ance, and conjectured but little of the influence they were to exert on future generations. Their attention was successively engaged by each separate act of the great drama that was passing before them; but did not extend to the connected effect of the whole, in which alone posterity was to find the grandeur and interest of the scene. The connexion indeed of those different acts is very often not then discernible. The series often stretches on beyond the reach of the generation which witnessed its beginning; and makes it impossible for them to integrate what had not yet attained its completion; while, from similar causes, many of the terms that at first appeared most important, are unavoidably discarded, to bring the problem within a manageable compass. Time, in short, performs the same services to events, which distance does to visible objects. It obscures and gradually annihilates the small, but renders those that are very great much more distinct and conceivable. If we would know the true form and bearings of a range of Alpine mountains, we must not grovel among the irregularities of its surface, but observe, from the distance of leagues, the direction of its ridges and peaks, and the giant outline which it traces on the sky. -A traveller who wanders through a rugged and picturesque district, though struck with the beauty of every new valley, or the grandeur of every cliff that he passes, has no notion at all of the general configuration of the country, or even of the relative situation of the objects he has been admiring; and will understand all those things, and his own route among them, a thousand times better from a small map, on a scale of half an inch to a mile, which represents neither thickets nor hamlets, than from the most painful efforts to combine the indications of the strongest memory. The case is the same with those who live through periods of great historical interest. They are too near the scene-too much interested in each successive event-and too much agitated with their rapid succession, to form any just estimate of the character or result of the whole. They are like private soldiers in the middle of a great battle, or rather of a busy and complicated campaign-hardly knowing whether they have lost or won, and having but the most obscure and imperfect conception of the general movements in which their own fate has been involved. The foreigner who reads of them in the Gazette, or the peasant who sees them from the top of a distant hill or a steeple, has in fact a far better idea of them.

Of the thousand or fifteen hundred names that have been connected in contemporary fame with the great events of the last twenty-five years, how many will go down to posterity? In all probability not more than twenty: And who shall yet venture to say which twenty it will be? But it is the same with the

events as with the actors. How often, during that period, have we mourned or exulted, with exaggerated emotions, over occurrences that we already discover to have been of no permanent importance !-how certain is it, that the far greater proportion of those to which we still attach an interest, will be viewed with the same indifference by the very next generation !—and how probable, that the whole train and tissue of the history will appear, to a remoter posterity, under a totally different character and colour from any that the most penetrating observer of the present day has thought of ascribing to it! Was there any contemporary, do we think, of Mahomet, of Gregory VII, of Faust, or Columbus, who formed the same estimate of their achievements that we do at this day? Were the great and wise men who brought about the Reforination, as much aware of its importance as the whole world is at present? or does any one imagine, that, even in the later and more domestic events of the establishment of the English Commonwealth in 1648, or the English Revolution in 1688, the large and energetic spirits by whom those great events were conducted, were fully sensible of their true character and bearings, or at all foresaw the mighty consequences of which they have since been prolific?

But though it may thus require the lapse of ages to develop the true character of a great transaction, and though its history may therefore be written with most advantage very long after its occurrence, it does not follow that such a history will not be deficient in many qualities which it would be desirable for it to possess. All we say is, that they are qualities which will generally be found incompatible with those larger and sounder views, which can hardly be matured while the subjects of them are That this is an imperfection in our histories and historians, is sufficiently obvious; but it is an imperfection to which we must patiently resign ourselves, if it appear to be an unavoidable consequence of the limitation of our faculties. We cannot both enjoy the sublime effect of a vast and various landscape, and at the same time discern the form of every leaf in the forest, or the movements of every living creature that breathes within its expanse. Beings of a higher order may be capable of this;-and it would be very desirable to be so: But, constituted as we are, it is impossible; and, in our delineation of such a scene, all that is minute and detached, however interesting or important to those who are at hand, must therefore be omitted-while the general effect is entrusted to masses in which nothing but the great outlines of great objects are preserved, and the details left to be inferred from the character of their results, or the larger features of their usual accompaniments.

It is needless to apply this to the case of history; in which, when it records events of permanent interest, it is equally impossible to retain those particular details which engrossed the attention of contemporaries-both because the memory of them is necessarily lost in the course of that period which must elapse before the just value of the whole can be known-and because, even if it were otherwise, no human memory could retain, or human judgment discriminate, the infinite number of particulars which must have been presented in such an interval. We shall only observe, further, that though that which is preserved is generally the most material and truly important part of the story, it not unfrequently happens, that too little is preserved to afford materials for a satisfactory narrative, or to justify any general conclusion; and that, in such cases, the historian often yields to the temptation of connecting the scanty materials that have reached him by a sort of general and theoretical reasoning, which naturally takes its colour from the prevailing views and opinions of the individual writer, or of the age to which he belongs. If an author of consummate judgment, and with a thorough knowledge of the unchangeable principles of human nature, undertake this task, it is wonderful indeed to see how much he may make of a subject that appears so unpromising-and it is almost certain that the view he will give to his readers, of such an obscure period, will, at all events, be at least as instructive and interesting as if he had had its entire annals before him. In other hands, however, the result is very different; and, instead of a masterly picture of rude or remote ages, true at least to the general features of such periods, we have nothing but a transcript of the author's own most recent fantasies and follies, ill disguised under the masquerade character of a few traditional names. It is only necessary to call to mind such books as Zouche's Life of Sir Philip Sydney, or Godwin's Life of Chaucer, to feel this much more strongly than we can express it. These, no doubt, are extreme cases;-but we suspect that our impressions of almost all remote characters and events, and the general notions we have of the times or societies which produced them, are much more dependent on the peculiar temper and habits of the popular writers in whom the memory of them is chiefly preserved, than it is very pleasant to think of. If we ever take the trouble of looking for ourselves into the documents and materials out of which those histories are made, we feel at once how much room there is for a very different representation of all those things from that which is current in the world: And accordingly we occasionally have very opposite representations, Compare Bossuet's Universal History with Voltaire's-Rollin

with Mitford-Hume or Clarendon with Ralph or Mrs M'Aulay; and it will be difficult to believe that these different writers are speaking of the same persons and things.

The work before us, we have already said, is singularly free from faults of this description. It is written, we do think, in the true spirit and temper of historical impartiality. But it has faults of a different character; and, with many of the merits, combines some of the appropriate defects, both of a contemporary and a philosophical history. Its details are too few and too succinct for the former-they are too numerous and too rashly selected for the latter;-while the reasonings and speculations in which perhaps its chief value consists, seem already to be too often thrown away upon matters that cannot long be had in remembrance. We must take care not to get entangled too far among the anecdotes-but the general reasoning cannot detain us very long.

It is the scope of the book to show that France must have a free government-a limited monarchy-in express words, a constitution like that of England. This, Mad. de S. says, was all that the body of the nation aimed at in 1789-and this she says the great majority of the nation are resolved to have still-undeterred by the fatal miscarriage of the last experiment, and undisgusted by the revival of antient pretensions which has accompanied its close. Still, though she maintains this to be the prevailing sentiment of the French people, she thinks it not altogether unnecessary to combat this discouragement and this disgust; and the great object of all that is argumentative in her book, is to show, that there is nothing in the character or condition, or late or early history of her countrymen, to render this regulated freedom unattainable by them, or to disqualify them from the enjoyment of a representative government, or the functions of free citizens.

For this purpose she takes a rapid and masterly view of the progress of the different European kingdoms, from their primitive condition of feudal aristocracies, to their present state of monarchies limited by law, or mitigated by the force of public pinion; and endeavours to show, that the course has been the same in all, and that its unavoidable termination is in a balanced constitution like that of England. The first change was the reduction of the Nobles, chiefly by the aid which the Commons, then first pretending to wealth or intelligence, afforded to the Crown-and, on this basis, some small states, in Italy and Germany especially, erected a permanent system of freedom. But the necessities of war, and the substitution of hired forces for 'the feudal militia, led much more generally to the establishment

of an arbitrary or despotical authority; which was accomplished in France, Spain and England, under Lewis XI., Philip II, and Henry VIII. Then came the age of commerce, luxury, and taxes, which necessarily ripened into the age of general intelligence, individual wealth, and a sense both of right and of power in the people;-and those led irresistibly to a linitation on the powers of the Crown by a representative assembly.

England having less occasion for a land army-and having been the first in the career of commercial prosperity, led the way in this great amelioration. But the same general principles have been operating in all the continental kingdoms, and must ultimately produce the same effects. The peculiar advantages which she enjoyed did not prevent England from being enslaved by the tyranny of Henry VIII., and Mary;-and she also experienced the hazards, and paid the penalties which are perhaps inseparable from the assertion of popular rights. She also overthrew the monarchy, and sacrificed the monarch in her first attempt to set limits to his power. The English Commonwealth of 1648, originated in as wild speculations as the French of 1792-and ended, like it, in the establishment of a military tyranny, and a restoration which seemed to confound all the asserters of liberty in the general guilt of rebellion:-Yet all the world is now agreed that this was but the first explosion of a flame that could neither be extinguished nor permanently repressed; and that what took place in 1688, was but the sequel and necessary consummation of what had been begun 40 years before-and which might and would have been accomplished without even the slight shock and dis turbance that was then experienced, if the Court had profited as much as the leaders of the people by the lessons of that first experience. Such too, Mad. de S. assures us, is the unalterable destiny of France;--and it is the great purpose of her book to show, that but for circumstances which cannot recur-mistakes that cannot be repeated, and accidents which never happened twice, even the last attempt would have led to that blessed consummation-and that every thing is now in the fairest train to secure it, without any great effort or hazard of disturbance.

That these views are supported with infinite talent, spirit, and eloquence, no one who has read the book will probably dispute; and we should be sorry indeed to think that they were not substantially just. Yet we are not, we confess, quite so sanguine as the distinguished writer before us; and though we do not doubt either that her principles are true, or that her predictions will be ultimately accomplished, we fear that the period of their triumph is not yet at hand; and that it is far more doubtful than she will allow it to be, whether that triumph will be easy,