s has become unquestionable;
what was secret to them has been confided to us. They mark the
beginnings, and we the ends. From the fulness of their accounts we
recover much which had been lost to us in the general views of history,
and it is by this more intimate acquaintance with persons and
circumstances that we are enabled to correct the less distinct, and
sometimes the fallacious appearances in the page of the popular
historian. He who _only_ views things in masses will have no distinct
notion of any one particular; he may be a fanciful or a passionate
historian, but he is not the historian who will enlighten while he
charms.

But as secret history appears to deal in minute things, its connexion
with great results is not usually suspected. The circumstantiality of
its story, the changeable shadows of its characters, the redundance of
its conversations, and the many careless superfluities which egotism or
vanity may throw out, seem usually confounded with that small-talk
familiarly termed _gossiping_. But the _gossiping_ of a profound
politician or a vivacious observer, in one of their letters, or in their
memoirs, often, by a spontaneous stroke, reveals the individual, or by a
simple incident unriddles a mysterious event. We may discover the value
of these pictures of human nature, with which secret history abounds, by
an observation which occurred between two statesmen in office. Lord
Raby, our ambassador, apologised to Lord Bolingbroke, then secretary of
state, for troubling him with the minuter circumstances which occurred
in his conferences; in reply, the minister requests the ambassador to
continue the same manner of writing, and alleges an excellent reason:
"Those _minute circumstances_ give very great light to the general scope
and design of the _persons_ negotiated with. And I own that nothing
pleases me more in that valuable collection of the Cardinal D'Ossat's
letters, than the _naive_ descriptions which he gives of the looks,
gestures, and even tones of voice, of the persons he conferred with." I
regret to have to record the opinions of another noble author, who
recently has thrown out some degrading notions of secret history, and
particularly of the historians. I would have silently passed by a vulgar
writer, superficial, prejudiced, and uninformed, but as so many are yet
deficient in correct notions of _secret history_, it is but justice that
their representative should be heard before they are condemned