who would keep chronicling the dry events would miss
writing a history. He must fathom the social condition of the
peasantry, the townsmen, the middle-classes, the nobles, and the clergy
(Christian or Pagan), in each period--how they fed, dressed, armed, and
housed themselves. He must exhibit the nature of the government, the
manners, the administration of law, the state of useful and fine arts,
of commerce, of foreign relations. He must let us see the decay and
rise of great principles and conditions--till we look on a tottering
sovereignty, a rising creed, an incipient war, as distinctly as, by
turning to the highway, we can see the old man, the vigorous youth, or
the infant child. He must paint--the council robed in its hall--the
priest in his temple--the conspirator--the outlaw--the judge--the
general--the martyr. The arms must clash and shine with genuine, not
romantic, likeness; and the brigades or clans join battle, or divide in
flight, before the reader's thought. Above all, a historian should be
able to seize on character, not vaguely eulogising nor cursing; but
feeling and expressing the pressure of a great mind on his time, and on
after-times.

Such things may be done partly in disquisitions, as in Michelet's
"France"; but they must now be done in narrative; and nowhere, not even
in Livy, is there a finer specimen of how all these things may be done
by narrative than in Augustine Thierry's "Norman Conquest" and
"Merovingian Scenes." The only danger to be avoided in dealing with so
long a period in Thierry's way is the continuing to attach importance
to a once great influence, when it has sunk to be an exceptive power.
He who thinks it possible to dash off a profoundly coloured and shaded
narrative like this of Thierry's will find himself bitterly wrong. Even
a great philosophical view may much more easily be extemporised than
this lasting and finished image of past times.

The greatest vice in such a work would be bigotry--bigotry of race or
creed. We know a descendant of a great Milesian family who supports the
Union, because he thinks the descendants of the Anglo-Irish--his
ancestors' foes--would mainly rule Ireland, were she independent. The
opposite rage against the older races is still more usual. A religious
bigot is altogether unfit, incurably unfit, for such a task; and the
writer of such an Irish history must feel a love for all sects, a
philosophical eye to the merits and demerits of all, and a sol