the English than the execution
of Louis in the French revolution. This history is clear, lucid, and
valuable; but it is written with little eloquence, and has met with no
great success: the author's powers were not of the dramatic or
pictorial kind necessary to paint that dreadful story. These were
editorial or industrial labours unworthy of Guizot's mind; it was when
he delivered lectures from the chair of history in Paris, that his
genius shone forth in its proper sphere and its true lustre.

His _Civilisation en France_, in five volumes, _Civilisation
Europeenne_, and _Essais sur l'Histoire de France_, each in one
volume, are the fruits of these professional labours. The same
profound thought, sagacious discrimination, and lucid view, are
conspicuous in them all; but they possess different degrees of
interest to the English reader. The _Civilisation en France_ is the
groundwork of the whole, and it enters at large into the whole
details, historical, legal, and antiquarian, essential for its
illustration, and the proof of the various propositions which it
contains. In the _Civilisation Europeenne_, and _Essays on the History
of France_, however, the general results are given with equal
clearness and greater brevity. We do not hesitate to say, that they
appear to us to throw more light on the history of society in modern
Europe, and the general progress of mankind, from the exertions of its
inhabitants, than any other works in existence; and it is of them,
especially the first, that we propose to give our readers some
account.

The most important event which ever occurred in the history of
mankind, is the one concerning which contemporary writers have given
us the least satisfactory accounts. Beyond all doubt the overthrow of
Rome by the Goths was the most momentous catastrophe which has
occurred on the earth since the deluge; yet, if we examine either the
historians of antiquity or the earliest of modern times, we find it
wholly impossible to understand to what cause so great a catastrophe
had been owing. What gave, in the third and fourth centuries, so
prodigious an impulse to the northern nations, and enabled them, after
being so long repelled by the arms of Rome, finally to prevail over
it? What, still more, so completely paralysed the strength of the
empire during that period, and produced that astonishing weakness in
the ancient conquerors of the world, which rendered them the easy prey
of those whom they had