just thoughts on such subjects. In all these instances, we discern the care of legislators to act with some just and honourable feeling towards other religions as well as towards the established religion. They are so many indications of a spirit of equality as opposed to a spirit of exclusiveness or monopoly. We see in these facts, that it begins to be dimly apprehended that the business of government is not to show favour to one sect so much as to do justice to all sects. Its next advance may be, to see that it will be best that all sects should be left to do justice to themselves. For the progress of self-sustained religion in England, and the bound which that principle has made of late in Scotland, are doing much to explode many an old argument in favour of a compulsory policy on that subject. Every day, also, is showing how little can be done to secure the purity of religion by creeds, and formularies, and civil statutes; and if many pious episcopalians, who are just now deeply offended with the divided state and declining religion of the established church, could only see in protestant nonconformity a haven of rest, a home for piety, we are constrained to think that many of the best of that class would fly to us as to a refuge, much as devout men from the same communion have done in former times.

But some man will say, 'We desire not such adherents. We wish men to be with us from principle, not from circumstances to be with us wholly, or not at all.' And can it be that the persons who thus express themselves, really mean what they say? You call on men to change their opinions, and refuse to allow any space as due to the process of that change! You determine to receive no man cordially as a nonconformist, who does not become such thoroughly and at one leap, did it never occur to you to inquire whether the man who could leave one set of opinions after that fashion, can be expected to hold with much steadiness to another? Are they not, commonly, persons either of the largest views, or of the most conscientious feeling, who see most reason for hesitancy in regard to very positive opinions on such points-and is there anything in the nature of our dogmatism, or our upbraidings, that can be expected to decide the hesitancy of such minds in our favour? Has it been by adopting a repulsive policy of this order, with regard to every class of the inquiring and the partially enlightened, or by conduct very much the reverse of it, that the one congregational church in England two centuries since, has given place to the several thousand churches in this country, which may now be described by that name? Would that it were always given us to reflect on questions of this nature, before attempting to speak or to write about them. The effect, we think, would be a greater

charity among ourselves—a greater charity towards such as are without; and a course of proceeding altogether much more becoming us as Christians, as members of general society, and as men of education and common sense.

ART. VII. The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic, of Spain. By WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT. Third Edition, revised, with additions. In three volumes.

HISTORICAL Writing requires so many qualities to sustain it in its proper place in literature, to justify the earnest expectation which it awakens in the wise and good, to fulfil adequately its own pretension, that no class of composition needs to be more jealously scanned. Though the ignorant and careless have received the legend and the lay without examination or suspicion, yet has the noble science of noting and developing the true story of man never been suffered to weaken its claim to truth by the indulgence of conjecture, or to corrupt its rectitude by partiality. The attempt may be frequent: in the dark obscurities of party and prejudice, it may succeed: a few dupes may be hoodwinked by the imposture. But any great work of this order, broad in outline, and public in interest,-taking a kingdom for its stage, and an epoch for its period, can shuffle nothing: it must be clear in the righteous motive of its undertaking, in the strict fidelity of its statements, in the triumphant authority of its proofs. Even then, mediocrity cannot be brooked. It is as fatal in productions of this nature as in poetry.

'Si paulum a summo decessit, vergit ad imum.'

This is the canon of all ages. It has been inexorably enforced. If it be severe, it is only in its tenderness towards human welfare. The toleration of the doubtful and the mean in such authorship would entail irretrievable mischief. It would be to misplace or extinguish the watch-towers of the world. It would be to slight all example, and to pervert all experience. It would sap the very foundations of morality. Man, whatever his devious errors and his vain 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 enclosureHistory.

We should form an imperfect estimate of literature in this department, were we to confine its merits to simple fidelity. The annalist, with his tables and records, would then deserve the praise we award to the historian. We do not restrict it to the

honours of an art. The term is not improperly applied, for it requires the skilfulness of arrangement, of illustration, of relief. It demands the bold conception, the touch of nature, and the stroke of truth. But accuracy, method, grace, are not enough. It must be inspired by philosophy; yet, though always felt, this must not be obtruded. It is wholesome instruction by censure and warning, by praise and blame. It turns back the veil of the past, that we may turn aside the veil of the future. It 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 too. 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.

And hence it is, that so few writers of this description have reached the height which the truly worthy are allowed, on all hands, to claim. Not lower than that of the bard is their challenged rank. Honour, the highest and most grateful, is due to their labour. Theirs are not estimable sacrifices. They wander back in old and deserted paths, where there is only monument and inscription. The cheerful ways, the opening scenes, of life they leave for the long and gloomy galleries of the dead. Their order of existence is inverted; for a season, the instinct of the present and of the future must be, as with a monastic severity, repressed. Men think of such self-denial with mingled awe and wonder, crowning these benefactors with no perishable leaf. But then the enrolment in that number is the more guarded and deliberate. 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. 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 foretel, on comprehensive calculations, the phenomena of the new. His control of passion must be complete. Sometimes he may not even be excited. The matter is not sufficiently serious to affect him. To separate the detritus which surrounds him to copy the ancient verse-to chronicle the ancient date-without theory, without prepossession, is at least possible, however it be rare. But must all emotion be proscribed? He knows not the vulgar eagerness of strife and side. He leans to none in obsequiousness or hate. He is so far raised above the earth, that while he foregoes none of its sympathies, he is exalted higher than its disputes. There is joy as well as calm in that elevation. The process to which he subjects himself is

often painful, but to him it is an ample recompence. He finds many a spoil among 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 retrospect, 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 improvement. He plucks from failure and disaster the antidote to their recurrence. Surely such a master deserves all honour-of former times, as their expositor; of present times, as their instructor; of future times, as their diviner. He deals not in fictions, but in what is more amazing. He furnishes the means of poetry and romance. He sheds around him the light which the prism of imagination catches and decomposes in all its variegated colours. How poor were song, but for his burden-how feeble statuary, but for his relic-how trifling poetry, but for his theme! The historical denotes the highest order of art, as it ought of letters. Withal, the conviction is very general, that the man who would rise to greatness in this path, must be personally worthy. He commonly obtains a moral homage. The temple receives his bust as 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 and the greatest department of history. What is called universal, must, of necessity, be wanting in every attribute of correct authentication, and of inspiring soul. But the man, at infrequent intervals, may be found, who can, by the union of genius and diligence, take a bold survey of his life-time, and thence pursue into the depths of antiquity the rise of usages and the causes of events. This truth will often be as distinctly stamped on his recital and his inference, as on his actual observations. Should he start from a distant point, avoiding all that is coeval, there is a straight highroad for him to travel, if other ages have bequeathed (what civilization cannot have existed without doing) some shape or measure of document or memorial. These he will collate and set in order, giving each 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 affairs, 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, from battle and victory to still more consummate retreat; in his affairs of Greece he completes the great Lacedæmonian struggle by bringing them to the battle of Mantinea, and the death of Epaminondas. Can these united historians-and surely no country can challenge their equals-be considered to lay open the wonders of that land, or the characteristics of that people? Rome must prefer even a lower title to a clear account of what it was. It can name illustrious chroniclers, but all its mighty tale is broken into parts, which it is often hopeless to conjoin. Cæsar describes his military progresses, or rather flights. Sallust sketches a single conspiracy and a foreign war. Even Tacitus, in his Annals, merely draws the hideous monster, Tiberius: while his history is chiefly interesting for its pictures of Britain and Judea. Suetonius, amidst his 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