and those who rage with an avidity of fame or profit will
gladly taste the fruit which they cannot mature. Researches too remotely
sought after, or too slowly acquired, or too fully detailed, would be so
many obstructions in the smooth texture of a narrative. Our theoretical
historians write from some particular and preconceived result; unlike
Livy, and De Thou, and Machiavel, who describe events in their natural
order, these cluster them together by the fanciful threads of some
political or moral theory, by which facts are distorted, displaced, and
sometimes altogether omitted! One single original document has sometimes
shaken into dust their Palladian edifice of history. At the moment Hume
was sending some sheets of his history to press, Murdin's State Papers
appeared. And we are highly amused and instructed by a letter of our
historian to his rival, Robertson, who probably found himself often in
the same forlorn situation. Our historian discovered in that collection
what compelled him to retract his preconceived system--he hurries to
stop the press, and paints his confusion and his anxiety with all the
ingenuous simplicity of his nature. "We are all in the wrong!" he
exclaims. Of Hume I have heard that certain manuscripts at the State
Paper Office had been prepared for his inspection during a fortnight,
but he never could muster courage to pay his promised visit. Satisfied
with the common accounts, and the most obvious sources of history, when
librarian at the Advocates' Library, where yet may be examined the books
he used, marked by his hand, he spread the volumes about the sofa, from
which he rarely rose to pursue obscure inquiries, or delay by fresh
difficulties the page which every day was growing under his charming
pen. A striking proof of his careless happiness I discovered in his
never referring to the perfect edition of "Whitelocke's Memorials" of
1732, but to the old truncated and faithless one of 1682.

Dr. Birch was a writer with no genius for composition, but one to whom
British history stands more indebted than to any superior author; his
incredible love of labour, in transcribing with his own hand a large
library of manuscripts from originals dispersed in public and in private
repositories, has enriched the British Museum by thousands of the most
authentic documents of genuine secret history. He once projected a
collection of original historical letters, for which he had prepared a
preface, where I find