e Crusades_. In his _De la Religion_ (1824-31) Benjamin Constant,
in Restoration days, traced the progress of the religious sentiment,
cleaving its way through dogma and ordinance to a free and full
development. Sismondi (1773-1842), in his _Histoire des Francais_,
investigated such sources as were accessible to him, studied economic
facts, and in a liberal spirit exhibited the life of the nation, and
not merely the acts of monarchs or the intrigues of statesmen. His
wide, though not profound, erudition comprehended Italy as well as
France; the _Histoire des Republiques Italiennes_ is the chart of
a difficult labyrinth. The method of disinterested narrative, which
abstains from ethical judgments, propounds no thesis, and aims at
no doctrinaire conclusion, was followed by Barante in his _Histoire
des Ducs de Bourgogne_. The precept of Quintilian expresses his rule:
"Scribitur ad narrandum, non ad probandum."

Each school of nineteenth-century thought has had its historical
exponents. Liberal Catholicism is represented by Montalembert,
Ozanam, De Broglie; socialism, by Louis Blanc; a patriotic Caesarism,
by Thiers; the democratic school, by Michelet and Quinet; philosophic
liberalism, by Guizot, Mignet, and Tocqueville.

AUGUSTIN THIERRY (1795-1856) nobly led the way. Some pages of
Chateaubriand, full of the sentiment of the past, were his first
inspiration; at a later time the influence of Fauriel and the novels
of Walter Scott, "the master of historical divination," confirmed
him in his sense of the uses of imagination as an aid to the scholarship
of history. For a time he acted as secretary to Saint-Simon, and under
his influence proposed a scheme for a community of European peoples
which should leave intact the nationality of each. Then he parted
from his master, to pursue his way in independence. It seemed to him
that the social condition and the revolutions of modern Europe had
their origins in the Germanic invasions, and especially in the Norman
Conquest of England. As he read the great collection of the original
historians of France and Gaul, he grew indignant against the modern
travesties named history, indignant against writers without
erudition, who could not see, and writers without imagination, who
could not depict. The conflict of races--Saxons and Normans in England,
Gauls and Franks in his own country--remained with him as a dominant
idea, but he would not lose himself in generalisations; he would
involv