it, of this class stand
such figures as that of Douglas Jerrold, a sort of very inferior Hook on
the other side of politics, with a dash (also very inferior) of Hood,
whose _Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures_ and similar things were very
popular at and a little before the middle of the century, but whose
permanent literary value is of the smallest, if indeed it can be said to
exist. But of these--not a few of them more worthy if less prominent in
their day than Jerrold--there could be no end; and there would be little
profit in trying to reach any. The successful "contributor," by the laws
of the case, climbs on the shoulders of his less successful mates even
more than elsewhere; and the very impetus which lands him on the height
rejects them into the depths.

CHAPTER V

THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY

After the brilliant group of historians whose work illustrated the close
of the period covered by the preceding volume, it was some time before a
historical writer of the first rank again appeared in England; and there
were reasons for this. Not that, as in the case of purely creative
literature, in prose as in verse, there is any natural or actual lull
between different successive periods in this case; on the contrary the
writing of history is more likely to be stimulated by example, and
requires rather the utmost talent than positive genius, except in those
rare cases which, as in other departments, are not to be accounted for,
either in their presence or in their absence, by observation or
inference. But in the first place the greatest minds of the first
generation of which we have to take account, who were born about the
beginning of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, were, partly
by time and partly by chance, directed for the most part either into
poetry, or into politics, or into active life; and the five and twenty
years of the Revolutionary War in which they passed their manhood were
more likely to provide materials for history, than history itself.

Yet history, after the example given by Hume, by Robertson, and above
all by Gibbon, was not at all likely to cease, nor did some men of great
talents in other ways fail to betake themselves to it. Godwin was a
historian, and, considering his strong prejudices, the unkindness of
fortune (for history demands leisure almost as much as poetry), and some
defects of knowledge, not a contemptible historian in his way.
Mackintosh, intended for a philosophe