manners. Montesquieu and
Voltaire personified these tendencies. The _Essai sur les moeurs_ is
the first sketch, and, in some respects, the masterpiece of history thus
conceived. The detailed narration of political and military events was
still regarded as the main work of history, but to this it now became
customary to add, generally by way of supplement or appendix, a sketch
of the "progress of the human mind." The expression "history of
civilisation" appears before the end of the eighteenth century. At the
same time German university professors, especially at Goettingen, were
creating, in order to supply educational needs, the new form of the
historical "manual," a methodical collection of carefully justified
facts, with no literary or other pretensions. Collections of historical
facts, made with a view to aid in the interpretation of literary texts,
or out of mere curiosity in regard to the things of the past, had
existed from ancient times; but the medleys of Athenaeus and Aulus
Gellius, or the vaster and better arranged compilations of the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance, are by no means to be compared with the
"scientific manuals" of which the German professors then gave the
models. These professors, moreover, contributed towards the clearing up
of the vague, general notion which the philosophers had of
"civilisation," for they applied themselves to the organisation of the
history of languages, of literatures, of the arts, of religions, of law,
of economic phenomena, and so on, as so many separate branches of study.
Thus the domain of history was greatly enlarged, and scientific, that
is, simple and objective, exposition began to compete with the
rhetorical or sententious, patriotic or philosophical ideals of
antiquity.

This competition was at first timid and obscure, for the beginning of
the nineteenth century was marked by a literary renaissance which
renovated historical literature. Under the influence of the romantic
movement historians sought for more vivid methods of exposition than
those employed by their predecessors, methods better adapted to strike
the imagination and rouse the emotions of the public, by filling the
mind with poetical images of vanished realities. Some endeavoured to
preserve the peculiar colouring of the original documents, which they
adapted: "Charmed with the contemporary narratives," says Barante, "I
have endeavoured to write a consecutive account which should borrow from
them thei