e human race. Nothing ever has, or ever
can do so, but such annals as, independent of local or family interest,
or antiquarian curiosity, are permanently attractive by the grandeur and
interest of the events they recount, and the elegance or pathos of the
language in which they are delivered. Such are the histories of
Herodotus and Thucydides, the annals of Sallust and Tacitus, the
narratives of Homer, Livy, and Gibbon. If instead of aiming at producing
one uniform work of this description, flowing from the same pen, couched
in the same style, reflecting the same mind, the historian presents his
readers with a collection of quotations from chronicles, state papers,
or _jejune_ annalists, he has entirely lost sight of the principles of
his art. He has not made a picture, but merely put together a collection
of original sketches; he has not built a temple, but only piled together
the unfinished blocks of which it was to be composed.

This is the great fault into which Barante, Sismondi, and Michelet have
fallen. In their anxiety to be faithful, they have sometimes become
tedious; in their desire to recount nothing that was not true, they have
narrated much that was neither material nor interesting. Barante, in
particular, has utterly ruined his otherwise highly interesting history
of the Dukes of Burgundy by this error. We have bulls of the Popes,
marriage-contracts, feudal charters, treaties of alliance, and other
similar instruments, quoted _ad longum_ in the text of the history, till
no one but an enthusiastic antiquary or half-cracked genealogist can go
on with the work. The same mistake is painfully conspicuous in
Sismondi's _Histoire des Francais_. Fifteen out of his valuable thirty
volumes are taken up with quotations from public records or instruments.
It is impossible to conceive a greater mistake, in a composition which
is intended not merely for learned men or antiquaries, but for the great
body of ordinary readers. The authors of these works are so immersed in
their own ideas and researches, they are so enamoured of their favourite
antiquities, that they forget that the world in general is far from
sharing their enthusiasm, and that many things, which to them are of the
highest possible interest and importance, seem to the great bulk of
readers immaterial or tedious. The two Thierrys have, in a great
measure, avoided this fatal error; for, though their narratives are as
much based on original and contemporary a