proposed to notice, and which, as nature takes precedence of habit, ought perhaps to have been the first. A Spaniard by birth and education, a Spaniard in his sympathies and in his tastes, he had inherited, nevertheless, some of the peculiarities, intellectual as well as moral, of the other race to which by his origin, and, as we have already said, by his physical characteristics, he belonged. He had none of the more pleasing qualities of the Netherlander; but he had the sluggish temper, the slow but laborious mind. "He is phlegmatic as well from natural disposition as from will," remarks an Italian contemporary. "This king," says another Venetian minister, "is absolutely free from every kind of passion." The word "passion" is here used in a strict, if not the most correct sense. Philip could, perhaps, love; that he could hate is what no one has ever ventured to dispute; but never did either feeling, strong, persistent, indestructible, though it might be, rise in turbulent waves around his soul. In religion he was a bigot,-not a fanatic. "The tranquillity of my dominions and the security of my crown," he said, "rest on an unqualified submission in all essential points to the authority of the Holy See." In the same deliberate and impressive style, not in that of a wild and reckless frenzy, is his famous saying, "Better not to reign at all than to reign over heretics." Ilis course in all matters of government was in conformity with the only chart by which he had been taught to steer. He boasted that he was no innovator,-that he did but tread in the footsteps of his father. Nor, though he ever kept his object steadily in view, did he press towards it with undue haste. He was content that time should smooth away the difficulties in his path. "Time and myself against any other two" was not the maxim of a man who looked to effect great changes or who felt himself in danger of being driven from his course by the gusts of passion.

To a person of this character it mattered little, as far as the essentials of existence were concerned, whether his life were passed upon a throne or at an attorney's desk. In the latter situation, his fondness for using the pen would well have qualified him for the drudgery, his admirable patience would have been sufficiently ex

ercised, and the mischief he was able to do would have been on a more contracted scale. On the throne, his labors, as his admirers tell us, were those of " a poor clerk earning his bread," while his recreations were those of a Jeronymite monk. His intercourse with mankind was limited to the narrowest range of which his position would allow. Even with his ministers he preferred to communicate in writing. When he went abroad, it was in a carriage so constructed as to screen him entirely from view, and to shut out the world from his observation. He always entered Madrid after nightfall, and reached his palace by streets that were the least frequented. He had an equally strong aversion to bodily exercise. Such was his love of quiet and seclusion, that it was commonly believed he waited only for a favorable opportunity to follow the example of his father, resign his power and withdraw to a convent.*

In the volume before us are two chapters devoted to the character and personal habits of Philip, a picture of his court, his method of transacting business, his chief advisers, the machinery of his government, and his relations with his subjects. As usually happens, it is in details of a personal and biographical kind that the author's investigations have been the most productive of new discoveries. It is a question with some minds, whether such details are properly admitted into history. The new luminary of moral and political science, the Verulam of the nineteenth century, Mr. Henry Buckle, tells us that biography forms no part of history, that individual character has little or no effect in determining the course of the world's affairs, and that the historian's proper business is to exhibit those general laws, discoverable by a strictly scientific process of investigation, which act with controlling power upon human conduct and govern the destinies of our race. We readily admit that the discovery of such laws would exceed in importance every other having relation to man's present sphere of existence; and we heartily wish that Mr. Buckle had made as near an approach to the discovery as he confidently believes himself to have done. But even had he, instead of crude theorics, unwar

*Relazione di Pigafella.

ranted assumptions, and a most lively but fallacious train of reasoning, presented us with a grand and solid philosophical work, a true Novum Organon, he would still have left the department of literature which he has so violently assailed in full possession of its present field. Our curiosity in regard to the character and habits of the men who have played conspicuous parts on the stage of history would have been not a whit diminished. The interest which men feel in the study of human character is, perhaps, the most common feeling that induces them to read at all. It is to gratify that feeling that the great majority of books are written. The mutual influences of mind upon mind-not the influences of climate, food, the "aspects of Nature," thunder-storms, earthquakes, and statistics-form, and will ever form, the great staple of literature. Mr. Buckle's own book would not have been half so entertaining as it is, if he had not, with the most natural inconsistency, plentifully besprinkled his pages with biographical details, some of which are not incorrect. Lord Macaulay, whom Mr. Buckle is unable to eulogize with sufficient vehemence without a ludicrous as well as irreverent application of Scriptural language, is of all writers the most profuse in the description of individual peculiarities, neatly doing up each separate man in a separate parcel with an appropriate label, and dismissing half his personages, like "ticket-of-leave men," with a "character," and nothing more.

In truth, while the office of the speculative philosopher is to explore the principles that have the widest operation in the revolutions of society, the office of the historian is to represent society as it actually exists at any given period in all its various phenomena. The science of history has been first invented-at least, he tells us so-by Mr. Buckle. The art of history is older than Herodotus, older than Moses, older than printed language. It is based, like every other art, on certain truths, general and special, principles and facts; its process, like that of every other art, is the Imagination, the creative principle of genius, using these truths as its rules and its materials, working by them and upon them, applying and idealizing them. That there is such a thing as historical art has also, we know, been disputed. It is one of the exceedingly strong convictions

he will not allow us to call them opinions -entertained by the distinguished author of "Modern Painters," and expressed by him in a lecture delivered at Edinburgh, that past ages are to be studied only in the records which they have themselves left,letters, contemporary memoirs, and the like sources. Works built upon these he calls "restorations," weak and servile copies, from which the spirit of the original has fled. He accordingly advises every one who would make himself really acquainted with the manners and events of a former period to go at once to the fountain-head and learn what that period said for itself in its own dialect and style. It might be sufficient mildly to warn any person who thinks of adopting this advice, that, unless the field of his intended researches be very limited, or the amount of time which he proposes to devote to the study very great, the result can scarcely be of a satisfactory nature. But there is another answer to Mr. Ruskin, which has more force when addressed to one so renowned as a critic and exponent of Art. The eye of Genius seizes what escapes ordinary observation. The province of Art is to reveal Nature, to elucidate her obscurities, to present her, not otherwise than as she is, but more truthfully and more completely than she appears to the common eye. Of what use were landscapepainting, if it did not teach us how to look for beauty in the real landscape? Who has not seen in a good portrait an expression which he then for the first time recognized as that which best represented the character of the original? When we applaud the personations of a great actor, we exclaim, as the highest praise, “How true to Nature!" We must, therefore, have seen before the look and gesture, and heard the tone, which we thus acknowledge as appropriate to the passion and the scene. And yet they had never stamped themselves upon our minds, when witnessed in actual life, from which the actor himself had copied them, with half that force and vividness which they receive from his delineation. In like manner, the historian-one to whom history is a genuine vocation-applies to the facts with which he has to deal, to the evidence which he has to sift, to the relations which he has to peruse, a faculty which shall detect a meaning where the common reader

would find none,-which shall conceive a whole picture, a complete view, where another would see but fragments,-which shall combine and reproduce in one distinet and living image the relics of a past age, which lie broken, scattered, and buried beneath the mounds of time. Such a work has Niebuhr performed for early Roman history, and Michelet for the confused epochs of medieval France. The spirit, instead of escaping in the process, was for the first time made visible. historian did not merely anatomize the body of the Past, but with magic power summoned up its ghost.

The

It cannot be said that the claims of history have ever been disallowed by the reading public. There is, indeed, no class of literature so secure of receiving the attention which it demands. While the novelist modestly confines himself to a brace of spare duodecimos, and, if his story be somewhat extended, endeavors to conceal its length in the smallness of the print, the historian unblushingly presents himself with three, six, a dozen, nay, if he be a Frenchman or a German, with forty huge tomes, and is more often taken to task for his omissions than censured for the fulness of his narrative. It is respectable to buy his volumes, and respectable to read them. We don't put them away in corners, but give them the most conspicuous places on our shelves. Strange to say, that kind of reading to which we were once driven as to a task, which our fathers thought must be useful because it was so dull, has of late outstripped every other branch in its attractiveness to the mass. Nobody yawns over Carlyle; people set upon Macaulay as if quite unconscious that they were about to be led into the labyrinths of Whig and Tory politics; and gentlemen whirled along in railway-cars bend over the pages of Prescott, and pronounce them as fascinating as any romance.

Stranger still, these modern historians excel their predecessors as much in learning and depth of research as in dramatic power, artistic arrangement and construction, and beauty and picturesqueness of style. Compare the meagre array of ref erences in the foot-notes of Watson's "History of Philip the Second" with the multitude of authorities cited by Mr. Prescott. It may be doubted, whether any printed book,

however rare or little known, which could throw the least glimmer of light upon his subject, has been overlooked or neglected by the last-mentioned author; while thousands of manuscript pages, gathered from libraries and collections in almost every part of Europe, have furnished him with some of his most curious particulars and enabled him to clear up the mystery that shrouded many portions of the subject.

We shall not attempt to determine the exact place that ought to be assigned in an illustrious brotherhood to our American historian. The country is justly proud of him, as one whose name is a household word in many lands,-who has done more, perhaps, than any other of her living writers, with the exception of Washington Irving, to obtain for a still youthful literature the regard and attention of the world, -who has helped to accomplish the prediction of Horace Walpole, that there would one day be "a Thucydides at Boston and a Xenophon at New York"; a prediction which seemed so fanciful, at the time it was made, (less than two years before the declaration of Independence,) that the prophet was fain to link its fulfilment with the contemporaneous visit of a South American traveller to the deserted ruins of London.* His writings have won favor with hosts of readers, and they have received the homage of learned and profound inquirers, like Humboldt and Guizot. They have merits that are recognizable at a glance, and they have also merits that will bear the closest examination. They occupy a field in which they have no compeers. They are the products of a fertile soil and of laborious cultivation. The mere literary critic, accustomed to dwell with even more attention on the form than on the substance of a work, commends above all the admirable skill shown in the selection and grouping of the incidents, the facile hand with which an obscure and entangled theme is divested of its embarrassments, the frequent brilliancy and picturesqueness of the narrative, the judicious mixture of anecdote and reflection, and the harmony and clearness of the style. These are the qualities which make Mr. Prescott's histories, with all their solid learning and minute research, as pleasant reading as the airiest

*Walpole to Mason, Nov. 24, 1774

of novels. And yet not these alone. A charm is felt in many a sentence that has a deeper origin than in the intellect. No egotism obtrudes itself upon our notice; but the subtile outflow of a generous and candid spirit, of a genial and singularly healthy nature, wins for the author a secure place in the affections of his readers.

The third volume of the " History of Philip the Second" is, we think, superior to its predecessors. It contains, perhaps, no single scene equal in elaborate and careful painting to the death of Count Egmont. It has no chapter devoted to the elucidation of the darker passages in Philip's personal history, like that which in a former volume traced to a still doubtful end the unhappy career of Don Carlos, or such as will doubtless, in a future volume, shed new light on that of Antonio Perez. But there is a more continuous interest, arising from a greater unity of subject. With the exception of the two chapters already referred to, the narrative is taken up with the contest waged by the Spaniards against those Moslem foes whom they hated with the hereditary hate of centuries, the mingled hate that had grown out of diversity of religion, an alien blood, and long arrears of vengeance. When that contest was waged upon the sea or on a foreign soil, it was at least mitigated by the ordinary rules of warfare. But on Spanish soil it knew no restraint, no limitation but the complete effacement of the Moorish population. The story of the Morisco Rebellion, which we remember to have first read with absorbed attention in Dunham's meagre sketch, is here related with a fulness of detail that exhausts the subject, and leaves the mind informed both of causes and results. Yet the march of the narrative is rapid and unchecked, from the first outbreak of the revolt, when Aben-Farax, with a handful of followers, facing the darkness of night and the blinding snow, penetrated into the streets of Granada, shouting the cry so long unheard in air that had once been so familiar with its sound, "There is no God but Allah, and Mahomet is the prophet of God!”— through all the strange and terrible vicissitudes of the deadly struggle that ensued, the frightful massacres, the wild guerrilla battles, the fiery onslaughts of the Spanish chivalry, the stealthy surprises of the Moorish mountaineers,-down to the com

plete suppression of the insurrection, the removal of the defeated race, the overthrow and death of Aben-Aboo, "the little king of the Alpujarras," and the ghastly triumph in which his dead body, clothed in the robes of royalty and supported upright on a horse, was led into the capital where his ancestors had once reigned in peaceful splendor, after which the head was cut off and set up in a cage above the wall, "the face turned towards his native hills, which he had loved so well."

On such a theme, and in such localities, Mr. Prescott is more at home than any other writer, American or European. His imagination, kindled by long familiar associations, burns with a steady flame. The characters are portrayed with a free and vigorous pencil, the contrast between the Orientalism of the Spanish Arab and the sterner features of the Spanish Goth being always strongly marked. The scenery, painted with as much fidelity as truth, is sometimes brought before the eye by minute description, and sometimes, with still happier effect, by incidental touches,—an epithet or a simile, as appropriate as it is suggestive. As we follow the route of Mondejar's army, the "frosty peaks" of the Sierra Nevada are seen "glistening in the sun like palisades of silver"; while terraces, scooped out along the rocky mountain-side, are covered with bright patches of variegated culture, that hang like a garland round the gaunt Sierra." At their removal from Granada, the remnant of what had once been a race of conquerors bid a last farewell to their ancient homes just as "the morning light has broken on the red towers of the Alhambra"; and scattered over the country in small and isolated masses, the presence of the exiles is "sure to be revealed by the minute and elaborate culture of the soil,-as the secret course of the mountain-stream is betrayed by the brighter green of the meadow."

We had marked for quotation an admirable passage, in which our author passes judgment on the policy of the Spanish government, its cruelty and its mistakes. But want of space compels us here to take leave of a book which we have not pretended to analyze, but to which we have rendered sincere, though inadequate, praise.

THE introduction and acclimatization of the hexameter upon English soil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt was first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. Gabriel Harvey,—a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,-whose chief claim to remembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he was the first to whom the notion of transplantation occurred. In his "Foure Letters," (1592,) he says, "If I never deserve anye better remembraunce, let mee rather be Epitaphed, the Inventour of the English Hexameter, whome learned M. Stanihurst imitated in his Virgill, and excellent Sir Phillip Sidney disdained not to follow in his Arcadia and elsewhere." This claim of invention, however, seems to have been an afterthought with Harvey, for, in the letters which passed between him and Spenser in 1579, he speaks of himself more modestly as only a collaborator with Sidney and others in the good work. The Earl of Surrey is said to have been the first who wrote thus in English. The most successful person, however, was William Webb, who translated two of Virgil's Eclogues with a good deal of spirit and harmony. Ascham, in his "Schoolmaster," (1570,) had already suggested the adoption of the ancient hexameter by English poets; but Ascham (as afterwards Puttenham in his "Art of Poesie") thought the number of monosyllabic words in English an insuperable objection to verses in which there was a large proportion of dactyles, and recommended, therefore, that a trial should be made with iambics. Spenser, at Harvey's instance, seems to have tried his hand at the new kind of verse. He says, "I like your late Englishe Hexameters so exceedingly well, that I also enure my penne sometimes in that kinde. . . . For the onely or chiefest hardnesse, whych seemeth, is in the Accente, which sometime gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth ilfauouredly, coming shorte of that it should, and sometime exceeding the measure of the Number, as in Carpenter; the middle sillable being vsed shorte in Speache, when it shall be read long in

Verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling that draweth one legge after hir: and Heaven, being used shorte as one sillable, when it is in Verse stretched out with a Diastole, is like a lame dogge that holdes up one legge. But it is to be wonne with Custome, and rough words must be subdued with Vse. For why a God's name may not we, as else the Greekes, have the kingdome of our owne Language, and measure our Accentes by the Sounde, reserving the Quantitie to the Verse?" The amiable Edmonde seems to be smiling in his sleeve as he writes this sentence. He instinctively saw the absurdity of attempting to subdue English to misunderstood laws of Latin quantities, which would, for example, make the vowel in debt long, in the teeth of use and wont.

We give a specimen of the hexameters which satisfied so entirely the ear of Master Gabriel Harvey,-an ear that must have been long by position, in virtue of its place on his head.

"Not the like Discourser, for Tongue and head to be found out;

Not the like resolute Man, for great and serious áffayres;

Not the like Lynx, to spie out secretes and priuities of States;

Eyed like to Argus, Earde like to Midas, Nosd like to Naso,

Wingd like to Mercury, fittst of a Thousand for to be émployed."

And here are a few from "worthy M. Stanyhurst's" translation of the "Æneid." "Laocoon storming from Princelie Castel is hastning,

And a far of beloing: What fond phantastical harebraine

Madnesse hath enchaunted your wits, you

townsmen unhappie?

Weene you (blind hodipecks) the Greekish nauie returned,

Or that their presents want craft? is subtil Vlisses

So soone forgotten? My life for an haulfpennie (Trojans)," etc.

Mr. Abraham Fraunce translates two verses of Heliodorus thus:

"Now had fyery Phlegon his dayes reuolution ended,

And his snoring snowt with salt waues all to bee washed."

Witty Tom Nash was right enough when he called this kind of stuff, "that drunken,