cies; it is positive, or it
is relative. It is _positive_, when the facts are first given to the
world; a sort of knowledge which can only be drawn from our own personal
experience, or from contemporary documents preserved in their manuscript
state in public or in private collections; or it is _relative_, in
proportion to the knowledge of those to whom it is communicated, and
will be more or less valued according to the acquisitions of the reader;
and this inferior species of secret history is drawn from rare and
obscure books and other published authorities, often as scarce as
manuscripts.

Some experience I have had in those literary researches, where
cusiosity, ever wakeful and vigilant, discovers among contemporary
manuscripts new facts; illustrations of old ones; and sometimes detects,
not merely by conjecture, the concealed causes of many events; often
opens a scene in which some well-known personage is exhibited in a new
character; and thus penetrates beyond those generalising representations
which satisfy the superficial, and often cover the page of history with
delusion and fiction.

It is only since the latter institution of national libraries that these
immense collections of manuscripts have been formed; with us they are an
undescribable variety, usually classed under the vague title of
"state-papers."[252] The instructions of ambassadors, but more
particularly their own dispatches; charters and chronicles brown with
antiquity, which preserve a world which had been else lost for us, like
the one before the deluge; series upon series of private correspondence,
among which we discover the most confidential communications, designed
by the writers to have been destroyed by the hand which received them;
memoirs of individuals by themselves or by their friends, such as are
now published by the pomp of vanity, or the faithlessness of their
possessors; and the miscellaneous collections formed by all kinds of
persons, characteristic of all countries and of all eras, materials for
the history of man!--records of the force or of the feebleness of the
human understanding, and still the monuments of their passions.

The original collectors of these dispersed manuscripts were a race of
ingenious men, silent benefactors of mankind, to whom justice has not
yet been fully awarded; but in their fervour of accumulation, everything
in a manuscript state bore its spell; acquisition was the sole point
aimed at by our early col