regarded human
events only as they were grouped round two or three great men, or as
they were influenced by the speculations of men of letters and
science. The history of France he stigmatized as savage and worthless
till the reign of Louis XIV.; the Russians he looked upon as bitter
barbarians till the time of Peter the Great. He thought the
philosophers alone all in all; till they arose, and a sovereign
appeared, who collected them round his throne, and shed on them the
rays of royal favour, human events were not worth narrating; they were
merely the contests of one set of savages plundering another.
Religion, in his eyes, was a mere priestly delusion to enslave and
benighten mankind; from its oppression the greatest miseries of modern
times had flowed; the first step in the emancipation of the human mind
was to chase for ever from the earth those sacerdotal tyrants. The
most free-thinking historian will now admit, that these views are
essentially erroneous; he will allow that, viewing Christianity merely
as a human institution, its effect in restraining the violence of
feudal anarchy was incalculable; long anterior to the date of the
philosophers, he will look for the broad foundation on which national
character and institutions, for good or for evil, have been formed.
Voltaire was of great service to history, by turning it from courts
and camps to the progress of literature, science, and the arts--to the
delineation of manners, and the preparation of anecdotes descriptive
of character; but, notwithstanding all his talent, he never got a
glimpse of the general causes which influence society. He gave us the
history of philosophy, but not the philosophy of history.

The ardent genius and pictorial eye of Gibbon rendered him an
incomparable delineator of events; and his powerful mind made him
seize the _general_ and characteristic features of society and
manners, as they appear in different parts of the world, as well as
the traits of individual greatness. His descriptions of the Roman
empire in the zenith of its power, as it existed in the time of
Augustus--of its decline and long-protracted old age, under
Constantine and his successors on the Byzantine throne--of the manners
of the pastoral nations, who, under different names, and for a
succession of ages, pressed upon and at last overturned the empire--of
the Saracens, who, issuing from the lands of Arabia, with the Koran in
one hand and the cimeter in the other, u