lectors, and to this these searching spirits
sacrificed their fortunes, their ease, and their days; but life would
have been too short to have decided on the intrinsic value of the
manuscripts flowing in a stream to the collectors; and suppression, even
of the disjointed reveries of madmen, or the sensible madness of
projectors, might have been indulging a capricious taste, or what has
proved more injurious to historical pursuits, that party-feeling which
has frequently annihilated the memorials of their adversaries.[253]

These manuscript collections now assume a formidable appearance. A
toilsome march over these "Alps rising over Alps!" a voyage in "a sea
without a shore!" has turned away most historians from their severer
duties; those who have grasped at early celebrity have been satisfied to
have given a new form to, rather than contributed to the new matter of
history. The very sight of these masses of history has terrified some
modern historians. When Pere Daniel undertook a history of France, the
learned Boivin, the king's librarian, opened for his inspection an
immense treasure of charters, and another of royal autograph letters,
and another of private correspondence; treasures reposing in fourteen
hundred folios! The modern historian passed two hours impatiently
looking over them, but frightened at another plunge into the gulf, this
Curtius of history would not immolate himself for his country! He wrote
a civil letter to the librarian for his "supernumerary kindness," but
insinuated that he could write a very readable history without any
further aid of such _paperasses_ or "paper-rubbish." Pere Daniel,
therefore, "quietly sat down to his history," copying others--a
compliment which was never returned by any one: but there was this
striking novelty in his "readable history," that according to the
accurate computation of Count Boulainvilliers, Pere Daniel's history of
France contains ten thousand blunders! The same circumstance has been
told me by a living historian of the late Gilbert Stuart; who, on some
manuscript volumes of letters being pointed out to him when composing
his history of Scotland, confessed that "what was already printed was
more than he was able to read!" and thus much for his theoretical
history, written to run counter to another theoretical history, being
Stuart versus Robertson! They equally depend on the simplicity of their
readers, and the charms of style! Another historian, Anquetil, the