger vein of Christian philanthropy, of could the Castilian Book of Kings have good-will to men, would have adorned it like been truly written, or perhaps, profitably a layer of gold. If the sections, which are read. Much of the lore has been rescued now far removed from each other, had been as from a sealed sepulchre. The lamp placed nearer and been more coherent, the which had so long been twinkling in it had whole would have proceeded in a more natwell nigh expired. It demanded every care ural order. The notes are often out of and effort to turn these discoveries to any taste. The biographies ought to have been good account. But the business has been more interlaced with the events. From this accomplished. We regard these volumes desire of giving complete parts rather than as an acquisition to the cause of historical the inwoven tissue, the reader has frequentauthority and knowledge. We acknow- ly to return to a long-deserted point, and ledge ourselves debtors to their general there to begin another excursion. clearness and consistency. Their spirit hemisphere is rich in its particular stars, shows a chaste scrupulousness of mind. but needs a more general and zodiacal We can find no fault against their candor and generosity.

light.

The

The principal fault of the publication is The work before us is the more welcome in its deficiency of philosophical generalifrom the circumstance that the author has zation. There was room in the subject been somewhat anticipated by a country- for the minute working out of principles man of his, a gentleman with whose magic until they should be established as the laws power of invention and description it would of mankind. There was abundant opporbe perilous to vie. Washington Irving has tunity for tracing nascent custom into the made a rhythmic period for himself. His noblest institutions of civilization and gov'well of English undefiled' plays like a ernment. The author might have stood fountain, with an iris on its spray and with close to the spring-heads of streams which a music in its pulsation. But in his his- now roll in tides of power and majesty, and torical fictions there is often danger. Sel-which cover the earth with the riches f dom do men of genius succeed in their intelligence and good. He might have machinery. The chorus which was inter- dealt with the roots and the causes of things. preter to the ancient drama never broke the His research demanded, and should have continuity, nor weakened the realness, of inspired, this determination. There were the action. Scott's eidola are commonly many known establishments and doctrines coarse and constrained. Moore's Fadla- of the present century which he should have deen is a heavy incubus upon his flowing pursued to their earliest shape and source. verse; and certainly, the Fray Antonio A fine scope offered itself of bringing toAgapida does not help the Chronicle of gether the ancient and the modern world, the Siege of Granada.' The vast defiles of exhibiting the renovation of the one, through