The wonders of history are of good results to contemporaries and posterity only when you can show them, that the most extraordinary and the greatest deeds have been achieved by great men amidst the strangest circumstances and incidents.

GOETHE.

HISTORY.

HISTORICAL RESEARCH.

Of all the grand branches of human knowledge, history is that upon which most has been written, and which has always been most popular. And it seems to be the general opinion that the success of historians has on the whole been equal to their industry; and that if on this subject much has been studied, much also is understood.

This confidence in the value of history is very widely diffused, as we see in the extent to which it is read, and in the share it occupies in all plans of education. Nor can it be denied that, in a certain point of view, such confidence is perfectly justifiable. It cannot be denied that materials have been collected, which, when looked at in the aggregate, have a rich and imposing appearance. The political and military annals of all the great countries in Europe, and of most of those out of Europe, have been carefully compiled, put together in a convenient form, and the evidence on which they rest has been tolerably well sifted. Great attention has been paid to the history of legislation, also to that of religion: while considerable, though inferior, labor has been employed in tracing the progress of science, of literature, of the fine arts, of useful inventions, and, latterly, of the manners and comforts of the people. In order to increase our knowledge of the past, antiquities of every kind have been examined, the sites of ancient cities have been

laid bare, coins dug up and deciphered, inscriptions copied, alphabets restored, hieroglyphics interpreted, and, in some instances, long-forgotten languages reconstructed and rearranged. Several of the laws which regulate the changes of human speech have been discovered, and, in the hands of philologists, have been made to elucidate even the most obscure periods in the early migration of nations. Political economy has been raised to a science, and by it much light has been thrown on the causes of that unequal distribution of wealth which is the most fertile source of social disturbance. Statistics have been so sedulously cultivated, that we have the most extensive information, not only respecting the material interests of men, but also respecting their moral peculiarities; such as the amount of different crimes, the proportion they bear to each other, and the influence exercised over them by age, sex, education, and the like. With this great movement physical geography has kept pace the phenomena of climate have been registered, mountains measured, rivers surveyed and tracked to their source, natural productions of all kinds carefully studied, and their hidden properties unfolded; while every food which sustains life has been chemically analysed, its constituents numbered and weighed, and the nature of the connection between them and the human frame has, in many cases, been satisfactorily ascertained. At the same time, and that nothing should be left undone which might enlarge our knowledge of the events by which man is affected, there have been instituted circumstantial researches in many other departments; so that in regard to the most civilised people, we are now acquainted with the rate of their mortality, of their marriages, the proportion of their births, the character of their employments, and the fluctuations both in their wages and in the price of the commodities necessary to their existence. These and similar facts have been collected, methodised, and are ripe for use. Such results, which form, as it were, the anatomy of a nation, are remarkable for their

minuteness; and to them there have been joined other results, less minute, but more extensive. Not only have the actions and characteristics of the great nations been recorded, but a prodigious number of different tribes in all the parts of the known world have been visited and described by travellers, thus enabling us to compare the condition of mankind in every stage of civilisation, and under every variety of circumstance. When we moreover add, that this curiosity respecting our fellow-creatures is apparently insatiable, that it is constantly increasing, that the means of gratifying it are also increasing, and that most of the observations which have been made are still preserved, - when we put all these things together, we may form a faint idea of the immense value of that vast body of facts which we now possess, and by the aid of which the progress of mankind is to be investigated.

Buckle.

USE OF THE IMAGINATION IN HISTORY.

WHEN I state that the imagination may minister to the knowledge of history, I do not mean to say that the poetic or dramatic form is better than any other form in history, or, indeed, to make any kind of comparison between them. I mean that inventive wisdom which brings the truth to life by the help of its own creative energy· the poetic element which is found, not only in the souls of mighty artists, whether their art be poetry or painting or sculpture, but also of great philosophers and historians.

I will, as briefly as possible, endeavour to show that this imaginative power does render important service in the acquisition of historical knowledge. In the first place I ask your attention to this fact. that whenever the imagination of a great artist, be he poet or be he painter, has touched

any historic character or event, forthwith it acquires a lifelike reality, which other portions of history, on which no such light has fallen, do not possess. Why is it that that splendid legend of early Roman history - the story of Coriolanus-is so fresh and familiar to us, but because Shakspeare has so impersonated the pride of that patrician soldier, as to make us feel that he was not a mere name on the page of history, but a human being with like passions as ourselves. I present to you this fact also as unquestionably true, that the portion of English history which Shakspeare has treated is more familiarly known, not only popularly, but in well-educated minds, and especially with reference to the characters of famous personages, than any other part of it. Why is it that the first great civil conflict

the baronial war, in the reign of Henry the Third, with De Montfort at its head,—he who, when he fell, earned a hero's honor and a martyr's name,"— why is it known so much less than that other civil feud, the fury of which was quenched by the blood spilt on Bosworth Field? Why is this, but because the latter period is seen in the light that is shed upon it by the imagination of Shakspeare? How the dramatic poet has so wrought upon those times as to inspire a life into them, I will not now stop to inquire. It is the fact I wish you to consider. From this, I pass to an authority on which much stress may be laid, because it comes from a writer remarkable for his logical and rather unimaginative habit of mind. It is a no less severe logician than Archbishop Whately, who thus reasons, to show how imagination is needed in the study of history :-"It has seldom or never been noticed how important, among the intellectual qualifications for the study of history, is a vivid imagination a faculty which, consequently, a skilful narrator must himself possess, and to which he must be able to furnish excitement in others. Some may, perhaps, be startled at this remark, who have been accustomed to consider Imagination as having no other office than to feign