of
nations, than upon his universal acquaintance with general literature
and the sister arts of politics and philosophy. It was for the
treacherous and elegant Bolingbroke to reduce the noble art of
Thucydides from the height of sublimity and grandeur to the parlor level
of the conversations of the Hotel de Rambouillet, to introduce into the
most serious political disquisitions, concerning perhaps the welfare of
society, an imperceptible yet carefully elaborated and most effective
tone of levity that speedily proved disastrous to their object. It was
be who forced the vapid but imposing ceremonial of the _bon ton_ into
the records of church and state; who clothed his empty but pompous
periods with the ermine of royalty, to ensure them the reverence of a
deluded multitude; who stripped Virtue of her ancient prerogatives, and
fed her with the crumbs from his table. His polished diction, undeniable
talent and fine acquisitions served most unhappily to disguise his real
poverty of sentiment, and for a time, at least, diverted the current of
popular feeling from the true, beautiful, and reliable in early
literature and art, no less than in history. With what success his
faulty and imperfect theories were engrafted upon the literature of his
nation, the learned and sagacious Schlosser conclusively proves in his
_History of the Eighteenth Century_. Says this ripe scholar and deep
thinker, 'All that Bolingbroke ridicules as tedious and without talent,
all that he laughs at as useless and without taste, all that which,
urged by his labors and those of his like-minded associates, had for
eighty years disappeared from ancient history, is again brought back in
our day. So short is the triumph of falsehood.' Well may we pervert the
verses of Horace,--

'Nullae placere diu, nec vivere _historiae_ possunt
Quae scribuntur aquae potoribus.'

That was an ungenerous fountain whence Bolingbroke drank even his
chilling draughts of inspiration. Splendid, in sooth, as the great
_Brunnen_ of the luckless Abderites of Wieland, with its sea-god of
marble surrounded by a stately train of nymphs, tritons, and dolphins,
from whose jets the water only dripped like tears, because, says the
writer, with grave naivete, 'there was scarcely enough to moisten the
lips of a single nymph.' Truly the purple wine of inspiration is as
necessary to the historian as to the poet; and if the laughing Bacchus
that holds the beaker to the student's eager lips