rt of inquiry we examine witnesses as to facts, not opinions.
But the historian reads mankind in cities; the philosopher in the
clouds. He who is anxious for the truth should look abroad on the plains
or in the woods, where man's first prerogative, the giving of names, was
exercised. His knowledge of nature must be wretchedly imperfect who
thinks that no grand outline of truth can possibly exist in the dim
records of human recollection ere the pen of the scholar was employed to
depict the scenes that opinion or prejudice had created. How many pages
of Clarendon's, Hume's, or even Robertson's history would be cancelled
if we had access to all the recollections of each event, and the
evidence of the unlettered vulgar who had witnessed the fact brought to
our notice, even through the mouthpiece of tradition!

There is more truth than comes to the surface in that speech put into
the lips of the father of lies by a late poet, where he says--

"The Bible's your book--history mine."

Savigny makes the same charge against one class of historians in his own
country:--"However discordant," says he, "their other doctrines may
appear, they agree in the practice of adopting each a particular system,
and in viewing all historical evidence as so many proofs of its truth."

Were it not for that contempt we have already noticed as the offspring
of pride and dogmatism, and which, in the administration of the republic
of letters, has been entertained and openly proclaimed for every kind of
history except that which its own acts may have originated, we should
have been in possession of thousands of facts and notions now overlaid
and lost irrecoverably to the philosopher and the historian.

The origin and the progress of nations, next after the school divinity
of the Middle Ages, has occasioned the most copious outpouring of
conjectural criticism. The simple mode of research suggested by the
works of Verstegan, Camden, and Spelman would, long before this time,
have made the early history of the British tribes as clear as it is now
obscure. Analogies in the primary sounds of each dialect; similarity or
difference in regard to objects of the first, or of a common necessity;
rules or laws for the succession of property, which are as various as
the tribes which overran the empire; the nature, agreement, or
dissimilarity in religious worship with those vestiges of its ritual and
celebration which, by the "pious frauds" and connivance of