any other notes which any future Congress may see fit to authorize in payment of their claims, and the work of providing a remedy will prove very easy. And until a sense of the exigency of the case is reached, no arrangement of plans for restoring specie payment can be expected to receive any effective support.

ART. VII.-CRITICAL NOTICES.

1.- Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of HENRY THOMAS BUCkle. Edited, with a Biographical Notice, by HELEN TAYLOR. In Three Volumes. London: Longmans, Green, & Co. 8vo. 1872.

BUCKLE'S History of Philosophy, unfinished as it is, certainly marks an epoch in historical literature. It was the first attempt, on a considerable scale, to apply to the concrete treatment of historical phenomena the laws that govern these phenomena, and by this means to bring history into the category of the exact sciences. Perhaps there is no one of these laws of which Buckle can be called, in any true sense of the word, the discoverer; although his demonstration of many of them is acute and exhaustive. His peculiar merit is that he brought them over, so to speak, from the domain of abstract philosophy into that of literature, and that he did this with a remarkable breadth and boldness of thought, and in so agreeable and lucid a style as to attract and hold attention. He was fortunate, too, in the time of bringing his book before the public, when the community, having become accustomed to the scientific treatment of phenomena, and in a certain degree imbued with the scientific spirit, was ready to see this treatment applied to the facts of human experience. It only needed something for its opinions to crystallize about. The extraordinary sensation created by this book is therefore fully justified by the effects which we may fairly ascribe to it. Those views of the uniformity of law, the irresistible tendency of general causes, and the importance of physical geography in human development, which had before been confined to a few advanced thinkers, now passed into the public mind, and powerfully influenced even those who refused to believe in a science of history. As accepted principles of historical investigation, they may be said to date from the appearance of this work.

The publication of Mr. Buckle's lesser writings, most of which have never seen the light before, and of the materials that he had

been collecting for the purposes of his great undertaking, will be welcome, not only to his special admirers, but to all who are interested in historical study. The complete papers here given are in Mr. Buckle's most finished style, and contain discussions of permanent value. All of these three thick volumes, however, except a part of the first, are taken up with the miscellaneous materials-fragments and commonplace books which he had been many years accumulating, and which will be found useful by all who desire to make a special study of any topic which came within Mr. Buckle's scope. We will especially instance the history of medieval literature. But this publication has a further value in illustrating his methods of work, and enabling us to form a better judgment, both of what he actually accomplished and of what he probably would have accomplished if he had lived. In reading his history, the first impression is of an erudition at once so wide and so minute as to show that there was nothing contracted in his sympathies or the range of his inquiries. In these fragments and notes we are brought directly face to face with his materials, and are in a condition to judge fairly whether there were any such limitations.

In the first place, it will be noticed that Mr. Buckle was a great reader, but not a scholar. It ought not to be expected that a book which deals with the philosophy of results rather than with the investigation of details should exhibit special scholarship in every field, or perhaps even in any one. The peculiar requisite for such a task as this is the power of judging accurately of the special labors of others; one need not himself perform these special labors. Still it is probable that no person can judge accurately of the special labors of others, unless he has himself done similar work in some one department; to deal satisfactorily with general results, one must know from one's own experience how such results are reached. Now here, we imagine, is where a University education would have stood Mr. Buckle in stead. He appears never to have engaged in the special investigation of details, but to have reserved himself for the higher work of reasoning from these details. Consequently, the first and most fatal defect in his reasoning is the inadequacy of his materials; not in amount, of course, but in character. It has been pointed out, we believe, by adepts in the natural sciences, that the treatment of these subjects is often unsatisfactory from lack of special knowledge. This is no less true of special historical erudition, in which at least it might be expected that he would be strong.

Nothing is so striking, on glancing over these pages, as the very second-rate character of many of the books read and cited. We do not forget that these commonplace books were made fifteen or twenty years ago, and that many books which were authority then are so no

longer; but this does not account for the whole deficiency. For example: in 1856 a paper appeared in England which has completely revolutionized the science of mythology. Mr. Buckle died in 1862; but, although there are several extracts here upon mythological subjects, Max Müller is not even mentioned; Mr. Prichard is the principal authority upon this head, and the profound treatises of K. O. Müller, Gerhard, Preller, Hartung, and others appear never to have attracted Mr. Buckle's attention. In like manner Prichard is his authority for ancient Egypt; genuine Egyptologists, like Lepsius and Brugsch, he takes no notice of. Now nothing is more certain than that if a person is not himself a special student and authority upon the subjects of which he writes, he must at any rate know how to find and use those who are authorities.

Real scholarship-a Cambridge or Oxford training would have saved Mr. Buckle from the wasted labor of copying out pages of worthless matter into these note-books, either facts that every scholar ought to be supposed to know, as the derivation of Ostracism (No. 220), or puerile derivations, such as that of Paris (No. 81). It is incredible that an historical student should take pains to note down the absurd derivation "from the son of Priam, king of Troy," when the transformation of the name of an ancient tribe into a modern city is so common and well-understood an occurrence as to be almost a rule: Treveri into Treves, Turones into Tours, Remi into Rheims, Parisii into Paris. It is, by the way, remarkable how very little use Mr. Buckle makes of any but English and French writers; he read, we are told, half a dozen languages, but we find very few traces of them in these "Commonplace Books."

So much for the character of the materials. As regards their scope, there are two or three wide fields of inquiry directly connected with his subject, in which he appears to have taken no interest. Institutions, for instance, he hardly notices; nor that wide class of subjects which Mr. Maine's and Mr. Tylor's books have made familiar to English readers. To be sure, both of these have written since Mr. Buckle; but the subject of primitive thought and customs, it would seem, could not fail to engage the attention of a philosophic student of civilization more than we find traces of here. We have already spoken of mythology, a branch of this subject which was well developed in his lifetime, but on which we find only a very few notes of very little value.

This leads us to the limits to which Mr. Buckle, unconsciously, no doubt, confined himself, and within which he did excellent service. By a history of civilization he meant a history of modern society. He VOL. CXVII. NO. 240. 15

took society as he found it in the sixteenth century, with very little and very inadequate study of the causes that brought it to that state. Starting from this, he followed out its development in the three centuries of modern history with remarkable power of analysis and breadth of view. Broad as it was, however, his view was not quite complete. Institutions, as we have said, possessed little interest for him. The entire range of events to which history usually confines itself too much he sedulously neglects, and flies into the opposite extreme of underrating their importance. But surely courts and camps, organized institutions and formal statutes, although they are not the sole objects worthy of attention, as our ancestors thought, are yet a part of society, and a very potent part.

This one-sidedness, a reaction from the one-sidedness of earlier historians, is manifested especially in two directions, in insisting overmuch upon the influence of general tendencies, to the exclusion of special and personal agencies; and in the exaggerated importance ascribed to physical as contrasted with moral and intellectual considerations. It is not that Mr. Buckle consciously ignored either personal agencies or moral considerations; he insists as strongly as one could wish upon the practical superiority of the higher part of man's nature; and again, no small part of his work—and perhaps the most generally interesting is devoted to an admirable analysis of the character and abilities of distinguished men, and the determination of the amount and kind of influence that they exerted. Nowhere does there exist a finer and more generous tribute to John Stuart Mill than in the review of his "Liberty," in the first of these three volumes. Nevertheless, Mr. Buckle is perhaps the foremost advocate of the theory that history is subject to laws as rigid as those which govern physical phenomena, and that the ablest man is impotent against the great movements of the race. Undoubtedly we must admit in the abstract that these human, intellectual influences are ultimately subject to law; but among these influences is that mighty power which we call, whether rightly or not, Free Will, a fact which we cannot go behind, and the influence of which in human development has been incalculable. Perhaps the time will come when this, too, will be sifted and analyzed, and every event of history shown to be produced by the operation of exact laws; but at present all that we can say is, that at various epochs in the world's history there has appeared among mankind an exceptional nature, which has excited an extraordinary influence upon its generation, and thus upon all future time. It is merely begging the question to say that these heroes of history appeared when the world was ripe for them, and that if they had not done the work somebody else would. There is no

more fallacious belief than that the man will come when the need is; the truth is and it is one of the saddest truths of human history — that it is very seldom the Luther, Washington, or William the Silent appears when he is wanted. Mr. Buckle says, "Whoever is accustomed to generalize, smiles within himself when he hears that Luther brought about the Reformation; . . . . that William III. saved our liberties, etc." It certainly seems to us, looking back now, that even without Luther the advance of human thought would have forced the Reformation; but, so far as we can see, circumstances were ripe for reform a hundred years before, and even in the sixteenth century any reformer of less vigorous genius than Luther must have met the fate of Huss. Even as it is, the advance of human thought was effectively crushed in Italy and Spain. Again, how do we know that the coalition that expelled James II. in 1688 could have held together a day but for the one man, William of Orange? Mr. Buckle's words would seem to mean that any nation that needs liberty will be sure to have it.

On the other point Mr. Buckle admits in theory the superiority of moral influences, but uses expressions strangely inconsistent with it, when it comes to the special case. "It may be broadly laid down that neither in the sixteenth century nor at any other period has any great revolution been permanently effected except with the view of remedying some palpable and physical evils" (Vol. I. p. 106). And more positively, "The history of the world shows that there has never been a revolution except when the people were groaning under the burden of taxation" (Vol. III. p. 633). Now Mr. Buckle did not really mean this, for he knew perfectly well that some of the greatest revolutions of history were wrought under the influence of religious excitement; and that, under this excitement, a community will submit to any physical suffering and deprivation without a word of complaint. But, while he knew and admitted this truth, his temper and turn of thought led his mind to dwell almost exclusively on physical causes. We find, too, in these passages, an illustration of an occasional habit of overstatement, which is, perhaps, his only fault of style. When he wishes to present a point very strongly, he permits himself hard and exaggerated expressions, which fit the mood he is then in, but which do not represent his real opinions. When, without qualification, he calls Mr. Justice Coleridge "an unjust and unrighteous judge," and dwells upon his "cold heart and shallow understanding" (Vol. I. pp. 60 and 62), he repeats precisely the fallacy that the Abolitionists were guilty of when they denied that a slaveholder could have any virtues. Nor would he in any other connection have said of Irenæus, Tertullian, and Cyprian that their "antiquity was the only possible claim they could