REIGN OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. developing the true story of man never

imaginations, does reserve one province for | His task is not of the day, the observation truth. He will not that it be invaded. He of the passing spectacle; he must read resents every trespass. He marks it out back the great revolutions and cycles of the with fenced boundaries. He calls the en- former heavens to foretell, on comprehenclosure-History. sive calculations, the phenomena of the His control of passion must be comSometimes he may not even be exThe 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 recompense. 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 honorof 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.

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

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. Honor, the highest and most grateful, is due to their labor. Theirs are not estimable sacrifices. They wander back in old and deserted 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. willingly as the portico and hall. When He may paint what we would see purely this is not true of the individual, it is alreflected. He may flatter what we would most invariably certain that a correspondhear inartificially rehearsed. Large and ing flaw will be detected in his production, generous must be the qualities of his soul.—some vein of the sinister, the ignoble, He must never forget his responsibility. and unjust.

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 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.

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 correct authentication, and of inspiring soul. But the man, at frequent intervals, may be found, who can, by the union of genius and diligence, take a bold survey of his lifetime, 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 high-road 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 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 volumes before us are the producthe wars of Persia against the land of histions of an American. He is evidently a celebrity, though not of his birth, from high-minded man. We know not pretheir beginning under Cyrus, until their judice against his country. We feel it, in termination under Xerxes, in the double all its great distinctions, to be our own. It and simultaneous fields of Platæa and My- has as much right to Milton and Shakcale. Thucydides has delivered to us the speare as ourselves it has no better right incidents and campaigns of the Pelopon- than we have to Edwards. As noble, cornesian war, down to its twenty-first year.rect, sterling English has come from its He was for a time engaged in it. None shores as any our own can boast. Other can doubt his accuracy, nor resist his ani-vulgar rivalries are not to our mind. If mation. But the eye-witness and the official there be in any of our critical organs and 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,

confederacies a disposition 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, a [they 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 he and his compatriots had been shut out deciphering differently spelt signatures, and of all this antiquity by the laws of space, complexities of character and figure, which and not only by those of time. There almost every paper of ancient date pre- rises up before them a past, with which for sents? A calamity like this would have ages they have had no interest or feeling disarmed Zoilus. But we mark no inad- intertwined. Diplomatic relations are now vertence, no failure. It would seem, that regularly established between these respecconscious incapacity had only made him tive countries. The romance the more more wary. His step is only the more captivates them who see in their own land measured and sure. We have to excuse nothing which conventionally bears that nothing as to his care, nor is he deficient name. It is altogether new. They need in ardor. He feels his epic-theme. He is not, however, regret that their youth was sometimes conscious of its glory to a mani- not so trained. They were not led through fest depression. It was very suitable that the gorgeous fable of childhood. They a Columbian, for the claim to the discov-came forth in more masculine maturity of ery of that Continent by Amerigo Ves- mind. Their romance-for they have one pucci is ridiculously false-should undertake the history of events in which, to this hour, he inherits a vital stake. He owes his all to it. From his mighty sea-line, his eye naturally fixes upon Spain, before any other European country. The coasts not only stand opposite to each other, and 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

-is not of that nursery illusion in which older people have been bound; they have achieved their romance by enterprises of intelligence and virtue. It is not a thing of indefinable fascination: their own deeds create it. It is not fled it yet lives on in a glowing accumulation. It is not to dream

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