WE have before us the remarks of a very amiable and accomplished gentleman upon one of the most important subjects, that can be brought within the range of critical or philosophical vision. To say that he has performed all that he proposed to himself, or has presented to our eyes the panorama which may have been present to his own, is more than the writer will expect, or than truth permits us to affirm. The chief error of the work resides in its title. It is not a history of civilisation, but a commentary upon it; not a series of views composing a circular landscape, every object clearly defined, the distances happily marked, and the light and shade naturally disposed; but a collection of detached and distinct views, in themselves pleasing and important, but deficient in unity of expression and harmony of combination. We would not be misunderstood. The historian of civilisation must assuredly be guided by certain seasons marked by striking events, linked with those that preceded, and influencing those that followed them; epochs fulfilling their Greek derivation, by furnishing high places from which the eye looks back over the past and forward over the future. Of this kind, in Scriptural history, are the creation of Adam, the deluge, the call of Abraham; and in modern

history, the age of Charlemagne, from which, as from a mountain-top, the old empire of the world is seen to recede and set, while the new rises with a faint but gathering splendour. The narrative of the progress of civilisation contains within itself the elements of all history-the flower, the essence; whatever is picturesque, or beautiful, or ennobling, or magnificent; the enterprise of commerce, the enchantment of art, and the embellishments of literature; the old manor-house sending forth its little band to fight for the Holy Sepulchre, the merchant over his ledgers at Amsterdam, or Titian behind the sunny window in Venice; each and all are representatives of the figures that await the pencil of the annalist of civilisation. How is he to arrange his subject? how group his crowding sitters? how impart to his drawing force and animation, and to his colouring brilliancy and truth? How ought history, in general, to be written? According to Fox, it should assume the shape of continued narration, neither deviating into commentary nor admitting the illustration of notes-a picture-gallery, in which nothing of the exhibitor is to be seen except the wand. Thus he narrowed the whole duty of the author into the small limits of telling

VOL. XXXIV. NO. CXCIX.

B

the story of the times, which he might select for the subject of inquiry. The skilful dissection of motives-even the brief and instructive summary of character at the close of a chapter-did not obtain the approbation of this severe critic. History wandered beyond the ropes when it dropped the simple and unassuming tone of narration. It is easy to perceive how such restrictions must cripple the free motion and impair the energy of history. It puts its judicial, not less than its critical functions in abeyance. Greek and Latin history might have been so composed, since there were few conflicting opinions to reconcile; no field of combat to measure out for a Burnet and a Lingard, a Clarendon or a Carlyle; earlier writers were not to be analysed and valued, previous estimates of virtue or vice to be contrasted and balanced. Tests of poison are useless where no murder has been committed nor any suspicion awakened.

One grievous defect, however, the claborate and comparative style of writing history has certainly introduced. The profuse sowing of a page with notes we are most unwilling to defend. However valuable and advantageous in their immediate or ultimate uses, they can only be regarded as excrescences from the original design. Goldsmith, in a preface to an intended history of the world, speaks of notes as the baggage of a bad writer; and adds, that whoever undertakes to write commentaries upon himself will always remain, without a rival, his own commentator. They corrupt and injure our modern reprints of old poets. In Milton, Paradise is lost a second time in the cloud of learned references to every writer that went before him; while Shakspeare experiences the inglorious fate of his own stout gentleman at Windsor, and is positively stifled between the heaps of very inodorous old clothes, which his industrious commentators have collected from all the poetical wardrobes of the sixteenth seventeenth centuries. Does it never occur to the editorial memory, that our delight in looking at a picture of Raffaelle would be greatly marred, by observing sketches in the corner of all his obligations

and

or

to Albert Durer and others; or that the colouring of Sebastian del Piombo would become indifferent if our attention were to be importunately drawn by a separate mark, to every outline of nose limb which he owed to the helping hand of Michael Angelo? With what deep disgust should we walk up to the most sumptuous palace through a long avenue of fingerposts! nor would the way to the Parthenon or Coliseum be rendered more agreeable by a chattering crowd of link-boys.

The deformity of notes is not beyond the skill of criticism to mitigate or remove. Bossuet has shewn us how to treat a subject which brings with it a vast confluence of dates and references. He heaps, melts, and combines them. We say nothing of a practice, not uncommon among ingenious writers, of disuniting their happiest anecdotes or acutest remarks from the texture of the discourse, and casting them into notes at the foot of the page. Of course the beauty and grace of the style suffer largely from this treatment. The richest garment becomes comparatively mean when all its embroidery and spangles are concentrated in the flounces.

The style of history should be in harmony with its subject; not, indeed, gay with the gay, or lively with the lively; for history, being the judgment of experience on men and things brought before its tribunal, ought always to be grave and carnest; but in harmony with the subject, by adapting itself to the fine gradations of the narrative; from the intellectual to the industrial resources of a nation; from Milton to Arkwright, and Westminster Abbey to the Haymarket. It is the absence of this fitness and harmony which detracts from the merit of what might otherwise have been a model for the annalist of civilisation; we refer to Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society, a work written in a more sustained measure of dignified elevation than any other of a similar kind in our language. Mr. Mackinnon had forgotten Ferguson when he expressed a belief that the subject of civilisation had been hitherto scarcely noticed by any writer in our nation. Surely the following

“The wealth, the aggrandisement and power of nations are commonly the effects of virtue; the loss of these advantages is often a consequence of vice. Were we to suppose men to have succeeded in the discovery and application of every art by which states are preserved and governed; to have attained by efforts of wisdom and magnanimity the admired establishments and advantages of a civilised and flourishing people; the subsequent part of their history, containing, according to vulgar apprehension, a full display of those fruits in maturity, of which they had till then carried only the blossom and the first formation, should, still more than the former, merit our attention, and excite our admiration. The event, however, has not corresponded to this expectation. The virtues of men have shone most during their struggles, not after the attainment of their ends. Those ends themselves, though attained by virtue, are frequently the causes of corruption and vice. Mankind, in aspiring to national felicity, have substituted arts which increase their riches, instead of those which improve their nature. They have entertained admiration of themselves under the titles of civilised, and of polished, where they should have been affected with shame. War, which furnishes mankind with a principal occupation of their restless spirit, serves, by the variety of its events, to diversify their fortunes. While it opens to one tribe or society the way to eminence, and leads to dominion, it brings another to subjection, and closes the scene of their national efforts.

The

celebrated rivalship of Carthage and Rome was, in both parties, the natural exercise of an ambitious spirit, impatient of opposition, or even of equality. The conduct and fortune of leaders held the balance for some time in suspense; but to whichever side it had inclined, a great nation was to fall; a seat of empire and of policy was to be removed from its place; and it was then to be determined whether the Syriac or the Latin should contain the erudition that was, in future ages, to occupy the studies of the learned.

"States have been thus conquered from abroad before they gave any signs of internal decay, even in the midst of prosperity, and in the period of their greatest ardour for national objects. Athens, in the height of her ambition and of her glory, received a fatal wound, in striving to extend her maritime power beyond the Grecian seas. And nations

rude ferocity, respected for their discipline and military experience, when advancing as well as when declining in their strength, fell a prey by turns to the ambition and arrogant spirit of the Ro

mans.

"Did we find that nations advancing from small beginnings, and arrived at the possession of arts which lead to dominion, became secure of their advantages in proportion as they were qualified to gain them; that they proceeded in a course of uninterrupted felicity till they were broke by external calamities; and that they retained their force till a more fortunate or vigorous power arose to depress them; the subject in speculation could not be attended with many difficulties, nor give rise to many reflections. But when we observe among nations a kind of spontaneous return to obscurity and weakness, and when, in spite of perpetual admonitions of the danger they run, they suffer themselves to be subdued in one period by powers which could not have entered into competition with them in a former, and by forces which they had often baffled and despised, the subject becomes more curious, and its explanation more difficult. The fact itself is known in a variety of different examples. The empire of Asia was more than once transferred from the greater to the inferior power. The states of Greece, once so warlike, felt a relaxation of their vigour, and yielded the ascendant, they had disputed with the monarchs of the East, to the forces of an obscure principality, become formidable in a few years, and raised to eminence under the conduct of a single man. The Roman Empire, which stood alone for ages, which had brought every rival under subjection, and saw no power from whom a competition would be feared, sunk at last before an artless and contemptible enemy. Abandoned to inroad, to pillage, and at last to conquest, on her frontier, she decayed in all her extremities, and shrunk on every side. Her territory was dismembered, and whole provinces gave way, like branches fallen down with age, not violently torn by superior force. The spirit with which Marius had baffled and repelled the attacks of barbarians in a former age, the civil and military force with which the consul and his legions had extended this empire, were now no more. The Roman greatness, doomed to sink as it rose, by slow degrees, was impaired in every encounter. It was reduced to its original dimensions, within the compass of a single city; and depending for its preservation on the fortune of a siege, it was extinguished at a

blow; and the brand, which had filled the world with its flames, sunk like a taper in the socket."*

This, as Pope told the bookseller of Akenside, is no every-day writer; and numerous passages of equal vigour and brilliancy might be selected from the same Essay; such as the portrait of Aurungzebe preserving the simplicity of the hermit upon the throne of Indostan; the contagious example of conquering or refined ages; the want of a fixed standard in literary taste; and the portrait of the Roman soldier. The Essay of Ferguson obtained the applause of one of the most delicate and fastidious of critics; and it is sufficiently curious to find Beattie unacquainted with the production of a Scottish professor, in which Gray discovered rare strains of eloquence, unjarred by national idioms; speaking to the eye as well as to the heart; and wanting nothing but occasional relaxations of stature to make it agreeable as it is dazzling. The splendour has an Oriental rich

FERGUSON.

"In the West, as well as the East, we are willing to bow to the splendid equipage, and stand at an awful distance from the pomp of a princely estate. We, too, may be terrified by the frowns, or won by the smiles of those whose favour is riches and honour, and whose displeasure is poverty and neglect. We, too, may overlook the honours of the human soul, from an admiration of the pageantries that accompany fortune. The procession of elephants harnessed with gold might dazzle into slaves that people who derive corruption and weakness from the effect of their own arts and contrivances, as well as those who inherit servility from their ancestors, and are enfeebled by their natural temperament, and the enervating charms of their soil and their climate."Essay on the History of Civil Society, p.

390.

The defect of Ferguson is recognised in Gibbon; there is in him the same monotony of grandeur, constant

ness; the minutest and the greatest circumstances are related in the same tone; and even a fly is waved away with a peacock's fan. The style, formed upon a passionate admiration of Montesquieu and Tacitus, is singularly poignant and sententious; every paragraph is cut with a sharp edge of antithesis to catch the light; and, accordingly, we have a collection of brilliant and variegated descriptions and reflections; no squalor and debasement are discoverable; in this instance, at least, the Asiatic army has no beggars or slaves in the

rear.

The melody of the language rolls on with a magnificent monotony of pause; there is no perturbation of images, nor many figurative distortions of phrase. Gibbon found his model in Ferguson. The second edition of the Essay appeared in 1768; and it was in February 1776 that the first volume of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared. Perhaps these little quotations will indicate, however imperfectly, the resemblance to which we refer :

GIBBON.

"It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated. The natives of Europe were brave and robust; Spain, Gaul, Britain, and Illyricum, supplied the legions with excellent soldiers, and constituted the real strength of the monarchy. Their personal valour remained; but they no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honour, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. The most aspiring spirits resorted to the court or standard of the emperors; and the deserted provinces, deprived of political strength or union, insensibly sunk into the languid indifference of private life." - Decline and Fall of Roman Empire, vol. i. ch. ii.

-

brilliancy of expression, and antithetical construction of period; and yet, after every critical deduction has been