turdy a critic
that he scorned to read the fictitious Hardenberg, although the work
contains good material. He more than shared the unspiritual temper of
the school, and fearing alike the materialistic and the religious
basis of history, he insisted on confining it to affairs of state.
Having a better eye for institutions than his master, and an intellect
adapted to affairs, he was one of the first to turn from the study of
texts to modern times and burning questions. In erudition and remote
research he fully equalled those who were scholars and critics, and
nothing else; but his tastes called him to a different career. He said
of himself that he was three parts a politician, so that only the
miserable remnant composed the professor. Sybel approached the
Revolution through Burke, with essays on his French and Irish policy.
He stood firmly to the doctrine that men are governed by descent, that
the historic nation prevails invincibly over the actual nation, that
we cannot cast off our pedigree. Therefore the growth of things in
Prussia seemed to him to be almost normal, and acceptable in contrast
with the condition of a people which attempted to constitute itself
according to its own ideas. Political theory as well as national
antagonism allowed him no sympathy with the French, and no wonder he
is generally under-estimated in France. He stands aloof from the
meridian of Paris, and meditates high up in Central Europe on the
conflagration of 1789, and the trouble it gave to the world in
general. The distribution of power in France moves him less than the
distribution of power in Europe, and he thinks forms of government
less important than expansion of frontier. He describes the fall of
Robespierre as an episode in the partition of Poland. His endeavour is
to assign to the Revolution its place in international history.

Once it was said, in disparagement of Niebuhr and other historians,
that when you ask a German for a black coat he offers you a white
sheep, and leaves you to effect the transformation yourself. Sybel
belongs to a later age, and can write well, but heavily, and without
much light or air. His introduction, published in 1853, several years
before the volume of Tocqueville, has so much in common with it, that
it was suggested that he might have read the earlier article by
Tocqueville, which John Mill translated for the _Westminster Review_.
But Sybel assured me that he had not seen it. He had obtained access
t