INDEX ΤΟ THE FIRST TWENTY-FIVE VOLUMES OF THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. THE publisher of the North American Review has now in press, and, will shortly publish, a GENERAL INDEX to the work from its commencement to the end of the twenty-fifth volume. The plan on which this Journal has been conducted, and the great variety of subjects which it has embraced, make it a work of useful reference to all persons desirous of becoming familiar with the political and literary progress of the United States. In combining criticism with discussion, historical narrative with political investigation, and literary remark with the selection of important facts, it has become a repository of knowledge equally valuable to the scholar, and the general inquirer. It has been the object of the conductors of the work from the beginning, to confine its pages as closely as possible to the events, doings, and interests of this country. Few topics of general importance have come before the public within the last fifteen years, which have not been noticed and discussed, in a more or less extensive manner, in the North American Review. The Index will enable any person to ascertain immediately all the facts and particulars, that bear upon any one subject through the whole series of volumes. To persons, who have begun to take the work at any stage of its progress, the Index will be equally useful, as each reference will indicate both the volume and the page, methodically arranged, in which the incident or passage referred to is contained. And even those persons, who possess no part of the work itself, may be benefited by such a collection of references, which will point out to them the sources of much knowledge that they may desire to attain. The Index will be printed in the same style of execution as the current numbers of the Review, and make a volume of a suitable size to be bound up uniformly with the work itself. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. No. LXV. NEW SERIES, NO. XL. OCTOBER, 1829. ART. I.-A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada. By Fray Antonio Agapida. 1829. 2 vols. 12mo. Philadelphia. Carey, Lea, & Carey. ALMOST as many qualifications may be demanded for a perfect historian, indeed the Abbé Mably has enumerated as many, as Cicero stipulates for a perfect orator. He must be strictly impartial; a lover of truth under all circumstances, and ready to declare it at all hazards; he must be deeply conversant with whatever may bring into relief the character of the people he is depicting,-not merely with their laws, constitution, general resources, and all the other more visible parts of the machinery of government, but with the nicer moral and social relations, the informing spirit, which gives life to the whole, but escapes the eye of a vulgar observer. If he has to do with other ages and nations, he must transport himself into them, expatriating himself, as it were, from his own, in order to get the very form and pressure of the times he is delineating. He must be conscientious in his attention to geography, chronology, &c., an inaccuracy in which has been fatal to more than one good philosophical history; and mixed up with all these drier details, he must display the various powers of a novelist or dramatist, throwing his characters into suitable lights and shades, disposing his scenes so as to awaken and maintain an unflagging interest, and diffusing over the whole that finished style, without which his work will only become a magazine of materials for the more VOL. XXIX.-No. 65. 38 elegant edifices of subsequent writers. He must be-in short, there is no end to what a perfect historian must be and do. It is hardly necessary to add, that such a monster never did and never will exist. But, although we cannot attain to perfect excellence in this, or any other science in this world, considerable approaches have been made to it, and different individuals have arisen at different periods, possessed, in an eminent degree, of some of the principal qualities, which go to make up the aggregate of the character we have been describing. The peculiar character of these qualities will generally be determined in the writer, by that of the age in which he lives. Thus the earlier historians of Greece and Rome sought less to instruct than to amuse. They filled their pictures with dazzling and seductive images. In their researches into antiquity, they were not startled by the marvellous, like the more prudish critics of our day, but welcomed it as likely to stir the imaginations of their readers. They seldom interrupted the story by impertinent reflection. They bestowed infinite pains on the costume, the style of their history, and, in fine, made everything subordinate to the main purpose of conveying an elegant and interesting narrative. Such was Herodotus, such Livy, and such too, the earlier Chroniclers of modern Europe, whose pages glow with the picturesque and brilliant pageants of an age of chivalry. These last, as well as Herodotus, may be said to have written in the infancy of their nations, when the imagination is more willingly addressed than the understanding. Livy, who wrote in a riper age, lived nevertheless in a court and a period, where tranquillity and opulence disposed the minds of men to elegant recreation, rather than to severe discipline and exer tion. As, however, the nation advanced in years, or became oppressed with calamity, history also assumed a graver complexion. Fancy gave way to reflection. The mind, no longer invited to rove abroad in quest of elegant and alluring pictures, was driven back upon itself, speculated more deeply, and sought for support under the external evils of life, in moral and philosophical truth. Description was abandoned for the study of character; men took the place of events; and the romance was converted into a drama. Thus it was with Tacitus, who lived under those imperial monsters, who turned Rome into a charnel-house; and his compact narratives are filled with moral and political axioms sufficiently numerous to make a volume; and, indeed, Brotier has made one of them in his edition of the historian. The same philosophical spirit animates the page of Thucydides, himself one of the principal actors in the long, disastrous struggle, that terminated in the ruin of his nation. But, notwithstanding the deeper and more comprehensive thought of these later writers, there was still a wide difference between the complexion given to history under their hands, and that which it has assumed in our time. We would not be understood as determining, but simply as discriminating their relative merits. The Greeks and Romans lived when the world, at least when the mind, was in its comparative infancy; when fancy and feeling were most easily, and loved most to be excited. They possessed a finer sense of beauty than the moderns. They were infinitely more solicitous about the external dress, the finish, and all that makes up the poetry of a composition. Poetry, indeed, mingled in their daily pursuits, as well as pleasures; it determined their gravest deliberations. The command of their armies was given, not to the best gene ral, but oft-times to the most eloquent orator. Poetry entered into their religion, and created those beautiful monuments of architecture and sculpture, which the breath of time has not tarnished. It entered into their philosophy,—and no one confessed its influence more deeply, than he who would have banished it from his Republic. It informed the souls of their orators, and prompted those magnificent rhapsodies, which fall lifeless enough from the stammering tongue of the schoolboy, but which once awak'd to extacy the living' populace of Athens. It entered deeply even into their latest history. It was first exhibited in the national chronicles of Homer. It lost little of its coloring, though it conformed to the general laws of prosaic composition, under Herodotus. And it shed a pleasing grace over the sober pages of Thucydides and Xenophon. The Muse, indeed, was stript of her wings. She no longer made her airy excursions into the fairy regions of romance. But as she moved along the earth, the sweetest wild-flowers seemed to spring up unbidden at her feet. We would not be understood as implying that Grecian history was ambitious of florid or meretricious ornament. Nothing, indeed, could be more simple than its general plan and execution; far too simple, we fear, for imitation in our day. Thus Thucydides, for example, distributes his events most inartificially, according to the regular revolutions of the seasons; and the rear of every section is brought up with the same eternal repetition of ἔτος τῷ πολέμῳ ἐτέλευτα τῷδε, ὃν Θουκυδίδης ξυνέγραψε. But in the fictitious speeches, with which he has illumined his narrative, he has left the choicest specimens of Attic eloquence; and he elaborated his general diction into so high a finish that Demosthenes, as is well known, in the hope of catching some of his rhetorical graces, thought him worthy of being thrice transcribed with his own hand. Far different has been the general conception, as well as execution, of history by the moderns. In this, however, it was accommodated to the exigencies of their situation, and, as with the ancients, still reflected the spirit of the age. If the Greeks lived in the infancy of civilization, the contemporaries of our day may be said to have reached its prime. The same revolution has taken place as in the growth of an individual. The vivacity of the imagination has been blunted, but reason is matured. The credulity of youth has given way to habits of cautious inquiry, and sometimes to a phlegmatic scepticism. The productions, indeed, which first appeared in the doubtful twilight of morning, exhibited the love of the marvellous, the light and fanciful spirit of a green and tender age. But a new order of things commenced, as the stores of classical learning were unrolled to the eye of the scholar. The mind seemed at once to enter upon the rich inheritance, which the sages of antiquity had been ages in accumulating, and to start, as it were, from the very point where they had terminated their career. Thus raised by learning and experience, it was enabled to take a wider view of its proper destiny; to understand that truth is the greatest good, and to discern the surest method of arriving at it. The Christian doctrine, too, inculcated that the end of being was best answered by a life of active usefulness, and not by one of abstract contemplation, or selfish indulgence, or passive fortitude, as variously taught by the various sects of antiquity. Hence a new standard of moral excellence was formed. Pursuits were estimated by their practical results; and the useful was preferred to the ornamental. Poetry, confined to her own sphere, was no longer permitted to mingle in the councils of philosophy. Intellectual and physical science, instead of floating on vague speculation as with the ancients, was established on careful induction and experiment. The orator, |