old lady of Rome in utter
abomination, and governed in matters of religion by the Presbyterian
forms, and the tenets of Calvin. It is not to be wondered at, that the
annalist of the countries of Tasso and Dante, of Titian and Machiavel,
of Petrarch and Leonardo da Vinci, of Galileo and Michael Angelo,
should conceive, that in no other state of society is such scope
afforded for mental cultivation and the development of the highest
efforts of genius. Still less is it surprising, that the historian of
the crusade against the Albigenses, of the unheard-of atrocities of
Simon de Montfort, of the wholesale massacres, burnings, and
torturings, which have brought such indelible disgrace on the Roman
priesthood, should feel deeply interested in a faith which has
extricated his own country from the abominable persecution. But still,
this indulgence of these natural, and in some respects praiseworthy,
feelings, has blinded Sismondi to the insurmountable evils of a
confederacy of small republics at this time, amidst surrounding,
powerful, and monarchical states; and to the inappreciable blessings
of the Christian faith, and even of the Romish superstition, before
the period when these infamous cruelties began, when their warfare was
only with the oppressor, their struggles with the destroyers of the
human race.

But truth is great, and will prevail. Those just views of modern
society, which neither the luminous eye of Robertson, nor the learned
research and philosophic mind of Sismondi could reach, have been
brought forward by a writer of surpassing ability, whose fame as an
historian and a philosopher is for the time overshadowed by the more
fleeting celebrity of the statesman and the politician. We will not
speak of M. GUIZOT in the latter character, much as we are tempted to
do so, by the high and honourable part which he has long borne in
European diplomacy, and the signal ability with which, in the midst of
a short-sighted and rebellious generation, clamouring, as the Romans
of old, for the _multis utile bellum_, he has sustained his
sovereign's wise and magnanimous resolution to maintain peace. We are
too near the time to appreciate the magnitude of these blessings; men
would not now believe through what a crisis the British empire,
unconscious of its danger, passed, when M. Thiers was dismissed, three
years and a half ago, by Louis Philippe, and M. Guizot called to the
helm. But when the time arrives, as arrive it will, th