ed history. The earliest and
simplest was to record in the form of annals, without investigating,
whatever the writer could lay hold of, the only thread of connection
being the order of time, so that events have no more relation to each
other than so many beads on a string. Higher then this, because more
picturesque, and because living men take the place of mere names, are
the better class of chronicles, like Froissart's, in which the scenes
sometimes have the minute vividness of illumination, and the page seems
to take life and motion as we read. The annalist still survives, a kind
of literary dodo, in the "standard" historian, respectable,
immitigable,--with his philosophy of history, and his stereotyped
phrase, his one Amurath succeeding another, so very dead, so unlike
anything but historical characters, that we can scarce believe they
ever lived,--and only differing from his ancient congener of the
monastery by his skill in making ten words do the duty of one. His are
the fatal books without which no gentleman's library can be complete;
his the storied pages which ingenuous youth is invited to turn, and is
apt to turn four or five together. With him something is still always
sure to transpire in the course of these negotiations, still the
traditional door is opened to the inroad of democratic innovation,
still it is impossible to interpret the motives which inspired the
conduct of so-and-so in this particular emergency. So little does he
himself conceive of any possible past or future life in his characters
that he periphrases death into a disappearance from the page of
history, as if they were bodiless and soulless creatures of pen and
ink; mere names, not things. Picturesqueness he sternly avoids as the
Delilah of the philosophic mind, liveliness as a snare of the careless
investigator; and so, stopping both ears, he slips safely by those
Sirens, keeping safe that sobriety of style which his fellow-men call
by another name. Unhappy books, which we know by heart before we read
them, and which a mysterious superstition yet compels many unoffending
persons to read! What has not the benevolent reader had to suffer at
the hands of the so-called impartial historian, who, wholly
disinterested and disinteresting, writes with as mechanic an industry
and as little emotion as he would have brought to the weaving of calico
or the digging of potatoes, under other circumstances! Far truer, at
least to nature and to some conceiv