job: four octavo volumes in only ten times the number of months, even in
our days of locomotive celerity, would be thought rather a suspicious
piece of literary handiwork; and besides the indecent haste, so
incompatible with thoroughness, the misrepresentations of Smollet are
patent. Goldsmith, as unambitious in research as he was genial in
expression, made so agreeable a story, that, with all its imperfection,
his sketch still finds readers; while the rarely quoted work of Henry
most conveniently enumerates, at the end of each reign, details
economical and social which identify and illustrate both period and
progress in Anglo-Saxon civilization. As a copious and consecutive
record of the salient incidents in modern Continental history,--so
needful now for reference, and the diverse phases of which are so widely
chronicled in the memoirs, the journals, the diplomatic correspondence,
and what may be called the incidental history of the period,--the plan
of Alison's work might have achieved a triumph of industry and skill,
valuable as well as interesting to general readers and professional
writers: but the political opinions, with the partial feelings they
engender, continually distort the view and influence the estimate of
this positive yet pleasant historian; while his almost wilful blunders,
like the errors of Lord Mahon in regard to the American War, have
been repeatedly demonstrated. Mackintosh philosophized about events,
measures, and men, better than he described either. Sharon Turner nobly
illustrates the value of intrepid research and patient collation.
Mitford represents the aristocratic as Grote the democratic element in
Grecian history. Tytler wrote of the past in the life of nations with
the exclusive reliance on written proof that a conveyancer places upon
title-deeds, and beside the glowing and harmonious pictures of later
annalists such writing now appears obsolete. Napier describes battles
scientifically, and Carlyle revolutions melodramatically,--each with
original power, in their respective methods,--while Miss Strickland
brings to the record of queenly sorrows and duties a woman's sympathetic
prepossessions.

Since those quaintly simple and emphatic statements which, under the
name of Froissart's Chronicles, seem to perpetuate the instinctive
notion of History, as an honest and earnest, but unadorned and
unelaborate narrative of military and political facts,--not only has
there been a continual refine